Hacker News: Stealthisbook

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Have you restarted your computer this week?"

Stealthisbook — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:26:06 +0000

Sadly, my computer has apparently rebooted multiple times this week. I didn't do it, but Microsoft decided it was for the best. I remember when a restart was something you were asked to consent to, and before that you had to affirmatively decide to perform an update.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Court settlement calls for NPR to get $36M to operate US public radio system"

Stealthisbook — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:03:06 +0000

The justification for many of these stations is emergency preparedness. They're maintained for the ability to receive and transmit emergency alerts despite power outages or transmission line cuts. The daily programming is mostly incidental beyond maintaining listenership

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Is moderate drinking healthy? Scientists say the idea is outdated"

Stealthisbook — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 09:48:27 +0000

I remember the exploration of alcohol consumption stats from one of Michael Hobbes' podcasts and how hard it is to untangle both self-reporting and confounding factors. Like, the population of reported non-drinkers is dominated by both religious abstainers who may otherwise differ culturally from the broader population, and alcoholics who've needed to cut out drinking entirely

New comment by Stealthisbook in "400 million Windows PCs vanished in 3 years. Where did they all go?"

Stealthisbook — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 04:42:09 +0000

The quoted number is awfully specific. Monthly active devices? Why not licenses since that's what they are theoretically in the business of selling? Active devices would be relevant to their ad revenue, so I'd be interested to know what's the context for the statistic and what they're actually tracking. Are enterprise and other installs that block ad telemetry included?

New comment by Stealthisbook in "No One Is in Charge at the US Copyright Office"

Stealthisbook — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 22:58:37 +0000

The Copyright Office doesn't have much to do with copyright enforcement. That's almost entirely hashed out in court. If anything, the office provides one of the few streamlining mechanisms in an unwieldy system by maintaining registration records so you can track down ownership and at least arrange licensing for works that would otherwise represent an unknown rights minefield.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "A man who visited every country in the world without boarding a plane (2023)"

Stealthisbook — Tue, 20 May 2025 05:52:28 +0000

Graham Hughes did that years ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Hughes

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Ghost students are creating problems for California colleges"

Stealthisbook — Wed, 07 May 2025 21:08:47 +0000

There are so many layers of fraud to make this scam work. Fake enrollment seems easy enough, but financial aid requires a valid identity with real tax info. If you've already stolen an identity to snag a tax refund, I guess might as well file a FAFSA. But, the lion's share of financial aid goes directly to the school while only any remainder after tuition and fees goes to the student. I feel like unless this is happening at scale committed by relatively few actors, the return isn't worth the effort... if there isn't some further institutional coordination helping things along

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Ask HN: Are there any money-saving hacks that AI can assist you with？"

Stealthisbook — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 07:58:09 +0000

AI necessarily offers strategies that are already available, and at this point can't be expected to reason out if anything is especially effective. There are services like rocketmoney that can identify subscriptions that you may no longer want or gain savings through mechanically gamed processes, and AI could certainly copy that.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Despite sticker prices, the real cost of getting a degree has been going down"

Stealthisbook — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:29:22 +0000

It's true that the top line tuition is generally discounted through financial aid, but that's been the case for decades. People aren't shocked at the absurd tuition, but at the rate of increase that vastly outstrips aid, making the normal discounted cost increasingly unaffordable.

The actual shocking costs are buried well below the top line as services and facilities that you'd expect to be paid through tuition are separately charged but mandatory fees.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong"

Stealthisbook — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 03:56:52 +0000

The sticking point isn't the value of the tax, it's having to individually generate the paperwork for each shipment.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Spotify Shuts Down ‘Unwrapped’ Artist Royalty Calculator with Legal Threats"

Stealthisbook — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 14:04:48 +0000

YT Music is generally as good or better for casual listening. There's a potential deal breaking quirk in that some tracks are user uploads. You can find obscure stuff that's not easily available elsewhere, but I've found quite a few tracks that are low quality CD or vinyl rips, and concert bootlegs. If you build a playlist, it's not easy to weed out the trash.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "WW1 dazzle camouflage was not as well understood as it might have been"

Stealthisbook — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 01:46:09 +0000

The article outlines the research into how effective dazzle paint was in disguising ships from u-boats as they question the new dazzle paint jobs on Ukrainian ships. I doubt the Ukrainians are trying to fool Russian sailors so much as drones using machine learning algorithms

New comment by Stealthisbook in "US targets trade loophole used by ecommerce groups Temu and Shein"

Stealthisbook — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 06:23:51 +0000

The de minimas threshold allows for lots of things that would otherwise be difficult to document or not worth the effort, from grandma mailing a sweater for Christmas to getting a replacement part shipped directly.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Amazon Paid Almost $1B for Twitch in 2014. It's Still Losing Money"

Stealthisbook — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 12:59:44 +0000

I wonder how the accounting nets out when you consider quite a lot of the costs are likely billed internally for use of Amazon infrastructure. Charging market rate for AWS hosting, billing services, etc, could helpfully make a low margin profitable operation into a tax deductible money pit.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Every company should be owned by its employees"

Stealthisbook — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 07:11:29 +0000

It helps that board members are often fellow CEOs or members of multiple other company boards. They have an incentive to negotiate high pay packages and shareholders in general get presented with a yes/no question

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Houston Is on a Path to an All-Out Power Crisis"

Stealthisbook — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 10:18:37 +0000

Houston is built mostly on swamp with a high water table and routine flooding. I doubt underground cabling would be significantly more reliable and would be much more expensive to install and maintain

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Longer and Longer Freight Trains Drive Up the Odds of Derailment"

Stealthisbook — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 15:00:39 +0000

More use? I'd challenge you to find that European freight is substantially diverted from rail to road. In most cases I'd suspect it's a matter of small or mixed loads over short distances, which in Europe might still be multinational. Frankly, for the kinds of loads that in the US would travel by rail freight, the alternative to rail wouldn't be air, but sea.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Former Burning Man headquarters building sells at 90% discount"

Stealthisbook — Fri, 03 May 2024 00:11:49 +0000

These stories seem to always exaggerate the losses on these types of commercial properties. Inevitably, the buyer is paying off a big outstanding loan and possibly a tax bill, but the headline purchase amount is just the winning bid to pay for the privilege to settle the outstanding debt. No doubt the value of these properties struggling to find tenants is lower than it was, but not nearly what they're trying to show in these stories.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Return-to-Office Mandates: How to Lose Your Best Performers"

Stealthisbook — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 14:16:12 +0000

I haven't seen it mentioned about RTO yet, but I'm sure some managers really just want to be able to conduct certain conversations and behaviors in person, completely off the record. Working for these people would range in badness from being victimized to potential accusations of conspiracy.

New comment by Stealthisbook in "Governor signs bills creating EV charging station network across Wisconsin"

Stealthisbook — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 23:03:13 +0000

You have to wonder where they're finding contractors to competently build these and maintain them. Electrify America has a bad reputation for offline and broken stations, and Tesla might not bid on a contract like this. It would be cool if they built state capacity to just have charging stations.