Hacker News: Taikonerd

New comment by Taikonerd in "US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion"

Taikonerd — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:39:39 +0000

I would settle for "not actively cutting taxes while claiming you're balancing the budget."

The DOGE cuts last year were paired with, yes, massive tax cuts for the rich: [0]

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-trumps-agenda-cal...

New comment by Taikonerd in "US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion"

Taikonerd — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 15:42:48 +0000

At some point I realized: there is no plan to fix it. Both of the parties are just hoping that the upcoming crisis happens while the other party is in power.

New comment by Taikonerd in "Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years"

Taikonerd — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:03:43 +0000

I really don't understand why they have virtual meetups on their platform. Their branding used to be all, "get out from behind a screen and meet people IRL!"

New comment by Taikonerd in "CFTC Staff Were Told to Retract Analysis of Suspicious Oil Trades"

Taikonerd — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:02:17 +0000

I totally agree. Presidential elections have 2 (viable) parties, so voters are really only able to express 1 bit of information.

Individual people may have nuanced takes on politics when you talk to them. But it all gets compressed down to 1 bit on the ballot: left or right? Red or blue?

I wish we had a system with more parties, like they do in many other countries.

New comment by Taikonerd in "Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over"

Taikonerd — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:09:27 +0000

When you have kids? Absolutely ;-)

New comment by Taikonerd in "DraftKings Is Using AI to Behaviorally Target Chronic Gamblers"

Taikonerd — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:51:55 +0000

> The best thing would be to ban these sites.

I think we could legislate some easy-to-understand, easy-to-enforce rules. Like, "you can't have more than N bets open at a time." (1?) Or, "you can't have more than $1,000 worth of bets open at a time."

True, addicts could skirt these rules by having different bets on different sites. But at least it would add a little friction, and it would be easy to monitor compliance.

New comment by Taikonerd in "Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over"

Taikonerd — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:34:39 +0000

> So many questions and so much to clean up.

Yes -- the main reason my wife and I stopped doing "Spaghetti Sundays" was because I hated cleaning up the house (for hours and hours!) before the guests showed up.

New comment by Taikonerd in "Socialism's Positive Rating Tops 40% for First Time"

Taikonerd — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:22:52 +0000

That's why we need voting reform: to make it realistic for new parties to form!

New comment by Taikonerd in "Texas police department ordered to close for failing to provide public benefit"

Taikonerd — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:49:39 +0000

Oh, sorry! Yes, I meant Camden.

New comment by Taikonerd in "Texas police department ordered to close for failing to provide public benefit"

Taikonerd — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:51:22 +0000

Some interesting context: the city of Camden, NJ had its (much larger) police department closed by the state in 2013. Its duties were handed over to the county police, the same as they're doing in the linked article.

The Camden County police successfully brought the crime rate way down. And in the summer of 2020, when riots rocked the US, the CCPD was held up as an example of good policing.

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...

(EDIT: corrected name of city)

New comment by Taikonerd in "'My Husband Has No Friends'"

Taikonerd — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:05:34 +0000

> Putting this on gender is such a weird thing to do.

Yes -- this phenomenon is somewhat gendered, but not overwhelmingly so. From the article's own statistic:

A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that 54 percent of women say they turn to a friend for emotional support but only 38 percent of men say they do.

So I think this is a problem that affects men somewhat more often than women, but happens plenty to both.

New comment by Taikonerd in "'My Husband Has No Friends'"

Taikonerd — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:42:13 +0000

I feel like this article oscillates between sympathy for the lonely men, and victim-blaming that they're not trying hard enough, they're expecting their wife to manage their social life, etc.

I will say that loneliness and depression go hand-in-hand. And if someone's husband is clinically depressed, that's going to look a lot like "they're not even trying."

New comment by Taikonerd in "Who People Talk to When They're Struggling"

Taikonerd — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:33:29 +0000

Do lodges generally attract an older crowd? There's a lodge near me, and I have the impression it's mostly retired-age men.

New comment by Taikonerd in "Who People Talk to When They're Struggling"

Taikonerd — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:32:14 +0000

I really like this answer. I wish there were a men's group near me.

New comment by Taikonerd in "C*: Unifying Programming and Verification in C (2025)"

Taikonerd — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:04:11 +0000

Refactoring legacy code seems like something where formal methods could help. "Prove that these 2 subroutines are equivalent, across all inputs" is exactly the kind of thing that they're good at!

New comment by Taikonerd in "C*: Unifying Programming and Verification in C (2025)"

Taikonerd — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:39:14 +0000

The authors cite this, but just to mention it: this sounds like F*, another proof-oriented language. (https://fstar-lang.org/)

F* is in the ML family of languages, so it looks pretty different from C*.

New comment by Taikonerd in "TALA Is Open-Source"

Taikonerd — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 02:07:44 +0000

Always happy to see D2 on here! In my last job, I had to do several architecture diagrams. Learning D2 took maybe 1 day, and saved me much more time than that.

New comment by Taikonerd in "'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres"

Taikonerd — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:15:08 +0000

> Really the main issue [is] ... energy production

I know that's what the rhetoric focuses on, but is it the real issue? The people I know personally who are against "data centers" are really just against AI, period. "It takes jobs from artists, it's going to take my job, it's going to enrich a handful of oligarchs," etc.

I suspect that even if some magical breakthrough meant that AI usage could grow and grow without building a single new data center, these guys would still oppose AI.

And understandably so! "I'm worried that AI will take my job" is a reasonable worry, for many jobs! But I feel like "data centers" is, for many people, a pretext.

New comment by Taikonerd in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

Taikonerd — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:11:45 +0000

This is like a plot point in the old sci-fi movie Colossus: the Forbin Project.[0]

In the movie, America and the Soviet Union have both developed an AI. The two AIs are linked, and they rapidly shift from speaking human languages, to speaking in sequences of numbers that the onlooking humans can't understand.

Spoiler alert: this all goes horribly wrong for humanity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus%3A_The_Forbin_Project

New comment by Taikonerd in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

Taikonerd — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:52:16 +0000

I find that Claude Code writes very long comments, longer than even a human trying to be helpful would write.

I figure that it's basically making notes for itself, when it has to revisit the same code in a fresh session.