Hacker News: elektronika

New comment by elektronika in "Hallucinate – Massively Multiplayer Online Rave"

elektronika — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:26:43 +0000

I hear this all the time as a rationalization for why people don't go out anymore, but I don't buy it. You're afraid people on the internet might see you having fun? I've had people shove a phone in my face and take video while I was out dancing. It's rude, but it's not a big deal. The reason people don't go out is because Live Nation/Ticketmaster made live music outrageously expensive and strangled small venues.

New comment by elektronika in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

elektronika — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:14:18 +0000

It's very blatant and below that range. They got many orders for the exact same model that's around $50k.

New comment by elektronika in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

elektronika — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:31:59 +0000

Watches are the commodity of choice for corruption in some circles. I know people in jewelry and a significant portion of their transactions are watches to Chinese businessmen, formerly through Hong Kong, now through Singapore. They're high value items with razor thin margins.

New comment by elektronika in "Childhood Computing"

elektronika — Sun, 24 May 2026 23:14:29 +0000

Americans like to downplay the impact of the situation of their birth in their successes and others' failures.

New comment by elektronika in "The sigmoids won't save you"

elektronika — Sun, 17 May 2026 00:42:23 +0000

> AI and automation makes things so cheap that today's underclass lives better than kings ever did

I suggest you go share this opinion with the people living on the street because they can't afford housing.

New comment by elektronika in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"

elektronika — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:51:09 +0000

> The question is whether we feel air travel is as essential to everyday life as busses and trains are.

Anywhere I can get to by train in the USA I can go faster and cheaper by plane. By bus I can go "cheaper" if I ignore the value of my time and the people offering me meth at the bus-stop.

New comment by elektronika in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

elektronika — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:20:00 +0000

> Specifically, for the least happy group, happiness rises with income until $100,000, then shows no further increase as income grows. For those in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income, and for the happiest group the association actually accelerates above $100,000.

Exactly. There are other things you can do to be happy and some personalities are simply miserable, but there's nobody who's better off with less money. I'd be curious to see if this holds in societies with better social safety nets for whom money isn't as directly tied to survival or options in how to live.

New comment by elektronika in "Why I Write (1946)"

elektronika — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:29:49 +0000

The state of the UK suggests to me that Orwell's writing was as much an expression of British post-colonial anxieties as it was an indictment of the USSR. His books are no doubt pushed in US education system for their nonpartisan anti-communism.

1984 was surprisingly prescient about automatically generated propaganda. The slop deluge we're going through certainly echoes the "Novel-Writing Machines".

New comment by elektronika in "Police used AI facial recognition to wrongly arrest TN woman for crimes in ND"

elektronika — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:04:19 +0000

Under qualified immunity cops are all but completely immune to being sued.

New comment by elektronika in "U.S. Global War on Terror Has Taken Nearly 1M Lives (2021)"

elektronika — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:18:46 +0000

More accurate to call it the War for Terror at this point.

New comment by elektronika in ""Just a little detail that wouldn't sell anything""

elektronika — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:24:40 +0000

Sadly, or not, they still sell the best laptops.

New comment by elektronika in "Can you reverse engineer our neural network?"

elektronika — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:55:24 +0000

A market economy is just as good if not better at denying "the agency to live their lives as they choose". Do you think the bum on the street or the poor family working paycheck to paycheck have more agency than someone with a decent job at a state owned enterprise and a social safety net? It's absurd.

New comment by elektronika in "Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

elektronika — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:24:18 +0000

They will fall in line as property crime increases.

New comment by elektronika in "The only moat left is money?"

elektronika — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:35:00 +0000

Is it any surprise when wealth inequality has been increasing in the USA for the past 50 years? Globally the picture is even more bleak.

New comment by elektronika in "Property taxes going up? The 340B Program might be partly responsible"

elektronika — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:42:28 +0000

Universities are just as bad or worse on this front. They will buy up properties with no plan simply because they have the cash to throw around and don't have to pay tax.

New comment by elektronika in "Russia's economy has entered the death zone"

elektronika — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:54:25 +0000

So glad we don't have propaganda, only independent journalists who just coincidentally parrot the same think-tank talking points. See the wealth of articles that are even more obviously wrong predicting China's collapse.

New comment by elektronika in "Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?"

elektronika — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:12:19 +0000

> The reason for the "talent shortage" (aka "talent more expensive than we'd like") is really just because hardware design is a niche field that most people a) don't need to do, b) can't access because almost all the tools are proprietary and c) can't afford, outside of tiny FPGAs.

Mostly B. Even if you work in company that does both you'll rarely get a chance to touch the hardware as a software developer because all the EDA tools are seat-licensed, making it an expensive gamble to let someone who doesn't have domain experience take a crack at it. If you work at a verilog shop you can sneak in verilator, but the digital designers tend to push back in favor of vendor tools.

New comment by elektronika in "State Attorneys General Want to Tie Online Access to ID"

elektronika — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 23:36:06 +0000

If you can't beat them join them. The rest of the world is getting the same thing as China, but less transparent and more hypocritical.

New comment by elektronika in "Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986"

elektronika — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 15:21:09 +0000

It's tiresome. I would rather read the bullet points he fed in and be done.

New comment by elektronika in "Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code"

elektronika — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:07:31 +0000

Try Generals Evolution mod for RA3.