<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: AmericanChopper</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AmericanChopper</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2026 22:12:35 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=AmericanChopper" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is the main reason I never plan on buying one. I really hate all of the car-driven-by-a-computer functionality. I don’t want to drive a car where an internal computer can take over control of the vehicle, I especially don’t want one where the computer in charge of the car can connect to a network, I never want to drive one that has a mandatory always on connection. I also really want buttons, dials and switches, and think a yoke is such a stupid idea for a road car…<p>Plenty of ICE vehicles are starting to get these features as well, but I don’t buy those cars either, and all of the half decent EVs seem to have (nearly) all of those features I hate, configured in the worst way I could possibly imagine.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Oct 2024 09:00:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41817662</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41817662</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41817662</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> consumers are never satisfied because they have wrong expectations<p>Consumers are satisfied with buying ICE vehicles, which is why 90-something percent of them do just that when buying a new vehicle. You’re not saying anything about consumers expectations here, what’s happening is (most of them) just they don’t want what EVs are selling. You can’t be wrong about wanting something, we’re all allowed to choose what it is that we want for ourselves.<p>This is just the EV version of “the world would be much nicer if everybody thought like me” argument.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Oct 2024 08:50:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41817611</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41817611</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41817611</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "Electric vehicle battery prices are expected to fall almost 50% by 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you want people to choose one thing, then you want it to be better than or at least as good as the alternatives. The idea that EVs need to be comparable to ICE vehicles isn’t just some silly argument, it’s literally the choice that consumers are faced with if they want to buy a car. Even if longer range travel is only 1% of what consumers will do with their car (which I’m sure is a number you just made up), why would you get a product that only meets 99% of your needs, when you can get the competing product that meets 100% of them?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Oct 2024 08:30:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41817491</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41817491</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41817491</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "Day Rates (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree that it usually doesn’t fly with clients, unless you already have a good relationship and track record with them. But I don’t think it’s supposed to be a trick. On the client side somebody either has some funding for a project and needs to know whether you can deliver within the budget, or they need to go and apply for some funding to complete the project, but in either case the deliverable they’re committing to provide in exchange for this funding is the completed project, not a scope for the project.<p>From that perspective the “discovery project” is just a much worse version of “contact us for pricing”, it’s “pay us $5,000-$20,000 or more for pricing”. Paying a lot of money to find out how much something will cost, or what you’re going to get from it (if anything) just isn’t a valuable proposition to a lot of people, and doesn’t fit in nicely with their existing business processes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Oct 2024 05:54:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41806599</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41806599</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41806599</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "TypedDicts are better than you think"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’m not a big fan of the “my opinion is fact” or “your opinion is wrong” headlines. They can be mildly funny in the right context, but it’s been done so much that they’re just a bit boring now. I’m especially bored of seeing this convention in conference presentation titles.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Oct 2024 01:04:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41805131</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41805131</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41805131</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think it’s an excellent comment, and I’m very happy with it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Oct 2024 20:40:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41803337</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41803337</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41803337</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’m happy for people to keep writing M$. It’s a great way to quickly identify comments to scroll past.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Oct 2024 13:05:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41798397</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41798397</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41798397</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "Cognizant found guilty of discriminating against non-Indian employees"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To say that some quality is embedded in a culture isn’t even close to the same as saying all people originating from that culture possess that quality. The extent to which India’s (racist) caste system is embedded in its culture is hardly up for serious debate, the influence it has in India has basically been proven by science at this point.<p>> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/the-caste-system-has-left-its-mark-on-indians-genomes" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/the-caste-system-has...</a><p>A hypothetical claim that all Indians are racist would clearly be absurd, but it’s hardly surprising to find a group of Indians practicing something that is openly part of their native culture.