Hacker News: cpt1138

New comment by cpt1138 in "Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs"

cpt1138 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 05:33:16 +0000

I ordered something from a Chinese company and they quoted me 5USD per unit and 35USD shipping. I accepted and the units were shipped and delivered and of excellent quality.

Sometime later FedEx sends me a weird bill for some random seeming amount of money I owed. They had a link or email or something to basically refuse to pay. I did refuse to pay. The shipper ended up communicating with me to determine I was going to refuse to pay and I found where Fedex had on the website that indicated the shipper was responsible for all fees. I assume the randomness of it was related to tariffs but I wasn't going to pay anything like what they sent me.

I do hope that some repercussions come of these terrible economic policies and the shipper gets their money back from Fedex, but as a company or as an individual I don't think a company's policy to send random bills after delivery is valid either.

New comment by cpt1138 in "[dead]"

cpt1138 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 20:11:23 +0000

Pure FAFO. Love it. Hating Musk before it was cool has its upsides but I really can’t help thinking about how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

New comment by cpt1138 in "Comets that 'bounce' from planet to planet could spread life across the universe"

cpt1138 — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 01:01:57 +0000

Are amino acids not present in rocky planet oceans?

Sharing Truths About the Self

cpt1138 — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 19:56:01 +0000

Article URL: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/18918/3843

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281542

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by cpt1138 in "I Asked Leading Covid Scientists, Off the Record, About the Lab Leak Theory"

cpt1138 — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 18:43:41 +0000

All I can take away from this is that it really doesn't matter where it came from. The real problem is dealing with something like this was a failure on so many levels regardless of where it came from. The OP definitely finishes with the emotional desire to blame that still doesn't change the fact that the despair is not from where it came from but rather our global dealing with it.

New comment by cpt1138 in "[dead]"

cpt1138 — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 03:22:44 +0000

Never liked Musk

New comment by cpt1138 in "Ask HN: Bird watching binoculars, which ones are best?"

cpt1138 — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 20:47:07 +0000

The Nikon Monarch 7 is good. For birds you want something with a lot of light and less magnification (easier to hold steady). I also like the Vortex Viper HD for lower budgets. 8x42-50 is going to be your best bet for birding.

New comment by cpt1138 in "Why is Booz Allen renting us back our own national parks?"

cpt1138 — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 22:01:13 +0000

Doctorow says "But there’s something we can do about this! The part of the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act that authorizes agencies to assess fees runs out in Oct 2023, and when Congress renews it, they could add an amendment to block Booz’s junk fees."

What exactly are "we" supposed to do about it?

12ft.io Down?

cpt1138 — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 17:31:02 +0000

https://12ft.io/ seems disabled. Anyone know what happened?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32665575

Points: 4

# Comments: 4

New comment by cpt1138 in "The bottom is dropping out of Netflix"

cpt1138 — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 19:18:24 +0000

I think I would pay for all these services for content if I could be assured of watching the content how I want. I don't like the monthly fees, but Ill put up with it, I prefer the rental model and I'm willing to wait (like we used to for rentals). That said the way I want to watch content is downloaded for offline viewing, on our projector, with the sound split since my wife is hard of hearing and likes the sound going directly to her hearing aids. The content providers see that as pirating and disable it. Its frustrating to find that out, when you are no longer anywhere with service (the reason for the downloading the first place) and can't do anything about it. Netflix has worked like that for a while and the problem is finding good content. Amazon Prime "works" and is the rental model and I like that the best. Disney does not work at all. And I cant be bothered to try every service to see if it works like that. I would love an aggregator and would be happy to pay monthly if they could provide EVERYTHING. In the meantime, Ill often even pay for the content somehow and then pirate it to watch it how I want.

New comment by cpt1138 in "Five coding interview questions I hate"

cpt1138 — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 05:26:04 +0000

Are all these questions related to Javascript? In some instances number vs object I guess I could talk about it wrt to Java or C but in terms of what Javascript’s notion of anything is unknown to me.

New comment by cpt1138 in "The End of Online Anonymity (2019)"

cpt1138 — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 16:12:50 +0000

On all these sites, including this one, why is the engagement model to comment on things? At family gatherings, prior to COVID, I always noticed real life chit chat to be bizarrely opinionated and biased as soon as it veered from the weather or traffic. What is the value we are getting from commenting, that makes it “worth it” to us to give up anonymity?

What Ground Forces Look Like to an Electronic Warfare System

cpt1138 — Tue, 12 May 2020 01:55:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33401/this-is-what-ground-forces-look-like-to-an-electronic-warfare-system-and-why-its-a-big-deal

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23149758

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by cpt1138 in "How to detect web bots?"

cpt1138 — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 06:07:52 +0000

Since 1/21 I have identified 153,423 attempts to gain access to some servers I run. All from unique ip addresses. It's one thing to identify bots, it's quite another what do about them.

New comment by cpt1138 in "The Setup-Cleanup Problem"

cpt1138 — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 02:03:48 +0000

Since Java 7, try with resources handles this in a much cleaner way than the example.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/exceptions...

New comment by cpt1138 in "Ask HN: What did you do that has changed your life the most?"

cpt1138 — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 19:00:50 +0000

It sounds trivial but exercise and a moderate diet affects my well being more than anything else.

New comment by cpt1138 in "The Octopus: An Alien Among Us"

cpt1138 — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 21:50:43 +0000

Is the question just whether invertebrates have consciousness? It may be a forcing function of our desire to impose consciousness on things but it really seems like my cat and my dog both have a level of consciousness.

New comment by cpt1138 in "She Wanted a Man with a Good Job Who Is Nice to Animals"

cpt1138 — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:10:54 +0000

What a perfect story. Very nicely done.

Ancient Whale with 4 legs found in Peru

cpt1138 — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 22:20:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.inverse.com/article/54611-ancient-whale-four-legs-peru

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19577681

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by cpt1138 in "Ask HN: What laptop did you go with when moving on from the macbook pro?"

cpt1138 — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 16:53:09 +0000

MacBook Air: right price, good selection of ports, thought the screen would be an issue after 15" MBP (late 2011) but it was good enough, keyboard.