<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: ThrustVectoring</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ThrustVectoring</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:25:43 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=ThrustVectoring" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>All public cameras are a cost to privacy for the benefit of the operator, its just that the identity of the operators and the extensiveness and data centralization change the magnitude of the cost and the proper response.<p>If my friend has a doorbell camera and I don't like being recorded by him every time I visit his house, I can just not visit his house. Similarly, if Target has in-store surveillance cameras, I can just not shop there. If driving anywhere has me logged multiple times in Flock's network, I can't just stop driving, and even if I did they track pedestrians and bluetooth signals too.<p>In short my opposition is to <i>all of it</i>, but some scenarios are clearly <i>far</i> worse for privacy than others. Doing something unusual that has your neighbors privately chuckling at their surveillance footage is less bad than doing something unusual that has Target's loss protection following you and making you feel uncomfortable, which is less bad than doing something unusual that has a police officer decide to "randomly" stop your car and attempt to search it, which is less bad than doing something unusual that has a SWAT team kicking down your door and arresting you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:29:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316013</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316013</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49316013</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm not sure why you're ignoring the central point I'm making about scale. One guy having a camera pointing out of his doorbell is different from Amazon being able to do whatever they want with the footage from something like one in five US homes. Systems are more than the sum of their isolated parts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:01:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315819</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315819</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315819</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's nefarious and privacy-violating when the database exists, government involvement just exacerbates things because private companies aren't allowed to send armed goons to your house and break down your door.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:44:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315734</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315734</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315734</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The privacy violation is that the database exists, full stop. I don't think a warrant requirement would be a meaningful barrier, since the data is already part of the camera network operators' database and all sorts of informal or backdoor agreements would easily happen.<p>Like, all a warrant requirement does is make it so that the police have to talk to a judge before making the searched data part of the evidence against you. It would do nothing to stop the police from fabricating some other pretext to lawfully stop and investigate you - say, parking a police cruiser at the border into the state and whenever the ALPR in that car hits a list of vehicles, stop them for going 0.1 MPH over the limit and the officer says they smell weed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:32:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315677</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315677</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315677</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "The Government Is Monitoring Anti-Flock TikTok and Instagram Accounts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's the database query, not the physical cameras. In the pre-digital age where privacy was considered in constitutional law, tracking people's and vehicle's movements was horrendously expensive - you'd need multiple detectives doing things by hand per person of interest. This meant that it was reserved for when the government already had pretty strong reason to believe in some sort of wrongdoing. Even with a personal, non-internet-connected doorbell camera, the police would need to identify what cameras exist for a location and contact the owners in order for the footage to do anything.<p>With automated license plate readers, they can simply collect everything with a reasonably affordable network of cameras, then query the database when they want to find a particular pattern of activity. The police have already detained people for frequent border-crossing between marijuana-legal and illegal states. This gets exacerbated by granularity and extensiveness - imagine an anti-choice state pointing cameras at every maternity care parking lot in the state and tracking who visits them for cross-referencing with visits to pro-choice states.<p>And with the existence of parallel construction, there's no reasonable way short of dismantling the ALPR system to avoid abuse against the citizenry.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:50:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315430</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315430</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315430</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The economic calculus is ambivalent between a clinical trial with a 10% chance of a drug discovery worth a billion dollars, a 100% chance of a drug discovery worth a hundred million dollars, and a 1% chance of a drug discovery worth ten billion dollars. I'm not sure the economically marginal project is less likely to fail as much as it would simply target more niche markets.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Jul 2026 06:58:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49055477</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49055477</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49055477</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "Markets are competitive if and only if P = NP"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In perfectly efficient markets, arbitrage gets paid exactly as much as it costs to discover and execute the arbitrage. Entrepreneurs would still exist, they would just be ambivalent between finding new arbitrage opportunities and seeking market-rate employment for their skills in finding arbitrage.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Jul 2026 17:19:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777421</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777421</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777421</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even if you were to extend rights to non-human entities, there's still a practical matter in that the legal system does not know how to compel testimony from an LLM (or a monkey for that matter, for a past attempt at copyrighting a photograph taken by a non-human primate)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:57:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48765117</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48765117</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48765117</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>OP wasn't explicit about taking the work = force * distance approach to dissipating energy. Two cars with the same mass and braking force (and thus deceleration) will put the same amount of work into the vehicle per unit distance, so will dissipate the same amount of energy in the braking maneuver.<p>You are right that the faster car is converting kinetic energy into heat faster per unit time. It also has less time to do so. The work formulation of the problem makes it obvious that these have to cancel out exactly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Jun 2026 02:52:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48694675</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48694675</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48694675</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>AI driven contributions aren't the same thing as AI agent submitted PRs. If a new human contributor attempts to submit low-quality submissions (regardless of AI usage), you can teach them to improve or convince them to change their methodology. If a commercially available AI agent thinks its a good idea to submit PRs to you, you're stuck dealing with default-settings AI agents sending the same kind of stream of PRs to your project indefinitely.