Hacker News: anikan_vader

New comment by anikan_vader in "Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI"

anikan_vader — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 18:28:07 +0000

Some places (including some places in the US) ban cashless stores. It seems reasonable to me to try to legally protect people who struggle to adapt to new technologies.

New comment by anikan_vader in "Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Center City Philadelphia"

anikan_vader — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 02:34:57 +0000

Arrested for refusing to yield to a motor vehicle on a public sidewalk? Curious to see if they can find any jury in the land that won’t laugh this one out…

New comment by anikan_vader in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

anikan_vader — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:00:16 +0000

>> Poland was the first country to make a remarkable peaceful transition from a bankrupt, failed Soviet satellite state.

In what sense? Czechia is richer per capita. Almost all of the former Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe have had largely peaceful (since 1991) sustained economic growth. The exceptions are exactly those countries which continue to have Russian troops occupying portions, namely Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova.

New comment by anikan_vader in "What you need to know about EMP weapons"

anikan_vader — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:19:00 +0000

Until someone calls your bluff, perhaps accidentally, and realizes much of the nuclear saber-rattling was just that. Of course, since it wasn't entirely a bluff, this is the easiest way to get a nuclear war going. (Get a country with nukes but limited conventional capabilities into a brinksmanship contest.)

New comment by anikan_vader in "When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?"

anikan_vader — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 20:13:36 +0000

To date, there have been no confirmed exomoon detections. So hopefully they'll do a better job than we have so far.

New comment by anikan_vader in "ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation"

anikan_vader — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 14:52:05 +0000

Due Process is being denied to US citizens, who are being removed from the country without the opportunity for them or their parents to consult an attorney.

New comment by anikan_vader in "A life that added up to something (Obituary of Paul Erdòs)"

anikan_vader — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 22:29:47 +0000

The point is that the title and article misspell (in two different ways) his second name.

New comment by anikan_vader in "Are you better than a language model at predicting the next word?"

anikan_vader — Sat, 17 Aug 2024 21:47:01 +0000

Got 8/15, best AI model got 7/15, and unigram got 1/15.

Finally a use for all the wasted hours I’ve spent on HN — my next word prediction is marginally better than that of the AI.

New comment by anikan_vader in "The rarest move in chess [video]"

anikan_vader — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 21:25:08 +0000

Some sources do write ep after en passant captures. As you point out, it’s no more redundant than notating checks.

New comment by anikan_vader in "300k airplanes in five years"

anikan_vader — Fri, 24 May 2024 18:40:45 +0000

Well we certainly do agree that artillery will not be the primary weapon of choice in any naval war!

I do appreciate your point of view, but I maintain that in a lengthy land war with a near peer, missile stockpiles would run low and 4th gen fighters would be unable to contest enemy airspace. Of course, the caveat is that the US would very much like to avoid any such conflict via either diplomacy or a decisive first few weeks of combat. And the hope is that 5th gen fighters would evade air defenses. Even so, US doctrine calls for being capable of fighting prolonged land wars on multiple fronts.

New comment by anikan_vader in "300k airplanes in five years"

anikan_vader — Fri, 24 May 2024 14:30:59 +0000

It’s disingenuous to claim without citation that the US does not anticipate using artillery as one (of many) primary weapons in a land conflict against a near-peer adversary. The fact that thr US hasn’t had such a conflict since at least Vietnam (and arguably Korea) not withstanding.

Artillery has proved decisive in every conflict with static lines in the last 100 years. Sure, hopefully air supremacy would overwhelm your opponent and prevent a static conflict, but no air force has ever established supremacy in a conflict with saturated strategic air defenses. Perhaps the US air forces could, but this capability is untested. Sadam and Yugoslavia were limited to tactical air defenses in relatively small numbers compared with modern day Russia or China.

In short, artillery remains important, which is why US artillery shell production is up an order of magnitude over the last 3 years, and will continue to rise.

New comment by anikan_vader in "Creepy Study Suggests AI Is the Reason We've Never Found Aliens"

anikan_vader — Sun, 12 May 2024 19:25:20 +0000

Atomic weapons emerged slightly before the first craft to leave the Earth’s atmosphere, but we’re still nowhere near interstellar travel. On the other hand, the difficulty of space travel is largely a function of the escape velocity, which is dependent on the gravitational pull of your planet and solar system (both of which are variable).

One issue with your claim though is that once you have interstellar flight, you certainly have weapons of mass destruction. Even crashing a coke-can sized meteor into the Earth at 1% of the speed of light would cause major destruction.

New comment by anikan_vader in "Three women contract HIV from dirty "vampire facials" at unlicensed spa"

anikan_vader — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 14:41:31 +0000

I’m sure you realize that Arnold didn’t get that big just through chicken and broccoli…

New comment by anikan_vader in "How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?"

anikan_vader — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 14:40:07 +0000

It is incredibly insulting to neanderthals to make an unsubstantiated comparison between them and politicians.

New comment by anikan_vader in "The case for single-stair multifamily"

anikan_vader — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 02:16:12 +0000

The author does not even attempt to analyze the safety impact of removing the second stair. The only evidence they provide is that Western Europe has fewer fire deaths than the US. Which suggests that perhaps the US should be increasing fire safety standards rather than removing them…

New comment by anikan_vader in "Evidence Russia Is Now Using Jet Shahed Kamikaze Drones Emerges"

anikan_vader — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:56 +0000

This only emphasizes the need for NATO to reinvest in radar-guided anti-aircraft guns. Frankly, it's a bit troubling that the Europeans have been so slow to respond to the war in Ukraine (e.g., EU artillery shell production still vastly lags Russia's despite the Russian economy being the size of Italy's). With the US looking more and more like an unreliable security partner in the region, the time for the Europeans to revamp their military industrial complex was yesterday.

New comment by anikan_vader in "People have been buried behind a Mississippi jail since 2016, attorney says"

anikan_vader — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 15:39:09 +0000

Oops! Definitely. It actually looks to have been a clever use of irony. The internet is such a hard place to be clever though, in that people tend to take things at face value.

New comment by anikan_vader in "People have been buried behind a Mississippi jail since 2016, attorney says"

anikan_vader — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 02:24:18 +0000

Cop kills someone (allegedly by accident) and then the police bury him in a pauper’s grave and don’t inform any relevant parties.

>> These things happen.

No, they really don’t. That’s why it has made national news.

New comment by anikan_vader in "The Journal of Universal Rejection"

anikan_vader — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 21:18:37 +0000

This is definitely a tricky venue to get into, but the prestige still makes submissions worth it.

New comment by anikan_vader in "The Drums of War Are Growing Louder in South America"

anikan_vader — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 17:53:00 +0000

Venezuela’s (relatively sudden) refusal to honor its treaty obligations that admit the land is owned by Guyana is obviously due to oil greed.

Guyana has almost no military, but the Venezuelan military doesn’t really have any offensive capabilities that the US cant easily deter. The US actually appears to be a stabilizing force in this case; if the US committed to non-intervention, it would make sense for Venezuela to invade immediately.

As is, the strategic balance is not in favor of Venezuela attempting to annex the land by force.