Hacker News: 0xcde4c3db

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "CDC terminates flu vaccine promotion campaign"

0xcde4c3db — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:31:38 +0000

> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement

Do you have some concrete examples of this? I recall a lot of hyperventilating about the possibility of "vaccine passports" (complete with "mark of the beast" references), and a handful of instances where people got angry about COVID vaccination being folded into (decades-old) policies covering mandatory vaccinations for school/work, but not much beyond that. I carried a mask in case places had mask policies, but it never even occurred to me that I might need to prove that I was vaccinated.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'"

0xcde4c3db — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 01:14:22 +0000

And even supposing that an administration doesn't fully trust Congress (or its ability to execute through parliamentary gridlock), there are a bunch of people in the executive branch whose whole-ass job it is to investigate this stuff, and could legitimately be directed to shift their priorities without Congressional approval. Oops, scratch that; there were a bunch of people with that job. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'"

0xcde4c3db — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 21:45:24 +0000

Probably because it's implausible, trivial to fake, and there's no way to conclusively prove it's real without the original tweet still being up.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE"

0xcde4c3db — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 23:10:57 +0000

Being in bed with tax preparation companies is probably the main thing, but I also vaguely recall a statement by someone years ago (perhaps Grover Norquist or Dick Armey) that filing tax returns should be kept annoying simply for the sake of keeping people angry about taxes in general.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "CDC data are disappearing"

0xcde4c3db — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 17:15:23 +0000

I was sure this was wrong, but it's true: according to official state counts, Donald Trump won 49.80% of the popular vote to Kamala Harris's 48.32%. The top 5 was rounded out by Jill Stein (0.56%), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (0.49%), and Chase Oliver (0.42%) [1].

[1] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...

(yes, I'm aware of the irony of linking to federal agency data in this thread)

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Add "fucking" to your Google searches to neutralize AI summaries"

0xcde4c3db — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 02:08:57 +0000

And Larry Ellison wants us all under the eye of AI cameras so that "citizens will be on their best behavior". I almost used the word "panopticon" there, but Ellison is proposing something strictly worse, in that there's no hope of the cameras not being watched.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Exposed DeepSeek database leaking sensitive information, including chat history"

0xcde4c3db — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:49:43 +0000

> Or do devs around the world just have to bite the bullet and learn enough English to be able to use the majority of tools?

I'm a native English speaker, but from looking at various code bases written by people who aren't, I gather that it's basically this. It wasn't too long ago that one couldn't even reliably feed non-ASCII comments to a lot of compilers, let alone variable and function names.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Are Americans' perceptions of the economy and crime broken?"

0xcde4c3db — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 19:16:49 +0000

It's easy for any one agency or police department to cook the books, but I don't think that scales to the kind of huge shift across multiple categories and data sources shown in the article.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Show HN: I built an active community of trans people online"

0xcde4c3db — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 01:12:28 +0000

Yeah; it's not strictly accurate, but in a similar sense that it's not strictly accurate to call the typical copper Ethernet connector "RJ45", to say that a UDP "connection" occurred, or to say that a modem connects to a "DB-9" serial port.

I suspect the root of the problem is that over time, "proxy" has become strongly associated with application-layer protocols like HTTP, and after that shift it wasn't obvious what to use for something lower-level that encompassed a wider range of protocols/endpoints/conversations. In principle, "tunnel" would probably have been better (and a legible metaphor to boot), but that's just not how things shook out in practice.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Collusion through Common Leadership [pdf]"

0xcde4c3db — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 19:45:11 +0000

It's been argued that similar dynamics also inflate executive pay, although I'm not well-versed enough in the overall economic policy debate to know how well-established this actually is [1].

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/reining-in-ceo-compensation-...

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Perplexity got ads"

0xcde4c3db — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 23:19:14 +0000

There's also "Free File Fillable Forms", which is part of the weird compromise that tax return prep companies like Intuit and H&R Block negotiated to prevent individuals being allowed to file directly with the IRS. It's actually operated by one of the companies in the "alliance", but it's set up like a digital version of the IRS forms (up to and including the fact that you need to make your own copies of everything because they delete all accounts/data every year).

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Pornhub Is Now Blocked in Almost All of the U.S. South"

0xcde4c3db — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 03:19:29 +0000

> Hmm. I'm ready to believe you, but 2257 doesn't seem totally infeasible to comply with in a VHS world.

