Hacker News: InitialLastName

New comment by InitialLastName in "Git for the US Code"

InitialLastName — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 19:25:04 +0000

> a system where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS.

This is my only significant disagreement with you. This should be two justices:

1) An 18-year (9*2) term is more compatible with age limits than a 36-year term

2) Each Senate class gets to participate in the appointment of one justice.

New comment by InitialLastName in "Swedish government offices to ban ChatGPT and Claude"

InitialLastName — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 18:44:36 +0000

Your latter point belies the former: The the trade-off is only worth it if the data centers are used for purposes that benefit humanity. As yet, all we've seen them used for is wealth consolidation (through labor force reduction), mass surveillance, hacking, and other antisocial behaviors. There's no reason to believe those won't persist as the profit-maximizing use cases.

New comment by InitialLastName in "What shall I teach my son?"

InitialLastName — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:17:54 +0000

You can get LTSPICE to do the simulation for you, but it will be much harder to understand why an interesting circuit works (such that you can adjust it or implement it with real components) without understanding some of the calculus behind the simulation.

New comment by InitialLastName in "Allow babywearing carriers on planes"

InitialLastName — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:58:28 +0000

Plenty of places operate much more dense transit without that level of security.

Trains, even HSR have essentially zero hijacking risk relative to airplanes, and proper safety interlocks make them very difficult to use the vehicle as a weapon.

At that point, your terrorism risk is approximately on level with any other dense transportation interconnect.

New comment by InitialLastName in "Allow babywearing carriers on planes"

InitialLastName — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:53:31 +0000

The biggest difference to hijackings post 9/11 has nothing to do with pre-boarding security: Locking the cockpit door.

New comment by InitialLastName in "What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals"

InitialLastName — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:43:12 +0000

That's how both the SBS buses in NYC used to work (before tap to pay), and how the NJ Transit light rail still works.

New comment by InitialLastName in "Seattle Bans Rental Junk Fees"

InitialLastName — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:48:49 +0000

Your last point was that some people prefer to rent. I don't think it's irrelevant to compare that to the number of people who would prefer to own.

New comment by InitialLastName in "Seattle Bans Rental Junk Fees"

InitialLastName — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:22:37 +0000

Assuming the same homes, which group do you think is larger:

A) Households who are currently renting who would prefer to own their home

B) Households who currently own who would prefer to be renting

I'm going to guess A >>> B, but I've never seen the data.

New comment by InitialLastName in "Diplodocus, Long Thought Exclusively American, Turns Up in Spain"

InitialLastName — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:00:05 +0000

What's wild about this is that it makes really obvious how limited our perspective on dinosaur biodiversity is. Our best view on the best-known dinosaurs comes from a few places that were really good for finding fossils from specific eras.

New comment by InitialLastName in "OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability"

InitialLastName — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:57:52 +0000

Presumably the browser still has to fetch the page in that case, right? From a "surveilled net traffic" perspective, how is that different than clicking the link?

New comment by InitialLastName in "Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction?"

InitialLastName — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:51:14 +0000

What's the market share for non-system-default browsers and/or email clients?

New comment by InitialLastName in "Pixel Watch 5"

InitialLastName — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:36:55 +0000

My watch (Garmin VivoActive 4) lasts ~1 week. The charger is one less thing I have to:

- keep on my nightstand

- take with me if I go away for a few days

It wouldn't be the worst thing to build charging it into my daily routine, but it sure is liberating to not need to.

New comment by InitialLastName in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

InitialLastName — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:58:37 +0000

Not just ethnic groups. Schools mostly can't say "we only want rich people" but they definitely want to prefer students who will contribute to the donation revenue stream either themselves or through their parents. Signals like "doesn't have a job to take up their time in high school" and "parents can afford (and have the free time to enable) expensive, time-consuming activities" are really good proxies for that.

New comment by InitialLastName in "The US tried to stop cartel money-laundering; devastated mom-and-pop businesses"

InitialLastName — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:22:00 +0000

> Drug users don't seem to be overly preoccupied with what drug they use.

What? In the case of opiates (which is the most significant drug problem we have at the moment), users are often physically addicted to a specific substance and that addiction was often initiated by legitimate medical usage of that substance. They'll certainly care if you say "hey, you can't use heroin any more, have some weed instead".

New comment by InitialLastName in "The US tried to stop cartel money-laundering; devastated mom-and-pop businesses"

InitialLastName — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:08:12 +0000

In the US, we usually refer to "paying someone to borrow a car" as a car "rental" and "borrowing money to finance a car purchase" as a car "loan".

New comment by InitialLastName in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

InitialLastName — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:01:57 +0000

Since TFA can't be bothered, here's the text of the actual bill: https://my.ilga.gov/Legislation/BillStatus/FullText?GAID=18&...

New comment by InitialLastName in "Taylor Farms Cyclospora outbreak triples in size"

InitialLastName — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:25:48 +0000

Lettuce has a shelf-life of ~4 weeks from harvest, the parasite can incubate for ~2 weeks from consumption, and it may take a week or two for the infected person to see a doctor, get positive test results, and have those results reported to the tracking bodies. That means tracking could easily lag distribution of the bad goods by 2 months.

New comment by InitialLastName in "What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard"

InitialLastName — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:24:31 +0000

This [0] was a pretty big deal in the audio electronics industry.

[0] https://www.audioholics.com/news/fire-destroys-akm-audio-chi...

New comment by InitialLastName in "Someone Used AI to Write an Unauthorized Biography of Me"

InitialLastName — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:46:39 +0000

In addition to the direct interview, there are other advantages of authorization that often allow the author a much deeper access to research the subject:

- Access to records, correspondence, and journals in the subject's possession

- explicit endorsement from the subject encourages their family, friends and colleagues to work with the author.

- Opportunities for the subject themselves to fact-check and contextualize the research.

That must be balanced against the fact that authorization also often provides the subject an opportunity to review the content, giving them a hand in crafting the narrative and/or suppressing unflattering details.

New comment by InitialLastName in "US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers"

InitialLastName — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:31:44 +0000

> David will always, in the long run, win against Goliath.

Every Goliath may, in the long run, meet a David that beats it, but this premise ignores all the thousands of Davids that don't win.