Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

871–880 of 943 posts

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#871

Post by neom »

mvcalder wrote: post #870
neom wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't think you were a kook, I did wonder why you decided to film it in the first place, more the 6am thing, or more it was unusual thing?

It was an odd sight at that hour of the day. I wanted pictures as something to talk about with friends. I really wish I had been astute enough to take video.

yah did better than I'd have, friend. I'm sure I'd have just been all like "oh lookie here, a drone flying around at 6am, unusual and cool!" and then gotten on with my day, ha!

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#872

Post by left-struck »

rmah wrote: post #835
left-struck wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article you just linked ‘Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Pat Ryder said on Thursday that the US was "aware that [the balloon] had intelligence collection capabilities". But "it has been our assessment now that it did not collect while it was transiting the United States or over flying the United States".’ When did the pentagon confirm it was not a spy balloon? The article is very short and the meanin…

They were hedging: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/09/20/chinese-balloon-n... Honestly, "sensors" means anything from cameras to thermometers. Either way, the balloon was recovered by the US Navy. It wasn't a spy balloon.

I agree that sensors could mean anything, and so could “intelligence data” but just because the positive was not confirmed “It’s a spy balloon” doesn’t mean that the negative was confirmed “It’s not a spy balloon”. Personally I am unconvinced either way and actually don’t care whether or not it was a spy balloon, my point is that the bbc article absolutely does not say that the pentagon thinks it wasn’t a spy balloon.

Also keep in mind the US military isn’t necessarily going to be honest about what they think the balloon is and how much they can discern about its purpose.

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#873

Post by UltraSane »

bsder wrote: post #856
UltraSane wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tons of global variables on code that has lots of people working on it seems almost as hard as trying to write lock-free data structures.

Global variables (nee static) are fairly normal in embedded. You want to preallocate all your memory since you generally don't have a heap. Mostly you have specific inputs from some other tasks and your outputs are consumed by different tasks. So, even though the variables are "global" they generally only have one writer with multiple readers in properly done embedded programming. What Toyota did was not even in the…

"specific inputs from some other tasks and your outputs are consumed by different tasks" sounds a lot like how PLCs work. Just running an infinite loop scanning inputs and triggering outputs in response to the state of the inputs.

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#874

Post by jandrese »

boesboes wrote: post #800
jandrese wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything that approaches the underwater mothership is destroyed before they even know they're under attack. Let me guess, it is parked in the "Bermuda Triangle". It's easy to make theories when you are unburdened by evidence.

Yup, but it only attacks military targets that are threat. Otherwise it just hides deeper. Looking forward to a spin off of ancient aliens on this haha Evidence smevidence! Aliens!

If they have craft that can travel between solar systems then our military technology is not a threat. Besides, why make your presence known when you can just hide deeper from everybody? People tend to notice with multi-million dollar craft manned by people with families suddenly go missing, especially in American waters at peacetime with modern geolocation and communications technologies installed.

If fully manned Navy frigates and destroyers were vanishing without warning or explanation there is zero chance of keeping a lid on that. Way too many people involved, many of which are civilians.

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#876

Post by keepamovin »

foxglacier wrote: post #562
keepamovin wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please take my upvote for your first hand account over someone's speculation. What do they sound like?

It contains speculation about their height and speed. You usually can't estimate those things for a UFO because near, low, and slow looks the same as far, high and fast when you have no idea how big it is or how it "should" behave.

Man you're a killjoy, but you can't really say they can't estimate it as you don't know the specifics of what they saw, so there's speculation on your part too. I'd say you get a rough estimate, but you can't know for sure especially at night.

Although in this case if the person thinks it was low, and slow, that's less remarkable than if it was high and fast, because then it would be giant.

Overall, I'd say we're "converging on truth" because of all the reports. Like sparsity, even if each report is incomplete or has innacuracy overall we can build a picture, which is what we're doing. Killjoy. Hahahaha :)

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#877

Post by keepamovin »

xattt wrote: post #538
keepamovin wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there's a point quoting, people here don't always watch videos, but thanks for the link. Article gets the quote slightly wrong, but semantically it's right: some are described as being slightly larger than um um than a commercial uh available drone um fixed Wing as well as rotary Technically you could say the rotary/fixed-wing is only invoked to describe the class of drones compared to which these reports are la…

Back in my day, we called “commercial fixed-wing drones” RC model planes.

Heh, those things look super fun. It would be funny if some of these turn out to be that, tho I doubt it.

What's weird is the authorities are saying: "we don't know what they are, but we know for sure they're not a threat." This doesn't make sense. No one is allowing them to be there, it's safer to assume they're a threat until you know for sure what they are.

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#878

Post by lxgr »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #736
kjkjadksj wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Training exercise” case closed if they wanted to end it right there.

That wouldn't close the case for most people. Not that leaving it a mystery like they're doing right now is any better.

Not sure if most, but definitely many.

And I really can't think of any reason to want something like this to be a national news story, rather than possibly a couple months' worth of entertainment on r/ufos.

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#879

Post by Izkata »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #669
jerf wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The military theory doesn't fit to me on the grounds that at this point they should be just admitting it. They're calling more attention to the drones than they would if they would just say "yup, those are ours". You don't hide things by parading them around in front of people. They've got all sorts of places to secretly fly things and all the permits they need to create whatever RF environment they want in the proce…

The next question after "yup those are ours" is "then why are they there", and they might not wish to answer that one.

"We're using the population to test our new invisibility cloak. It's not going well."

Re: Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

#880

Post by VectorLock »

bloopernova wrote: post #674
VectorLock wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA1ENhxLqTo

I really like that it switches off the outer pair of propellers in level flight, that's a nice feature. Changing the vertical alignment of the wings to horizontal after takeoff is also really cool, an interesting alternative to 4 vertical propellers with a separate pair of wings. It seems to eliminate the extra moving parts to control those vertical propellers.

The linkage system is pretty cool I will say that.
Post reply on HN