Hacker News: everybodyknows

New comment by everybodyknows in "Buying Computers at Costco"

everybodyknows — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 19:50:09 +0000

Just bought an ASUS 17 liter desktop there. It has a sound problem: constant whine from a tiny power supply fan.

Threat of air strikes: US looks to bolster base infrastructure with 3D printing

everybodyknows — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 19:46:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2026/11/04/under-threat-of-air-strikes-us-looks-to-bolster-base-infrastructure-with-3d-printing/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50416440

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by everybodyknows in "The Ubuntu 26.04 Rust sudo is not compatible with standard sudo"

everybodyknows — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 18:28:13 +0000

I just sidelined Ubuntu 24.04 for Debian stable on new home desktop hardware.

Impressions:

1. Installer a bit rough. Tried both "graphical" and curses modes: Both truncated partition-specific strings from the manufacturer's Windows setup. No contextual help; wiki seemed out-of-date.

2. Good choices for initial packages; good apt speed from default server.

3. Firefox base version is four months old -- but is a ".7", so maybe seven rounds of bug fix backports? Ubuntu FF snap version on old hardware is by contrast a ".0", tracking much more recent upstream. Which mostly seems to get me a lot of annoying confections and semi-weekly demands to restart for the new version -- after each of which I must then manually repopulate GNOME's desktop workspaces.

4. Snap-induced clutter of home dir and filesystem utility output is gone! Loving that part.

New comment by everybodyknows in "Hospital gave sick doctor a special PC for his personal, erm, pleasure"

everybodyknows — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 14:41:30 +0000

What are the usual attack vectors for that?

New comment by everybodyknows in "Have I befriended a murderer?"

everybodyknows — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 05:46:05 +0000

For an example of the sort of distress that the American unanimity requirement can impose on jurors, read A Trial By Jury, D. Graham Burnett.

New comment by everybodyknows in "Too Expensive to Exist"

everybodyknows — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 15:15:01 +0000

> I talked to the owner. She told me how upset she was to have to do it but insurance costs keep going up, and she can’t afford to pay them.

> This is the invisible hand of the market at work. This is the invisible hand giving me the middle finger.

Misdiagnosed. Insurance is a competitive business, and operators who overcharge lose customers.

It's the trial lawyers, and their own state legislators giving them the middle finger. The insurance coverage that's gone up and driven the park to shut down is of course that for accident claims, driven by excessive jury awards to victims .

I asked Claude to explain Anthropic's IPO

everybodyknows — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 21:11:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/26/business/claude-anthropic-ipo-summary

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50251018

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Millions exposed to spyware operation through online ads, researchers say

everybodyknows — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 03:32:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-firm-advertising-spyware-mobile-phone-hacking/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137682

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by everybodyknows in "Super Intelligence"

everybodyknows — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:48:37 +0000

How long before colleges still using "artificial intelligence" are threatened with defunding?

New comment by everybodyknows in "Super Intelligence"

everybodyknows — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:46:30 +0000

For those going with the satire, recall the original French: "Système international d'unités".

New comment by everybodyknows in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

everybodyknows — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:15:39 +0000

Scarcity of instructors competent to teach such subjects? Followed by the natural bureaucratic response: Pretend no such need exists.

German search engine ditches Mistral, bets on Chinese open-source AI

everybodyknows — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:03:30 +0000

Article URL: https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-ecosia-search-engine-mistral-china-open-source-ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007516

Points: 8

# Comments: 2

New comment by everybodyknows in "Using Blu-ray M-Disk as backup of last resort"

everybodyknows — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 02:41:30 +0000

As others have suggested, photos of previous generations look a lot like strangers, absent a story connecting them across a lifetime, and ideally all the way to the present.

The story furthermore must have enough intrinsic drama to engage readers, and fall into the hands of a writer with the skills to turn the raw facts into a biography.

The biographic text provides a structure to hang the photos on, yielding a "photobiography". Search for the term and you'll find examples.

New comment by everybodyknows in "California bans child marriage, a practice still legal in 32 US states"

everybodyknows — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:15:19 +0000

> But a report by the International Center for Research on Women found that teenage girls who are married are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to drop out of high school and more likely to develop diabetes or cancer.

Such a study needs thorough review for confounders, and direction of causation.

NASA observatory could be weeks away from falling to Earth after failed rescue

everybodyknows — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 22:02:10 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/30/science/nasa-swift-observatory-falling

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915078

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by everybodyknows in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

everybodyknows — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:50:48 +0000

You wouldn't have to, to nevertheless provide great benefit to the grid. Look up "TOU billing".

New comment by everybodyknows in "Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe"

everybodyknows — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:56:23 +0000

> short form text

Underestimated. Turn off keyboard customizations that let your phone learn you're a literate adult. Then discover how much it really expects you to be swiping: butt, sup, lol, rofl, bruh ... Interspersed with plenty of emojis.

New comment by everybodyknows in "The Mafia may be keeping fentanyl out of Italy"

everybodyknows — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:05:45 +0000

Absence of land borders simplifies the problem considerably.

New comment by everybodyknows in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

everybodyknows — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:58:33 +0000

But neglects to consider why it won a majority of votes. Why did it? And how does Prop 13 relate to the more recent Prop 19, which substantially weakened it?

New comment by everybodyknows in "The Curious Power of Punctuation"

everybodyknows — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:22:59 +0000

The author quotes: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Then comments:

> I think that “beat” and “borne” lack visual concreteness. Shouldn’t it be “paddle”? “Paddle” sounds a little silly, but that’s the metaphor Fitzgerald is using. (Those boats must be canoes, not steamboats. A steamboat wouldn’t care that much about a current.)

A reminder of the obscurity of Fitzgerald's analogy, which is specific to the technology of sailing: A "beat" is a course that will take the boat upwind -- always a challenge. And if the current of the water is pointed downwind, perhaps impossible.

Somehow none of the New Yorker editors caught this either.