Hacker News: hydrogen7800

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "Irish, Scottish and Welsh leaders meet to plan break-up of United Kingdom"

hydrogen7800 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:37:45 +0000

>the Venn would likely be somewhat disjoint.

This was my suspicion. 2 non intersecting circles.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet"

hydrogen7800 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:15:13 +0000

I was going to expand on my comment about the difference between alien and non-alien being a difference only in time. It's all from the same stuff.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "Irish, Scottish and Welsh leaders meet to plan break-up of United Kingdom"

hydrogen7800 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:13:43 +0000

My comment is only half snark, because I genuinely don't know: what's the venn diagram of folks who support this, and who supported Brexit?

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "LG says we're fake news [video]"

hydrogen7800 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:00:57 +0000

I tend to agree with this in general, especially lately, but I think there is an Overton window of depravity that businesses won't exceed the bounds of unless the industry norms shift it. I think the drift has a lot (or maybe everything) to do with the regulatory environment.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet"

hydrogen7800 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 13:44:20 +0000

>But it seems unclear to me how the researchers would distinguish between one super-Earth and >10^10 smaller rocks?

I have a similar feeling when life on earth is suggested to be "alien", arriving via debris in the solar system as the earth formed. Isn't everything in the solar system coalesced from the same debris?

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution"

hydrogen7800 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 02:03:32 +0000

>citizens known for owning guns.

They're largely the ones voting for this.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it"

hydrogen7800 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:53:50 +0000

I began and ended many hobbies in the novelty phase by endlessly reading about them, shopping, comparing features, etc. that I eventually became bored with them before spending a dollar. I got (almost) the whole novelty phase for free.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger"

hydrogen7800 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:27:35 +0000

Makes payola seem quaint. In fact, past crimes all seem quaint these days.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "Topologist's Map of the World"

hydrogen7800 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 13:57:23 +0000

>They included Morocco but not the United Kingdom

Yes that confused me too. If they included Morocco, then France should border Brazil and Suriname.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "Topologist's Map of the World"

hydrogen7800 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 12:32:32 +0000

Spain has another land border.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "Topologist's Map of the World"

hydrogen7800 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 03:03:27 +0000

Canada was my first guess, and I was able to get the rest of the Western hemisphere after that. I'm looking now for Portugal which i think should be pretty obvious, but I must be missing something.

Edit. Also, I was wondering why there was no French Guyana, but being part of France means it's not a separate country. However, in that case France should share a border with Brazil. I wonder what other such quirks are in this map.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "“It works better in the app”"

hydrogen7800 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 18:15:23 +0000

I'm also interested. I use tailscale and there is supposed to be a way to configure it to use my pihole DNS, but there is something in Android that prevents that. I think I have to set a custom DNS on the phone.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "Taylor Farms: How One Company's Reach Became a National Risk"

hydrogen7800 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 18:40:06 +0000

I think the 2 Trump administrations have shown that (multiple) political earthquakes are very possible.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "A brief history of federal lift ticket regulation"

hydrogen7800 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:34:22 +0000

I guess you can argue that the monopolization of a luxury good has no victims. Who feels bad for the consumers of luxury? But the monopoly itself is the harm, and especially highlighted in this example since its private monopolization of a public resource.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "The turbulent AI era is here"

hydrogen7800 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:35:03 +0000

This is all well known, but I recently visited an old coal mine in Pennsylvania, and much of the tour was talking about the labor conditions, and the generational "trap" of working there. If a worker died, the family had little time to leave the company-provided house without providing someone to work. What often happened is that one of the children would work to maintain the household.

>[0]the "rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_anthracite_coal_strike

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "The turbulent AI era is here"

hydrogen7800 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:27:18 +0000

I really don't think UBI can ever happen in the US. There is a moral imperative of "industriousness". Keynes' prediction (or maybe desire) ~100 years ago of the 15 hour workweek never panned out.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "A brief history of federal lift ticket regulation"

hydrogen7800 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:12:09 +0000

"Don't ski" is not a solution to a ski resort monopoly.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "Humanoid robots beat human records in the 100m, half-marathon, and high jump"

hydrogen7800 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 23:06:51 +0000

This is my reaction. Why does the machine being human-shaped make a difference?

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "Tracking Costco gas prices"

hydrogen7800 — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 01:09:54 +0000

I've been tracking every fuel purchase I've made for 12 years now across 5 or 6 different cars. Not sure what I'll ever do with that information, but I suppose it may come in handy for a political argument.

New comment by hydrogen7800 in "Anna's Archive Owes $340 Million, Lost Several Domains, but It's Still Online"

hydrogen7800 — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:53:24 +0000

I consider libraries, public schools and maybe even public fire departments in the list of things that could never be proposed today if they didn't already exist.