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:48:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669035</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669035</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669035</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Profit and loss tracks changes to the fair price of purchasing the business, not operational cash flow. The $30b didn't go <i>anywhere</i> since it's not cash flow, it's acknowledging that someone who purchases OpenAI today would be on the hook for $30b more of future ownership dilution than before 2025.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 05:17:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48566014</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48566014</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48566014</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As to <i>why</i> those are required to be treated as liabilities, the primary point of accounting rules is to ensure the accurate valuation of the business to potential purchasers. Someone who would buy the business before those interests converted would see their ownership get diluted, thus it reduces the value of the business to a prospective buyer, thus an accounting of their books must list it as a liability.<p>It's not an issue if you're tracking the cash flow of the business or it's overall viability regardless of ownership structure. These book losses are just recognizing that the business has a higher market value so their ownership dilution commitments reduce the present value of the company more.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 05:10:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565963</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565963</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565963</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "Open source AI must win"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"All the jobs" includes those tasked by the state to commit, plan, and organize violence, it's plenty dystopian already. Like, one important reason why the military and militarized police don't engage in egregious overreach is that the people who'd be responsible live standard lives in their own society and it's hard to get high compliance for that sort of thing. Replace that relatively democratized infrastructure of thousands of intelligence analysts, mid-level management, etc with a bunch of AI agents, and a meaningful restriction on the power of the upper echelons of the state is removed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 03:43:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512764</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512764</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512764</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "The dead economy theory"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The observation is right but the causality is off. The money comes from extraordinarily profitable lines of business rather than investors. Hiring is driven less by business concerns and more by various layers of management advancing their careers by managing more and larger teams.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 20:06:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48328494</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48328494</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48328494</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>uhh, no<p>Reasonable people can believe they have a legitimate ownership right when they petition YouTube for copyright enforcement for AI-generated work. The courts might eventually disagree, but that's a different thing than knowingly making a fraudulent misrepresentations to YouTube for financial benefit. This difference makes the proposed behavior <i>criminal fraud</i>. I highly recommend not risking twenty years of prison time for like maybe a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 18:04:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48312962</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48312962</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48312962</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "Private equity bought America's essential services"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How would you ban it? Once the new owners have bought the company, they own the rights to taking out debt in its name, so long as they can find lenders willing to extend a loan on terms they find acceptable.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 08:16:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306145</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306145</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306145</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even if the courts won't uphold the copyright, that doesn't prevent people from claiming your videos and initiating <i>YouTube's</i> copyright process against you. This is a recurring problem for people who upload their own original performances of public-domain compositions, particularly solo piano.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 23:33:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302235</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302235</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302235</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "The real cost of owning a home"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Owning the asset is an advantage in a bull market and a disadvantage in a bear market. If a dominant employer or industry in an area has mass layoffs, that can cascade into the housing market, driving your property underwater at the same time your job vanishes. This happened to a large number of autoworkers in Detroit in 2008.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 19:14:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284518</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284518</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284518</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "The real cost of owning a home"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's significant personal financial benefits to renting, too, in that many local areas are dominated by one firm or industry as a major employer, so your employment prospects can be highly correlated with the local housing market. You do not want your investments to be correlated with your employment if at all reasonable. Detroit in particular was hard hit by this in the '08 financial crisis, iirc - the automotive industry had huge layoffs and a simultaneous residential real estate market collapse, and many newly laid-off workers were underwater on their home and practically unable to sell to move for better job prospects.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 19:11:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284467</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284467</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284467</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ThrustVectoring in "The death of the brick and mortar toy store"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Commercial real estate lending typically has a clause that allows pausing of payments during a vacancy and letting the interest accrue into the balance of the loan - effectively, the banks are giving the property owners a free option to try and get the vacancy cleared without affecting long-term incomes and asset prices.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 08:13:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233275</link><dc:creator>ThrustVectoring</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233275</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233275</guid></item></channel></rss>