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2024 09:49:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41786081</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41786081</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41786081</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "Who died and left the US $7B?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Most tremendously wealthy people don’t want to be known for being tremendously wealthy. Unless being known for being tremendously wealthy is a part of your wealth accumulating strategy, the attention it brings is almost entirely negative. Being tremendously wealthy without millions of people constantly chirping about clawing as much of it away from you as possible, or demanding an explanation from you every time you wipe your ass is a far better outcome, and most people who are savvy enough to become billionaires are savvy enough to figure that out pretty quickly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2024 04:27:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41784500</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41784500</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41784500</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "GLP-1 pills are coming, and they could revolutionize weight-loss treatment"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’d say it stops being a useful descriptor at that point. If any activity that a person can possibly find rewarding in any way can be addictive, then everything is addictive. Because for any activity that you can possibly think of, you’ll find definitely find somebody who likes doing it.<p>By this criteria, I’m sure you’ll be able to find at least one eating glass addict somewhere in the world. But if we can stretch the definition to include glass as an addictive substance, then it kinda stops meaning anything at all.<p>And when I say these innovative addiction diagnoses are controversial, I mean within the community of clinical experts, which they are.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2024 02:08:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783776</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783776</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783776</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "GLP-1 pills are coming, and they could revolutionize weight-loss treatment"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I never suggested shame as an effective treatment. But refusing to acknowledge the reality of the situation is not an effective way to discuss the problem. Obesity is the result of lifestyle choices, and those choices do impose their costs on everybody in society. Which is why I would be very happy (and I would suggest everybody should be happy) if an effective way to address the problem was discovered.<p>The fact that an obese person is harming other people as well as themselves might be an uncomfortable truth for them to hear. But ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Oct 2024 16:09:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778921</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778921</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778921</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "GLP-1 pills are coming, and they could revolutionize weight-loss treatment"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well the food addiction or sedentariness addiction diagnosis are a lot more controversial than a heroin addiction diagnosis, though I can see how they have some things in common. I think labelling any observable manifestation of poor impulse control as a medical addiction is more of a social trend than a legitimate scientific discovery.<p>The bigger difference though is that we all eat food, and for most of us includes at least some absolutely delicious food that would be incredibly unhealthy to eat in large quantities. We’re all (more or less) exposed to the “addictive substance”, it’s just some people have the ability to deprive ourselves constantly indulging that impulse, while others don’t. We don’t however, need to take small doses of heroin every day to survive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Oct 2024 15:57:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778802</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778802</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778802</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "GLP-1 pills are coming, and they could revolutionize weight-loss treatment"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I would say that your suggestion that grown adults should be absolved of responsibility for their own decisions is actually a quintessentially childish idea. The fact that you are so deeply offended by any suggestion otherwise is even more childish.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Oct 2024 15:44:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778623</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778623</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778623</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "GLP-1 pills are coming, and they could revolutionize weight-loss treatment"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don’t think being addicted to laziness and having a glutinous appetite is exactly comparable to say, being addicted to heroin. But yes, I do think addicts should receive treatment, just as I think obese patients should (and do) receive treatment for all the diseases they end up with. But addicts, like the obese, impose many of the costs of their own bad life decisions onto others. It’s what you’d call a negative externality, and if some magic treatment came along to fix drug addiction, I would also be very happy to see that negative externality addressed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Oct 2024 15:31:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778464</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778464</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778464</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "GLP-1 pills are coming, and they could revolutionize weight-loss treatment"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Health care costs is how individual people’s terrible lifestyle decisions end up impacting everybody else. If somebody wants to live some awful unhealthy lifestyle it really should be their own choice to do so. Except for the fact that it drives up everybody’s insurance premiums, and in countries where the government either partially or entirely subsidises healthcare costs, it gives the government an outright moral mandate to start nannying everybody’s health choices.<p>If somebody wants to live an obese lifestyle, I really think that’s up to them. But I’d be much happier about it if it didn’t cost me so much money.