<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: LarsAlereon</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=LarsAlereon</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:09:35 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=LarsAlereon" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Deodands put a price on objects that caused death"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I feel like you're asking two different questions: what do we do about average criminals, and what do we do when our normal strategies don't work?<p>Most shoplifters stop after they get caught the first time, even if they don't face any further consequences. Most people who keep shoplifting after that stop if they are caught and face consequences like community service. In general, the system of escalating punishments before prison actually works to keep problems from developing to that level.<p>If someone is doing serious violent crimes then it seems obvious that they need to be imprisoned until we can figure out how to make them stop. But what if someone is doing minor property crimes where the total value of those crimes does not exceed the cost to imprison them? In that case we are essentially offering an incredibly inefficient subsidy to property owners.<p>The real answer is to directly address the factors that lead to crime and disorder, such as cost of living exceeding prevailing wages, unemployment, drug addiction, and mental illness.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 03:31:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772303</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772303</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772303</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Deodands put a price on objects that caused death"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Obviously nobody thinks once-in-a-generation exceptional monsters should be living among us, building straw men like that isn't helpful. I recommend reading the Scott Alexander blog post "Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know" here: <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-than-you" rel="nofollow">https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...</a><p>To oversimplify, the only value that prison provably offers to society is the crimes prevented by keeping someone who would have done crimes locked up. Pretty much all of the other supposed benefits like deterrence (not doing a crime due to fear of punishment) or rehabilitation (becoming a better person in prison) don't actually exist in real life at meaningful rates. Because it costs so much to keep someone in prison, it's actually really hard to find cases where the harm to society for the crimes they would have done justifies the investment of resources to imprison them. That doesn't mean no such cases exist and we shouldn't have prisons, but they are clearly overused when they are almost the default method of crime consequence in Western society, especially for minor property crimes like retail shoplifting.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:51:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771521</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771521</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771521</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I work in this industry, and a big issue is that a major customer of the cheapest, shadiest telcos is the US federal government. Because they're "being responsible with your tax money." So cracking down on them will affect government calls and quickly generate too much pushback. "I don't care how scammy Bill's Discount No-Questions-Asked VoIP LLC is, the army uses them!"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 23:57:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129833</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129833</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129833</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Painting the sides of railroad rails white to reduce derailment"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, they're called "high-rail" or "road-rail" vehicles. They have rail wheels that can be lowered down to drive on tracks or raised up for road use.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Jul 2026 03:45:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48955020</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48955020</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48955020</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The main benefit for me is that digital watermarking becomes completely inaudible with high-res audio, but I can sometimes clearly hear it in standard resolution.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:36:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48765614</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48765614</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48765614</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It takes too much energy and produces water too slowly to scale. In general any area with sufficient moisture in the air to explore this also has easier access to rain and ground water.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:12:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416886</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416886</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416886</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is honestly what I'm thinking. Carbohydrates and hydrocarbons will oxidize to CO2 and water in our atmosphere, and especially quickly at warm temperatures, in the presence of energy sources like sunlight, or in the presence of ozone or elevated oxygen levels. In general biological processes like aerobic decay are so much more effective that we ignore this, but it still happens.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:42:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364422</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364422</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364422</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Space Force looks at moving "significant number" of launches from ULA to SpaceX"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can't think of any other remaining large solid rocket manufacturer in the USA, NG bought them all.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:53:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784351</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784351</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784351</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "New Apple Silicon M4 and M5 HiDPI Limitation on 4K External Displays"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>From what I understand, the main goal is to fix the problem that non-native (1:1 pixel mapping) resolutions and scaling look worse than native. This is a problem when you ship high-dpi displays that need UI scaling in order for things to be readable. Apple's solution was to render everything at a higher, non-native resolution so that images were always downscaled to fit the display.<p>So to oversimplify, Windows can have a problem where if you are running 1.5X scaling so text is big enough, you can't fit 4K of native pixels on a 4K display so videos are blurry. If instead you were rendering a scaled image to a 6K framebuffer and then downscaling to 4K, there would be minimal loss of resolution.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:28:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570677</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570677</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570677</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "'Five Nights at Epstein's' Game Goes Viral at US School Campuses"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's just like how we learned survival and life skills by playing Oregon Trail back in the day!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:36:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535388</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535388</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535388</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "How are Iranian drones getting their guidance?