Hacker News: cactacea

New comment by cactacea in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

cactacea — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:53:24 +0000

Funny enough there's a very good chance I'm a Lost Canadian. I filed my application for proof of citizenship in February and am still waiting to hear back. Hopefully soon.

New comment by cactacea in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

cactacea — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:34:05 +0000

> In a more sane world the Republican Party would be in favor of universal health coverage. How many potential entrepreneurs stay working at BigCorp because they need the health benefits?

Oh hi. That is me.

New comment by cactacea in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

cactacea — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:31:22 +0000

> These are life-changing possibilities, especially for entrepreneurs.

I would quit my day job and completely focus on my side business if I didn't have to worry about healthcare.

New comment by cactacea in "Defending my own brain against enshittification"

cactacea — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:40:58 +0000

I was constantly sick when I worked in downtown Seattle and rode the bus. I've been sick exactly once since I started WFH full time in 2019.

New comment by cactacea in "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't"

cactacea — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:05:59 +0000

Good news, he does geology too

New comment by cactacea in "Senate OS Age Requirement Bill Introduced"

cactacea — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:50:12 +0000

Also somehow defines "Operating System Provider" but not "Operating System"?

> The term operating system provider means a person that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a covered device.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/s5090/text/is#lin...

Whoever wrote this is technologically illiterate.

New comment by cactacea in "Senate OS Age Requirement Bill Introduced"

cactacea — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:44:14 +0000

Parents should parent their children and not make it everyone else's problem. This is a social and political problem, not a technical problem with a technical solution.

New comment by cactacea in "Senate OS Age Requirement Bill Introduced"

cactacea — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:42:32 +0000

Text of the bill: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/s5090/text

New comment by cactacea in "Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters"

cactacea — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:26:12 +0000

It is more that labor protections in most of the industrialized world actually mean something, such that this sort of behavior is generally not even to be considered an option by an employer.

New comment by cactacea in "Our Amish Language"

cactacea — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:59:33 +0000

> (I assume Amish has a large corpus)

Pennsylvania Dutch does not, it is primarily oral and the Amish generally don't allow themselves to be photographed or recorded.

New comment by cactacea in "TLS certificates for internal services done right"

cactacea — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:25:28 +0000

Zero trust or bust. I actually cringed when I read "done right" applied to split-horizon DNS.

New comment by cactacea in "Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches"

cactacea — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 01:50:37 +0000

Yes, they solve the problem that you called the company.

New comment by cactacea in "CFPB Gives Workers Two Weeks to Decide Whether to Move to DC"

cactacea — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 21:00:48 +0000

RTO has always been about cheap layoffs so yeah, of course they'd do this.

New comment by cactacea in "Dark Sky Lighting"

cactacea — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:45:48 +0000

I hike at night fairly regularly and use either a dim red light or no light at all. I'm willing to bet that most people don't have any idea how good their fully dark adapted night vision actually is, especially with any sort of moonlight. The bigger problem I've found are bright lights that just blow out your night vision entirely. It only takes a few seconds to undo 30-40 minutes of adaptation.

New comment by cactacea in "Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors"

cactacea — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:44:42 +0000

New comment by cactacea in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

cactacea — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:39:33 +0000

Yeah there's a Pho place in Seattle I'd go to lunch at (iykyk) where we'd regularly have 20 people at a table and pay individually. But they didn't even use the check for that, they'd just ask what you had and ring that in as they went around the table with the handheld. Literally the only place I've ever seen that even offered to split a check at a table with more than 3-4 people.

New comment by cactacea in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

cactacea — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:31:48 +0000

> But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.

I'm guessing the author has never worked as a server themselves... Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill? As an American this just seems obvious to me but maybe the expectation is different in Dubai.

New comment by cactacea in "Ford rehires 350 engineers after AI fails to preserve expertise or train juniors"

cactacea — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:49:24 +0000

It was also designed by European engineers, not in Michigan. Not saying that's the reason the Focus is more reliable than a Taurus but they didn't follow the "typical" Ford design process at the time for that vehicle. For what it is worth I owned a 1992 Taurus and it left me stranded more times than I can count. Just some of the issues I had were a water pump that exploded and a seized A/C compressor.

New comment by cactacea in "Ask HN: How much coding should beginners learn in the AI era?"

cactacea — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:19:05 +0000

I see this question as akin to "do I really need to learn basic flight skills when my A320 has autopilot?". Yes. Yes, you do. For exactly the same reasons. AI is workload reduction the same way that autopilot is workload reduction when used as intended.

New comment by cactacea in "U.S. pulling ocean sensors a 'shock' for Canadian research as El Niño nears"

cactacea — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:58:15 +0000

Science is evil and must be destroyed at all costs.