Hacker News: hnuser847

New comment by hnuser847 in "Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns"

hnuser847 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:17:32 +0000

Nah, I don't see it. They've been trying to make smart glasses a thing for over a decade and it's not working. Nobody wants them. I don't think it's necessarily a privacy thing, it's just that smart glasses don't solve a real problem. Same with VR.

New comment by hnuser847 in "Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is killed in Israeli strike, ending 36-year rule"

hnuser847 — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:09:13 +0000

> if you think the president can go to war without congressional approval then you are unamerican

The last time congress declared war was 1942. That ship long ago my friend.

New comment by hnuser847 in "Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid"

hnuser847 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:28:27 +0000

Exactly. As distasteful as it is to put it in these terms, some slaveholders had massive "balance sheets" consisting of thousands of human "assets". Outlawing slavery meant reducing the value of these assets to zero.

New comment by hnuser847 in "Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey"

hnuser847 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:38:32 +0000

So if I'm understanding you correctly, prior to AI tools you spent 1 hour per week coding? And now you spend 30 minutes per week?

New comment by hnuser847 in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

hnuser847 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:16:12 +0000

The sole purpose of companies hiring foreign workers is to pay less in wages. This results in lower wages for Americans. It’s that simple.

New comment by hnuser847 in "Staff disquiet as Alan Turing Institute faces identity crisis"

hnuser847 — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 22:54:05 +0000

This law needs the addition of a third kind of person: one who is neither devoted to the goals of the organization nor the organization itself, but merely wishes to use the organization as a vehicle to push their own social and political beliefs (such as DEI).

New comment by hnuser847 in "44% Unicorn Startups in the US were founded by foreign workers"

hnuser847 — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 11:00:17 +0000

Are the Elites in the room with us now?

New comment by hnuser847 in "Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness"

hnuser847 — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 15:09:38 +0000

I mean, it sounds like your kids are just following the example you set. They're watching you sit in front of a screen as a form of recreation and they're simply doing the same. I think it's also worth noting that your hobbies are solo activities, so even if your kids did want to connect with you in a non-screen hobby, you'd be unavailable anyways. Maybe you could make the first move and invite them to do something outside with you?

New comment by hnuser847 in "Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia will be completed in 2026"

hnuser847 — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 15:10:24 +0000

Yes, only the best buildings from hundreds of years ago have been preserved, but that still doesn't explain why we build ugly buildings right now. You would think we would be able to draw on centuries of architectural trial and error to determine what is objectively pleasing to people. Instead it's like the past never existed. Architects keep building hideous blobs of steel and glass and wondering why people don't like their creations.

New comment by hnuser847 in "Nearly half of Americans age 18 to 29 are living with their parents"

hnuser847 — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 20:14:13 +0000

This article has a graph going back over a century. The percent of young adults living with parents in 1960 was only 29%, so I'd say the current value is pretty significant.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/09/04/a-majorit...

New comment by hnuser847 in "Electing the Doge of Venice: analysis of a 13th Century protocol (2007) [pdf]"

hnuser847 — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 17:14:15 +0000

That's not why the electoral college was created. The three fifths compromise was appended to the electoral college system, but it was not the reason for it being created in the first place.

The reason why we have an electoral college system, according to James Madison in the Federalist papers, is because the United States is intended to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. States within the US are not meant to be mere provinces; they are intended to be mini-countries with their own laws and customs under a broader federal umbrella. The electoral college system allows the states to cast the votes for President, instead of the majority of citizens voting directly.

It's sort of like how an HOA works, where each unit has one vote. The units themselves comprise the voting body, not the individual people living in each unit. The individuals in each unit might have different opinions and preferences, but at the end of the day they must submit a single vote representing their unit. The electoral college system works the same way, with the caveat that the number of votes apportioned to each state is relative to the size of the population.

New comment by hnuser847 in "The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”"

hnuser847 — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 14:43:29 +0000

If Amazon did that, sales would drop to zero and retailers would leave Amazon. eCommerce is a low-margin business. Sellers will only stay on Amazon as long it's profitable for them.

New comment by hnuser847 in "The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”"

hnuser847 — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 14:06:37 +0000

> You pay these fees so the products aren't cheap.

Except they are, otherwise consumers wouldn't use Amazon. Whenever I want to buy anything, I check Amazon first. 9 times out of 10 it's the same price as every other retailer with the added benefit of free shipping and free returns. If that wasn't the case, I would have no reason to use Amazon.

New comment by hnuser847 in "The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”"

hnuser847 — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 12:48:25 +0000

The “hidden tax” described in the article is to sellers, not consumers. Free shipping is subsidy for consumers that costs Amazon billions of dollars. I have personally never seen what you’re describing.

New comment by hnuser847 in "The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”"

hnuser847 — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 12:43:15 +0000

The TL;DR is that the “hidden tax” is onerous advertising fees paid by third-party retailers to have their products appear high in search results.

I don’t really see the issue here, since this appears to be a win-win for both consumers and sellers. Consumers get the cheap stuff they want with free shipping, and sellers get access to hundreds of millions of customers and the volume of sales needed to survive in a low-margin business. The fact that sellers are willing to pay these fees suggests that’s it worth it for them to be on Amazon. If it wasn’t worth it, they would be somewhere else.

New comment by hnuser847 in "A Young Architect’s Designs for the Climate Apocalypse"

hnuser847 — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 19:18:18 +0000

> For his final presentation at architecture school, Hedström proposed Inxect Island, an apartment complex built around mealworm farming, sustained by ocean-borne plastic, on a decommissioned oil rig moored outside Tórshavn.

This sounds more like the set of a Balenciaga runway show than an a helpful vision for the future. Complete with a dash of "zey vill eat zee bugs", it's hard to tell whether or not this is satire.

New comment by hnuser847 in "The way out of burnout (2016)"

hnuser847 — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 14:34:27 +0000

> For me, it's harder and harder to find the initial novelty that made programming fun.

I struggled with that for years before finally accepting that the magic wasn’t coming back. I’ve since moved on to other non-tech interests that are giving me that sense of magic again.

I think what a lot of us found to be so magical and entrancing was the initial process of discovery and learning. At least for me, it was downright addicting to figure out how to bend the computer to my will, but the thing about that phase is that it’s kind of a one time deal. Once you’ve learned how to write software to a professional level, the only way to keep the magic alive is to keep going deeper. And frankly I got to a point where I didn’t want to spend any more time in front of screen.

New comment by hnuser847 in "Fed raises rates 25 bps"

hnuser847 — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 18:41:07 +0000

Homeownership by age demographic has been surprisingly stable over the past 20 years.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

New comment by hnuser847 in "Why is there no government-built social media?"

hnuser847 — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 15:29:31 +0000

Because nobody would want to use FedBook. People on all ends of the political spectrum have reasons to not want to share their most personal and sensitive data directly with the government. Plus, because FedBook would have to be very careful about how it moderates content in order to not infringe on users 1st Amendment rights, it would likely be a cesspool of racist and conspiratorial content.

New comment by hnuser847 in "Brain fog after Covid-19 has similarities to ‘chemo brain’ in humans and mice"

hnuser847 — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 18:44:17 +0000

The problem with the concept of covid-induced brain fog is that the symptoms of brain fog are indistinguishable from general anxiety. I'm still not convinced that brain fog is a legitimate, medical outcome of having covid, as opposed to a culturally-conditioned response that's dependent on one's perception of the severity of covid. Anecdotally, among the people I know in real life, the only ones that have complained about post-covid brain fog are those that already tend to be hypochondriacs or doomers.