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>GPS is based on a small number of satellites in high orbit, so it's not practical to disable it for a particular region like it is for Starlink and other LEO satellites.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:51:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448800</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448800</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47448800</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Why do we need lots of Nuclear power long term?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For a high up-front price, nuclear plants give us an extremely large amount of consistent, emissions-free power that can also provide frequency stability to the grid. It's also very energy-dense in terms of Gigawatts per acre. Spent fuel is a largely solved problem, we should reprocess it into new fuel and place the residue into long-term geological storage. Modern nuclear reactors also do online refueling so they aren't shutting down to swap the fuel out.<p>That said, it's entirely possible to make an argument that the combination of wind, solar, battery energy storage, and kinetic (flywheel?) energy storage can solve the above needs for less money over the long term than nuclear. They can be built more incrementally and in smaller chunks, but there's also a certain value in having huge amounts of energy that can be sited basically anywhere. A big challenge with nuclear is that every time someone costs out a plant, by the time they can gather money solar and wind have gotten cheaper faster than expected.<p>Overall, I'd like to see a diversity of power sources. I think we should try building some big modern nuclear plants, convert some combustion plants with small modular reactors, subsidize solar and wind preferentially in areas where it makes the most sense, and fund hydro projects where it won't impact the environment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 03:09:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47383924</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47383924</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47383924</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Runners who churn butter on their runs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, it's a balance between flavor and storage time. If you plan to use it immediately, unwashed butter is best.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 02:51:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47383821</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47383821</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47383821</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Runners who churn butter on their runs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It usually contains significant amounts of milk protein, which contribute to flavor but spoil about as quickly as milk does. Washing the butter thoroughly until well after the water is clear will improve storage time, as will salting the butter and thoroughly drying it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:01:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47359002</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47359002</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47359002</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "WA income tax clears House after 24-hour debate"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The point of a 90% marginal rate isn't to increase tax revenue, it's to discourage high incomes that are economically and socially harmful. If you don't believe that's a problem then policies to address it won't seem logical.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:13:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47336704</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47336704</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47336704</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Amazon degraded shopping- you have to put in cart to see the price"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is just an Amazon site issue, lots of things are broken right now. This problem specifically appears to be caused by the site not being able to determine your location to ship to.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:52:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47266422</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47266422</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47266422</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "PayPal apparently does not understand how Gmail email addresses work"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sounds more like Paypal doesn't care to work around the fact that Gmail doesn't understand how e-mail addresses work.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 06:36:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214584</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214584</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214584</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Perceptions of Crime and Disorder"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How do we build a society that continues to function while people like this blog writer exist? The reality is that some people will always be 10/10 upset about something, no matter how unreasonable it is. We have a society that's the safest it's ever been but people want to burn it all down because they smelled a cannabis flower.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 06:31:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214561</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214561</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214561</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "You think unemployed, I think retired"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No one sane is afraid of living the ideal retired life. They are afraid of not being able to afford to live. If we were actually talking about replacing the current system of "work if you want to live" with AI-funded universal basic income, I don't think as many people would be complaining.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:36:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204026</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204026</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204026</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by LarsAlereon in "Poll: How do you think LLMs will affect the job market for software developers?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I believe that LLMs provide an excuse for businesses to shed the excess hiring they did during the zero interest rate era. Ultimately, this question comes down to how healthy you think the economy will be in five years, rather than being related to LLMs specifically. I believe there is an AI bubble, so to me this question is asking how much of our economy is mis-invested in AI, and how quickly the rest of the economy can recover if the AI portion implodes. I'm really concerned that the level of mis-investment is high enough that when the bubble bursts it will do severe damage to the larger economy. For example, I'm worried that we'll suddenly have a bunch of abandoned partially constructed data centers, power plants, and fabs. Can the market absorb a massive glut of DRAM and NAND that was contracted for by an entity that suddenly went bankrupt? What will happen to all those warehouses full of GPUs that were waiting for rack space and power?<p>All of the above could mean we're facing an economic depression that will be talked about for generations. Or it could mean that it will temporarily be unimaginably cheap to start a compute-intensive business, and they will all need to hire developers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:31:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204010</link><dc:creator>LarsAlereon</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204010</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204010</guid></item></channel></rss>