Hacker News: Herring

New comment by Herring in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

Herring — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:31:43 +0000

There are plenty of interested attackers who would love to control every device. One is in the white house, for example.

New comment by Herring in "The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE"

Herring — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:39:50 +0000

No, it doesn't solve any. You know this because of all the lying and child rape and murder. That's not how people who genuinely want to solve problems and improve society act.

It's basically just a power grab by a tiny fraction (< 1%) of the population against everyone else (including the rubes). And it doesn't make the rich happy either because we are social animals. It's better to be poor in Finland than super rich in Somalia.

New comment by Herring in "The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE"

Herring — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 02:43:59 +0000

Fascism always needs an enemy/excuse/scapegoat, and if it can’t find one it makes one out of thin air.

It can’t actually solve societal problems, that requires progressives.

New comment by Herring in "The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE"

Herring — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 02:14:22 +0000

Ask a lot of software engineers what they think about European-style salaries and taxes to pay for a welfare state.

New comment by Herring in "The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE"

Herring — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:53:01 +0000

Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.

Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...

New comment by Herring in "U.S. stocks are set to deliver their worst quarter in nearly four years"

Herring — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:20:07 +0000

It's consistent with the "profits over people" attitude that has been prevalent since slavery and feudalism and probably much earlier.

New comment by Herring in "We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year"

Herring — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:38:31 +0000

The full translation took 7hrs and $400 in tokens. Applying diffs every quarter using AI is much easier and cheaper. Software engineering has completely changed.

New comment by Herring in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

Herring — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:29:38 +0000

Yeah that’s called karma, the force of your intentions. It matters a lot. You can do good things with evil in your heart, and they come out evil. Like giving a nice gift, with strings attached.

New comment by Herring in "World Happiness Report 2026"

Herring — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:27:18 +0000

> ... but was unable to renounce his hopes of what he eagerly desired. (Power)

Yeah that last bit is key. As MLK said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. You can't just sit at the beach, because humans are hungry animals and you're probably somewhere in that chain (Rome → Italy → Sicily → Carthage → Greece).

If you want peace, prepare for peace.

New comment by Herring in "Starlink militarization and its impact on global strategic stability (2023)"

Herring — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 21:04:08 +0000

> All in all, I would rather live in a somewhat free America than in communist China.

The last 15 years has significantly changed peoples' opinions on that matter. https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart

Let's see how the next 15 goes.

New comment by Herring in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

Herring — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:27:07 +0000

Jesus...

New comment by Herring in "White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward"

Herring — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:46:31 +0000

Seriously. Racism, pedophilia, assassination, war -- I'd vote for a dead cat over this. Americans can't get that, they have a major problem.

New comment by Herring in "White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward"

Herring — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:32:58 +0000

Man after my own heart. I'm a statistician, and the data-free narratives on HN sometimes make me want to pull my hair out.

New comment by Herring in "BitNet: 100B Param 1-Bit model for local CPUs"

Herring — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:42:55 +0000

If this stuff was so revolutionary, don't you guys think Qwen/DeepSeek would have snapped it up already? Both those teams are highly innovative, picking up and inventing new techniques all the time. Hell, Deepseek-v3 was one of the first to do large scale fp8 training.

New comment by Herring in "Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job"

Herring — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:14:02 +0000

The rich have known they're in a class war since at least Occupy Wall Street.

New comment by Herring in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

Herring — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:04:06 +0000

Check back in a year or two. Just the other day we had Claude finding significant bugs in Firefox. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47273854

New comment by Herring in "Ad-tech is fascist tech"

Herring — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:26:18 +0000

Yeah sorry I'm not a fan of rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

New comment by Herring in "Ad-tech is fascist tech"

Herring — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:47:12 +0000

You’d still be having fascism here even if the internet didn’t exist. The most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans. Eventually rents/healthcare/tuitions outpace income, so people become desperate and start voting for strongmen.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...

New comment by Herring in "The Government Told Courts It Could Easily Refund Tariffs. Now It Says It Can't"

Herring — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:35:23 +0000

Would you rather live next to a domestic abuser or a serial killer? That's the math a lot of countries are doing right now. It's hard for Americans to understand because they've never been invaded or even credibly threatened with invasion. (And yes, the US does plenty of domestic abuse too.)

New comment by Herring in "The Government Told Courts It Could Easily Refund Tariffs. Now It Says It Can't"

Herring — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:22:44 +0000

China's GDP (PPP) overtook the US in 2016. It is currently ~30% higher and will reach double by 2035. They haven't dropped bombs on foreign soil in over 40 years.