Hacker News: bhouston

New comment by bhouston in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

bhouston — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:37:47 +0000

This is a ridiculous demand to make of an early teen in the pre-internet era. You know how hard it was to get information on arbitrary subjects back then like this?

New comment by bhouston in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

bhouston — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:09:22 +0000

SimCity 2000 with Fusion plants was released in 1993. To predict that solar would do this back then is asking a lot - this graph doesn't even start in 1993:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

New comment by bhouston in "'It's offensively cheap': Solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear"

bhouston — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:58:36 +0000

The nature of disruptive solutions is that they can be adopted easily at the bottom of the market - which means in this case people like you rather than at the centrally planned utility.

New comment by bhouston in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

bhouston — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:57:29 +0000

Yeah, Nuclear is one of those solutions where in an ideal world it makes sense, but in the real world it is just too complex all around make it work.

New comment by bhouston in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

bhouston — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:56:40 +0000

I am not saying that SimCity predicts the future, rather I had assumptions growing up in that period, probably similar to everyone else at the time, that Nuclear and Fusion were the future of energy. It is cool to see that shift so soundly to solar in just two decades.

New comment by bhouston in "Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism"

bhouston — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:49:14 +0000

Large multi-nationals like CNN can literally never promote eating the rich because their owners must be, by requirement, multi-billionaires. A lowly plebe could not own a multi-national media conglomerate, they are not wealthy enough.

New comment by bhouston in "Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear"

bhouston — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:46:16 +0000

It is amazing that solar, a ridiculous cheap and easy to install solution is winning the energy future. In the past, based mostly on playing SimCity, I would have thought that Nuclear and then Fusion was the future, but solar does seem to be winning and pretty thoroughly.

I guess this is in part because it only needs amazing factories and not complex deployed and maintained infrastructure that is at risk of blowing up.

Solar seems to fix the mould of a disruptive technology to a T.

New comment by bhouston in "Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism"

bhouston — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 13:47:12 +0000

> And hard left content is promoted everywhere else. What’s the point?

I guess it depends on what you consider to be "hard left".

If you consider anything to the left of Elon Musk's anti-immigrant, pro-White positions, unrestrained capitalism for him (although he is pro-tariffs on foreign EVs), to be "hard left", then yes, it is pretty prevalent, but I would argue that is actually representative of reality.

New comment by bhouston in "Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism"

bhouston — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 12:22:39 +0000

This is the future of elections if Big Tech isn't reined in. The first experiment/test case was X:

- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/technology/twitter-far-ri...

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/29/elon-mu...

- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/x-has-disproportionate...

- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-turned-x...

We forget this but hard right content is still highly promoted on X, especially related to white supremacy and anti-immigrant, and it is also protected from content violations.

New comment by bhouston in "Plex laid off the whole player team"

bhouston — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 19:43:27 +0000

How is that related to this story? Are you commenting on the wrong Hacker News post?

New comment by bhouston in "The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck"

bhouston — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:54:19 +0000

The post is so vague that it isn't clear what this is about. I would suggest just creating a new reddit account under a different email? Are not the main limits to reddit accounts is 3 months age and 1000 Karma? That is super easy to achieve, no need to wait years to restore your old account. Just make a new one. You are also allowed to have multiple reddit accounts, just do not double vote on things.

New comment by bhouston in "The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck"

bhouston — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:33:34 +0000

It got less media play but the founder of the Hind Foundation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hind_Rajab_Foundation) that is going after IDF soldiers for war crimes that happened in Gaza got his Instagram account taking down at the same time, but it wasn't restored:

https://www.instagram.com/Aboujahjah/

They also removed the account of slain Palestinian journalists, this time including Pulitzer winning Al Jazeera's Anas Al-Sharif - although it seems it is back now: https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx0kN5mUZDFsw7OgRiY3ElLx9DgjM...

It seems that there are repeated waves of account deletions affecting those not in power and only if you raise a huge stink is it undone but only on a per-account basis. And each of these waves slowly erodes those voices. It sort of feels like a strategy.

New comment by bhouston in "Qwen3-Coder writes less secure code when told it's for a US persona"

bhouston — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:25:23 +0000

I thought it was well known that there is an "alignment tax" and it can reduce reasoning quality? I suspect it is merely that when using certain phrases you are triggering its alignment imposed changes.

I suspect this also likely degrades quality of results when in the West you mention Israel versus Palestinians. E.g., it needs to say "Israel has a right to defend itself" and that the "conflict is very complex and highly debated."

Alberta votes to remain in Canada with 70% voting remain

bhouston — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:49:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-referendum-canada-remain-vote-9.7387871

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50163581

Points: 17

# Comments: 3

New comment by bhouston in "US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers "ownership," not "a license""

bhouston — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:20:58 +0000

When did I express any support for Hamas? I didn’t.

New comment by bhouston in "US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers "ownership," not "a license""

bhouston — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:49:18 +0000

Anyone like him that excuses what is happening in Gaza and opposing holding back any arm sales to Israel is not a good person in general. The amount of PR around this initiaitove seems like it is a favor by his donors to try and make up for the reputation costs he has paid to support their causes.

It isn’t ideological purity, it is Torres is a bad dude and supports what the majority in the US believes is a genocide.

New comment by bhouston in "US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers "ownership," not "a license""

bhouston — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:21:54 +0000

Richie Torres is such a net negative to the US. He is so right wing on foreign policy that he might as well be a republican.

New comment by bhouston in "BIPM decides to stop adding leap seconds to UTC"

bhouston — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:51:17 +0000

Now when the add a leap second it will be like Y2K. All these systems have not had to deal with that for a century and thus may not be able to deal with a UTC change? Or maybe all software will be auto-updated by hyper intelligence agents and it won't matter.

New comment by bhouston in "Show HN: A 3D Configurator for Macropads"

bhouston — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:13:22 +0000

The website is dead and not responding. What are you hosting this on? Whatever it is, it isn't efficient.

New comment by bhouston in "AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware"

bhouston — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:51:38 +0000

It is standard that companies within a country act in the interests of its security services. Israel has a lot of ad-tech companies and thus it makes sense that they are roped into serving Israel's security services.

It is no different that Israel's location tracking of StarLink terminals worldwide: https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-tech-firms-can-locate-an...

This is the same issue that the US government has with Chinese networking companies, it is too easy for the Chinese government to pressure these Chinese networking companies to put in back doors in the interests of national security. The US likely knows this because it pressures its own companies in similar ways.