I'm not saying that it was supposed to be impossible to comply with per se, but rather that it was supposed to be impossible specifically for the porn industry as anti-porn crusaders imagined/alleged it to be at the time. There was a bunch of drug-war-like rhetoric about how porn had become more violent, exploitative, and outright criminal since 1970, when the previous government commission on the subject reported that porn wasn't an important social problem and should not be restricted for adults.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Pornhub Is Now Blocked in Almost All of the U.S. South"

0xcde4c3db — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 19:59:22 +0000

The commercial incentives around this are also terrible, given that the prevailing assumption is that a private third party will do the attestation as a for-profit service. It's practically guaranteed to add cost and liability for the porn vendor as well as risk of leaks, tracking, and data brokering for the consumer. It may as well have been designed to shut down free porn altogether.

And maybe it was, considering the history of porn regulation in the US. If you look at the requirements and contemporary rhetoric around 18 USC 2257 (yes, the thing that basically all legit porn sites with US operations have a disclaimer for), it was pretty blatantly intended to render the porn industry unable to operate. Porn producers were never actually intended to come into compliance, but rather presumed to be unable to (due to the ridiculous procedures and the supposed omnipresent use of underage, undocumented, and coerced performers).

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "BioTerrorism Will Save Your Life with the 4 Thieves Vinegar Collective [video]"

0xcde4c3db — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 01:34:42 +0000

Lowe is known and (probably rightly, on average) lauded for his frankness in light of his expertise. He's sort of the chemistry equivalent of a Raymond Chen or John Carmack. I like him a lot overall, but I think he badly failed to "read the room" in this particular case.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "BioTerrorism Will Save Your Life with the 4 Thieves Vinegar Collective [video]"

0xcde4c3db — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 14:23:50 +0000

I get the snark on the technical merits, but saying that Four Thieves is just a joke is sort of like saying that Luigi Mangione is just a murderer. The reason that they have such notoriety is that countless people are deeply disappointed and frustrated by the state of the systems that they're lashing out against. It's arguably a cousin to the Silicon Valley "disruption" mindset: playing by the rules has only made things stagnant (if not worse), so the new heroes are the ones who make their own rules.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Why making friends as an adult is harder"

0xcde4c3db — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 00:12:46 +0000

As someone who has looked into it, it's unfortunately far from actually being a universal option in practice. I understand that my situation isn't typical, but the commute to an actually-inclusive UU congregation (there are "conservative" ones) would be a significant burden for me, whereas I could easily walk to the closest church that routinely funds "missions" to Africa to spread the "Good News".

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "T2 24.12 "Sky's the Limit " – 37 ISOs for 25 CPU ISAs"

0xcde4c3db — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 23:44:50 +0000

An interesting quirk of the ISO 9660 standard is that the first sector of the disc is explicitly undefined, in order to accommodate a platform-specific boot sector. I sometimes wonder how many platforms could be accommodated by a single "polyglot" disc image.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "Talking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer"

0xcde4c3db — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 22:39:41 +0000

I don't recall seeing "app" on its own that often, but there was the idiom "killer app", meaning an application that was compelling enough to drive sales of its host platform (VisiCalc on Apple II being the go-to example).

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "UK's Online Safety Act comes into force"

0xcde4c3db — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 15:13:50 +0000

Also, it's become pretty clear that anorexia embodies a particular kind of dysfunctional dynamic between body perception and diet (one that is gaining recognition in other forms of dietary restriction, as sometimes seen in e.g. athletes and people obsessed with various categorizations of "natural" or "pure" foods). The vast majority of obese people aren't building an elaborate system of memes and rituals to force themselves to overeat because they look in the mirror and see themselves as thinner than they really are.

New comment by 0xcde4c3db in "QEMU with VirtIO GPU Vulkan Support"

0xcde4c3db — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 01:02:39 +0000

You don't even necessarily get it with enterprise products; last time I checked, Nvidia requires additional CAL-type licenses installed on a "certified" server from the "Nvidia Partner Network", while AMD and Intel limit it to very specific GPU product lines targeted at VDI (i.e. virtualizing your employees' "desktops" in a server room a la X/Citrix terminals).