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What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

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Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#131

Post by icebraining »

bvod wrote: post #29
10dpd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might find it useful to read the HN Guidelines [1] "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So any article under the sun is relevant for HN? That's definitely not the case as mods frequently remove posts, and as much as they would like to be, mods are not arbiters of intellectual curiosity.

The guidelines are vague, but the site was still never intended to be exclusively about engineering - hell, initially it was called Startup News.

I find it useful to look at the submissions by the site's creator[1], before he passed over the site's management to others, back in 2014. As you'll see, it actually has very little engineering content, and on the contrary, has many articles from mainstream sources.

I'm sure HN has ebbs and flows on the ratio of engineering articles, but it was never supposed to be dedicated to those; maybe you just joined at a moment when the ratio was bigger.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#132

Post by anigbrowl »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #72
rtx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they realize it, but benefits of an empire are too great to give up.

I don't see much evidence that people are aware.

Oh they know, but either rationalize it or say 'it's too big for me to fix' and go about their day. It takes a certain sort of perversity to actually dedicate your puny efforts to interfering with the machine.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#133

Post by cookiecaper »

cantrip wrote: post #74
jonnycomputer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing that you don't have children. And no, your plan isn't as good as any other; its just one that suits your own fatalistic attitude toward the risks involved.

Yeah I think it's one of the worst reactions you could have. Without any indication of how bad the attack actually is, you should really assume the best and set yourself up to be able to survive. What if it's a conventional bombing, or you're not directly in the blast zone? Or if the nuke fails to detonate? The immediate aftermath if the most important time. While he's futzing around with Youtube and getting drunk th…

>What if it's a conventional bombing, or you're not directly in the blast zone? Or if the nuke fails to detonate?

Yeah, this has been the most frustrating thing reading all of these accounts. A "ballistic missile" does not necessarily have a nuclear warhead. I don't see anyone correcting this and it seems like an important thing to know.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#134

Post by pwg »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #81
ashleyn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing up I got the impression that a fallout shelter was a purpose-specific room deep underground. So every time I saw the "Fallout Shelter" sign on a building, I figured it was built with one of these "secret underground rooms". Think dedicated, locked stairwell that goes a thousand feet underground; after all, that's how it was pictured in my "Way Things Work" book. When we went to the bank, it was something of a…

Looked through the index of my early German (English translated, published around the 1960's, I believe) "The Way Things Work" volumes I and II and didn't see fallout shelters. It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters? I'm guessing (after having read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb") that this would be about when the hydrogen bomb came along. It was sob…

> It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters?

Sometime after the nuclear bomb was developed and first used to end the second world war. The "fallout" in "fallout shelter" refers to "nuclear fallout" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout) which would not have been a term that would have existed prior to the creation and first use of a nuclear bomb.

So sometime circa early 1940's to mid 1950's timeframe would be a good guess.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#135

Post by indemnity »

pault wrote: post #121
matte_black wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software development skills will be most useful in a post-apocalyptic world?

I would think basic knowledge of electrical engineering, solar & battery technology, radio, and mesh networking would make you pretty handy. Front end developers will be the first ones in the stew pot.

I’m a backend developer and I’m still useless with those things :)

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#136

Post by pault »

booleandilemma wrote: post #130
pault wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think basic knowledge of electrical engineering, solar & battery technology, radio, and mesh networking would make you pretty handy. Front end developers will be the first ones in the stew pot.

For most developers there is no overlap with what they know about software and the things listed above.

The best time to start learning electrical engineering was 10 years ago. The second best time is today! ;)

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#137

Post by booleandilemma »

fencepost wrote: post #116
sho_hn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. I live in Seoul, and we really just don't care.

I'm not sure NK would nuke Seoul anyway - it's too close. A massive artillery barrage or more conventional missiles (or chemical weapons?) seems more likely.

North Korea recently said that the nuclear weapons are meant strictly for the US.

http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-nuclear-weapons-only-tar...

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#138

Post by dmarlow »

McKayDavis wrote: post #102

I live on O'ahu and was holding my phone when the emergency alert came in at 8:07am. I yelled "Oh my God!" and ran to show my wife the message. I've run through this scenario a few times in my head before and I knew every minute was critical -- so I went into action mode immediately. I told my two kids to get dressed now because we were leaving in exactly 1 minute. The reason we were leaving is our house is single-wa…

What will you do if you can't get into your church building?

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#139

Post by anigbrowl »

gdubs wrote: post #64

It’s interesting how people (anecdotally) don’t seem to have any plan for a nuclear attack, as opposed to, say, an earthquake or a fire. I think there’s a stigma around even considering the possibility. However, it makes sense to at least talk with your family about what you would all do. According to what I’ve read on the gov sites, it’s very survivable for a lot of people if you take key steps: surround yourself wi…

A reasonable point, but it's sad that people consider surviving a nuclear war a more practical endeavor than altering the political direction of the country. Admittedly they are somewhat orthogonal, but I'm trying to highlight the problem of equating war with natural disasters as opposed to something over which we have any sort of political control.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#140

Post by rectangletangle »

macintux wrote: post #85
gdubs wrote: post #64

It’s interesting how people (anecdotally) don’t seem to have any plan for a nuclear attack, as opposed to, say, an earthquake or a fire. I think there’s a stigma around even considering the possibility. However, it makes sense to at least talk with your family about what you would all do. According to what I’ve read on the gov sites, it’s very survivable for a lot of people if you take key steps: surround yourself wi…

I think many people consider nuclear war an end of the world event. Working hard to survive just to be left adrift in the ashes of civilization with likely long-term health effects seems counterproductive to some of us.

The US/Russia/France have already detonated thousands of full power nuclear weapons all across the globe, primarily for testing. Although major cities would be ash, with millions lost in the senseless conflict, life would go on. You'd likely only have health problems if you had acute exposure to the blast. If you live somewhere irrelivant, radiation exposure won't be much more of a concern than it already is currently; whatever enviromemtal impacts nuclear weapons have, have already taken place.

Though the standard of living for survivors is sure to plummet, as famine and other secondary problems start to take precedence.

End of the world? No. Set back industrialized society two centuries? Sure.

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