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Oct 2024 15:08:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778174</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778174</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41778174</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "AT&T, Verizon reportedly hacked to target US govt wiretapping platform"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was going to comment basically this. Everything you could possibly want to know about how LI systems work is documented by the vendors online. It’s really just network interfaces that forward intercepted traffic to aggregators.<p>The thing about CSPs is their core business is edge routing. A majority of their core assets are going to be internet connected routers, and you’d actually be able to collect more data by owning some of those. The additional information you can get from LI (and the reason you often need a clearance to work on LI systems) is information about who law enforcement are running intercepts on.<p>Also, LI is just a regulatory cost centre for CSPs. It’s hilarious (or scary, depending on your perspective) how poorly those systems are maintained, and how often the break.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Oct 2024 16:16:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41767537</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41767537</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41767537</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "Nintendo's Legal Hitlist Grows"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And publishing software that decodes encrypted Switch ROMs is protected speech and not a copyright violation. Releasing it accompanied by a statement that said something to the effect of "here's some software that decodes encrypted Switch ROMs which you can use to pirate Switch games" makes you a party to the copyright violation. Just like I'm legally allowed to provide you with a hammer, but if I accompany that with the statement "here's something you can use to murder your neighbour" all of a sudden I'm a party to a crime.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Oct 2024 05:55:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41763155</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41763155</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41763155</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "Nintendo's Legal Hitlist Grows"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The main subject of the article seems to have come to an amicable agreement with Nintendo, but for all of the “copyright infringement enabling tools” that do get forcibly taken down, the way to avoid that just seems so obvious to me. The emulators, or DRM bypassing tools, or whatever, all seem to get tripped up by the marketing. Releasing emulators or DRM cracks is protected speech and not a copyright violation, but releasing the same tool and saying “this is a tool for enabling copyright violation, here’s how you use it to commit copyright violations” just makes you a party to the subsequent copyright violations that it might be used for. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s basically how a lot of them get taken down. Just releasing your tools without all the legally dubious explanation seems to be such an obvious risk avoidance strategy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Oct 2024 05:23:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41763030</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41763030</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41763030</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "Distributed transactions in Go: Read before you try"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You really have to be doing huge levels of throughput before you start to struggle with scaling MySQL or Postgres. There’s really not many workloads that actually require strict ACID guarantees _and_ produce that level of throughput. 10-20 years ago I was running hundreds to thousands of transactions per second on beefy Oracle and Postgres instances, and the workloads had to be especially big before we’d even consider any fancy scaling strategies to be necessary, and there wasn’t some magic tipping point where we’d decide that some instance had to go distributed all of a sudden.<p>Most of the distributed architectures I’ve seen have been led by engineers needs (to do something popular or interesting) rather than an actual product need, and most of them have had issues relating to poor attempts to replicate ACID functionality. If you’re really at the scale where you’re going to benefit from a distributed architecture, the chances are eventual consistency will do just fine.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 06 Oct 2024 12:23:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41756648</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41756648</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41756648</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AmericanChopper in "Anatomy of an internet argument"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This only matters if it's important to you that everybody believe the same truths, which I would suggest shouldn't be important to you. Some people will believe one thing, another group will believe a different thing, and those disagreements can't always be reasoned away. Which should be a perfectly fine outcome, it shouldn't cause you any distress that people believe things that you think aren't true, and vice versa.<p>Trying to boil this down to the quality of the faith is also a rather immature response. To frame things this way isn't to accept that there are different viewpoints other than your own, it's just to assert a claim that your viewpoints are correct, and that while other view points might exist, they are wrong. Your assessment of what is a good faith or what is a bad faith argument likely has little to do with the quality of the arguments involved, and instead will somehow miraculously align with your own world view at a rather implausible rate.<p>If you want to argue with people in public, the only thing you should really be concerned about is stating your best case. If you do that then you've achieved the only mature goals that you could possibly attach to public arguing, and whether people are convinced by it or not is up to them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Oct 2024 06:41:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41727893</link><dc:creator>AmericanChopper</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41727893</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41727893</guid></item></channel></rss>