Hacker News: dave4420

New comment by dave4420 in "Two tipping points for officially becoming a dictatorship could occur this week"

dave4420 — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 10:49:06 +0000

He’s conflating a few things. I don’t think becoming an illiberal democracy is the same thing as becoming a dictatorship. Still sucks for America though.

New comment by dave4420 in "Why Musk, Trump and tech elites seek collapse of global order"

dave4420 — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:55:42 +0000

You need to click through to a half hour video.

I can’t be arsed myself.

New comment by dave4420 in "Ask HN: Is there a daily puzzle where the rules of the puzzle change every day?"

dave4420 — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 20:06:09 +0000

Do you mean something like the Cracking the Cryptic channel on YouTube?

It features a couple of puzzles every day, with a variety of different rulesets.

New comment by dave4420 in "FCC head Brendan Carr tells Europe to get on board with Starlink"

dave4420 — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 18:23:28 +0000

> He also accused the European Commission of “protectionism” and an “anti-American” attitude.

Says someone working for a government that’s just introduced protectionist tariffs.

Hypocrites.

New comment by dave4420 in "'We Are Not Programmed to Die,' Says Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan"

dave4420 — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 10:35:49 +0000

I think his point is that death is the default, and that we’ve never been programmed for indefinite life. The only thing he’s selling is a book.

New comment by dave4420 in "Ask HN: Why is there no P2P streaming protocol like BitTorrent?"

dave4420 — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 18:34:21 +0000

With sports streams you specifically want low lag, don’t you? It’s no fun being spoilered by people cheering (or not) next door.

New comment by dave4420 in "This is Called "Capital Flight""

dave4420 — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 15:30:18 +0000

What has that got to do with this thread? A devaluation's a devaluation, whether you're forced into changing a fixed rate, or have it imposed on you by the markets.

New comment by dave4420 in "Console Do Not Track (DNT)"

dave4420 — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 15:28:22 +0000

A shame that this is only for opting out of everything.

It would be great if I could do something like

    export DO_NOT_TRACK=ads:personal-usage

and have that still allow crash reporting and anonymous usage statistics, while denying non-anonymous usage reporting and anything related to ads.

New comment by dave4420 in "Trump exempts phones, computers, chips from ‘reciprocal’ tariffs"

dave4420 — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 14:57:30 +0000

How will China react to this, I wonder.

New comment by dave4420 in "This is Called "Capital Flight""

dave4420 — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 12:03:06 +0000

You sound like Harold Wilson.

I don't mean to suggest that the current American devaluation is as large as the UK's 1967 devaluation, at least so far. Just that your reasoning here is wrong: when your currency falls, that has a domestic inflationary effect precisely because your currency is worth less than before.

New comment by dave4420 in "This is Called "Capital Flight""

dave4420 — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 09:45:53 +0000

There are no fewer dollars in the US dollar currency area after the sale than before… but those dollars are worth less than before. If capital has not left the area, it has been destroyed. That’s not to say that the US economy is inevitably doomed… but you sound very bullish.

New comment by dave4420 in "An International Minimum Wage"

dave4420 — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 21:01:57 +0000

Would this mean minimum wage workers the world over effectively being paid in dollars rather than their local currency? (Because their salary in local currency would rise and fall with the dollar.)

Or would wages be reset, say, annually based on whatever the level of the dollar was at the time?

I dunno, it feels like it would be ceding control over a chunk of your economy to the whims of the US political process. (Because of course it will be Americans forcing labour to be more expensive in Vietnam, not Europeans forcing labour to be more expensive in America… the Americans would never accept that.)

New comment by dave4420 in "New airport rules will get rid of boarding passes and check-in"

dave4420 — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 18:20:14 +0000

What was the bigger shake up that happened 50 years ago?

And what happens if your phone breaks or runs out of battery at the most inconvenient time? (Trump deports you, I guess, but what about everywhere else?)

New comment by dave4420 in "Ask HN: How come my online multiplayer game lags when som1 calls my home phone?"

dave4420 — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 19:37:11 +0000

Cordless phones use the same frequencies as WiFi, so they could be interfering with each other.

Or, I dunno. Is your phone using voip?

New comment by dave4420 in "Ask HN: Control Information, Control the World?"

dave4420 — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 14:57:52 +0000

If you are dependent on imports for half your food supply and I am able to choke off your imports… then it doesn’t matter that you have the knowledge of how to mass produce synthetic meat for cheap, a chunky proportion of your population will starve to death before you’re able to construct the new food factories.

New comment by dave4420 in "Ask HN: Control Information, Control the World?"

dave4420 — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 10:54:45 +0000

There are many chokepoints. The media/information is one of them. Food, water and energy are others. I expect there are more.

New comment by dave4420 in "Trump only simulates madness [Stock Insider Trading]"

dave4420 — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 07:23:36 +0000

In theory Congress can impeach him for it, but in practice there won’t be the votes to convict him. If there are ever, somehow, the votes to convict him, it’ll be for something worse.

After his term ends… I don’t know whether the law says that the insider trading exemption Congress has also applies to the Executive branch… but I’d fully expect the Supreme Court to say it does, if it got that far.

New comment by dave4420 in "Fake job seekers are flooding US companies that are hiring for remote positions"

dave4420 — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 18:12:48 +0000

£10k/year for maybe 2days/month of meetings and prep sounds pretty well paid for volunteer work.

New comment by dave4420 in "China could crush the U.S. housing market"

dave4420 — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 17:14:19 +0000

That’s true in the long term.

In the short term, a sudden drop in house prices causes economic pain (e.g. people trapped by negative equity), and the US has a lot of economic pain about to hit it already.

I’m kind of sceptical that the scenario the article presents will play out though. The Fed would reverse course and buy up the bonds, if it came to it.

New comment by dave4420 in "The Dishwasher Paradox"

dave4420 — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 23:11:09 +0000

Maybe some people assume the dishwasher is full, but some people are too lazy to check, and others are just copying everyone else.

Ironic that you make assumptions in a post about people making assumptions.