Hacker News: closeparen

New comment by closeparen in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

closeparen — Sat, 23 May 2026 19:41:17 +0000

Illustratively, living in the house is worth about $15,000/month and everything else combined is maybe $2,000.

New comment by closeparen in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

closeparen — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:09:31 +0000

Is this situation so uncommon? Almost everyone who lives in a house in California, for example, is living primarily off the unrealized gains on their home equity. Very few have the wage income to qualify for a mortgage on what their lifestyle is worth now.

California contains a lot of houses!

New comment by closeparen in "Who will buy your services if you fire us all?"

closeparen — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:35:27 +0000

Average American workers provide in-person services that don't scale and can't get much leverage from technology. Retail, hospitality, construction, care work, etc. They have not seen the kind of wage growth that accrued to the laptop class, but for the same reasons they are not as vulnerable. Probably we will end up alongside them. Plenty of demand growth coming in the elder-care sector.

New comment by closeparen in "AI ruling prompts warnings from US lawyers: Your chats could be used against you"

closeparen — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:32:12 +0000

If you are the subject of a criminal investigation, they will seize the devices from your house and do forensics on them. Taking steps to make that harder could expose you to more charges for tampering with evidence.

New comment by closeparen in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

closeparen — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:05:41 +0000

I do not think that marketing products and services that do useful work is “violence.”

New comment by closeparen in "More Americans are breaking into the upper middle class"

closeparen — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:28:46 +0000

>We consider a measure of necessity spending that includes but is not limited to childcare, external credit card payments, gasoline, general retail, grocery, housing (mortgage/rent), insurance, cable TV/broadband, public transportation, tax payments, vehicle costs and payments. We consider spending across payment channels (ACH, credit and debit card, bill pay). Income is defined as regularly recurring payments into accounts, such as payroll, social security, unemployment insurance pensions, and annuity income. Households are defined as living paycheck to paycheck if in the quarter their necessity spending exceeds 95% of their income

This is more thoughtful than some "paycheck to paycheck" discourse, put objectively well-off people definitely put themselves into this picture by signing up for more house, more car, or more credit card spending than even the relatively high level they can afford.

New comment by closeparen in "More Americans are breaking into the upper middle class"

closeparen — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:26:14 +0000

Doesn't look like it. What's your source? https://www.statista.com/statistics/200463/us-poverty-rate-s...

New comment by closeparen in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"

closeparen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 21:32:47 +0000

The beautiful thing about programming (which also makes edtech such an appealing dream to chase) is that you get immediate feedback from the computer and don't have to wait for someone whose attention is at least semi-scarce to mark your paper.

New comment by closeparen in "Go hard on agents, not on your filesystem"

closeparen — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:50:43 +0000

Seems most relevant in a hobbyist context where you have personal stuff on your machine unrelated to your projects. Employee endpoints in a corporate environment should already be limited to what’s necessary for job duties. There’s nothing on my remote development VMs that I wouldn’t want to share with Claude.

New comment by closeparen in "From zero to a RAG system: successes and failures"

closeparen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:55:54 +0000

184 Euro is about a day's wages for a software developer over there (40k EUR / 220 working days).

New comment by closeparen in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

closeparen — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:20:14 +0000

It would be better if they specifically excluded advertising uses of call metadata, etc. I assume this is getting mixed in from their ecommerce efforts to sell the devices. But how do you expect them to play back the voicemail if they don’t have it? What would be the point of "please leave a message after the beep" if the audio is going to /dev/null?

New comment by closeparen in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

closeparen — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:18:57 +0000

It would be pretty spooky if your voice managed to come out the other party's telephone without ever having been collected into and processed by the telephone network. Taking audio from one place and transporting it to another is what we pay it for.

New comment by closeparen in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

closeparen — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 03:43:21 +0000

This text does not appear in the link. I do see:

>Call Logs: We collect information about calls made using Phones, including the phone numbers you call or receive calls from, the date/time of the calls, and the length of the calls. We also collect network quality metrics and other technical data related to call performance. Please note that we do not record calls.

The version of the privacy policy cited in the previous discussion cited that voice audio is collected for the purposes of forwarding it to the other phone.

New comment by closeparen in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

closeparen — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:59:31 +0000

There is no world where a totalitarian government’s law enforcement ambitions on some object-level question are thwarted by the same government’s enforcement of privacy law. Countries with GDPR that are thinking of rounding up and kicking out the refugees know perfectly well who and where the refugees are.

New comment by closeparen in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

closeparen — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:45:51 +0000

I have the right to my own senses, my own observations, my own memories. I have the right to photograph what I can see with my eyes, and to write down what I can remember. Unless enjoined by a specific duty of care (doctor/patient, attorney/client, security clearance, etc) I have the right to discuss my memories with others. This obtains even when using electronic tools and even when working in association with others.

I don’t intend to give up or accept limitations on these rights because you consider yourself to have “privacy rights” or ownership interests in my records, my memories, my perceptions, or the reality in front of me. I find the notion of the government or another person interfering in this process, the perception and recollection of reality, to be creepy and totalitarian by itself.

In 1984, it is not only that the government is aware of Winston, but that it routinely tampers with or destroys evidence of the past & demands to control the perception of the present. I do not think we should let a government do that, even for a good reason like “protect your privacy” any more than we should let it destroy general purpose computing “for the children.”

New comment by closeparen in "HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)"

closeparen — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:54:15 +0000

In high school I worked at a VAR that had partnerships with HP, among others (Cisco, Microsoft, etc). Our partnership gave us access to a special support line where a fluent English speaker picked up quickly, talked to you like you had seen a computer before, didn't enforce a script, and issued a return authorization with minimal hassle.

At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.

New comment by closeparen in "U.S. to suspend the Jones Act in a bid to curb oil prices"

closeparen — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:09:03 +0000

Specifically, the Jones Act guarantees trucking and freight rail jobs by making it unreasonable to transport goods by water.

New comment by closeparen in "When does MCP make sense vs CLI?"

closeparen — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:32:54 +0000

The GPTs are "it" because they were deliberately named in a way to discourage anthropomorphizing them. Anthropic does want you to anthropomorphize Claude, and they gave their model a male name. It's not that deep!

New comment by closeparen in "When does MCP make sense vs CLI?"

closeparen — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 05:22:37 +0000

We have a lot of tools (starting with the internal wiki) which are normally only exposed to engineers through web interfaces; MCPs make them available to terminal agents to use autonomously. This can get really interesting with e.g. giving Claude access to query logs and metrics to debug a production issue.

It is obnoxious that MCP results always go directly into the context window. I'd prefer to dump a large payload into Claude's filesystem and let him figure it out from there. But some of the places MCPs can be used don't even have filesystems.

New comment by closeparen in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

closeparen — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 04:00:26 +0000

And the average commute duration is around 27 minutes. If you happened to live in one of the very few places in America where there even are 15 urban miles to cross, doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.