Hacker News: idkfasayer

New comment by idkfasayer in "Being poor vs. being broke"

idkfasayer — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:21:49 +0000

OK, one of my clients is a payday lender in a wealthy country. I have the complete banking histories of 10s of thousands of low income people in front of me.

I insist that the distinguishment proposed in the article is BS.

There is a small subset of clients with disabilities AND absense of insurance/government pensions, whose situation is permanent for all intents and purposes. But everyone else, one-off clients as well as regulars have ups and downs, and get through defaults or manage to repay their debt at times. Gambling and alcohol are a clear factor (drug abuse is harder to identify on someone's bank statement), but cases such as divorce from a partner with abuse problems bring relief most of the time. Children grow up or grow older and require less work or even generate income of their own.

I know it's different, when you live in a low income country and everyone around is poor and scamming people on the internet or marine piracy are the only possible access options to wealth, but that's a different topic.

New comment by idkfasayer in "Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026"

idkfasayer — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 06:53:11 +0000

Being hippie worked in the 1960ies, a crowd with a similar mindset fared much worse in 1930ies Paris.

New comment by idkfasayer in "Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026"

idkfasayer — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 06:50:18 +0000

You can't stop fighting the ones who claim the speck of dust (or a pale blue dot) is a flat disk.

New comment by idkfasayer in "Removing XSLT for a more secure browser"

idkfasayer — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 02:30:42 +0000

Question, how hard is it going to be to add XSLT back with WASM? I have built a few stylesheets for clients to view their raw XML in browser. I even add charts for data tables with XSLT.

New comment by idkfasayer in "Microsoft Can't Keep EU Data Safe from US Authorities"

idkfasayer — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:37:27 +0000

In theory, there is rule of law, the intention of which is to prevent government's access to your property and body without a court order and any emergency access such as use of force at crime scenes being subject to public scrutiny. I guess that was the idea when the USA was established as a country, but people forgot what their ancestors where fighting for.

New comment by idkfasayer in "UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards"

idkfasayer — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 23:18:34 +0000

You don't get the resistance?

Imagine a Russia-friendly party getting elected. Doesn't have to be overtly pro-russian. Can be someone very nationalist like Marine Le Pen in France. Or socialist like Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany. Just someone with financially dependent on Russia, or simply owing them favour. Now imagine them accidentally leaving some loophole in the system, such that Russians get read or maybe even write access to data.

New comment by idkfasayer in "This map is not upside down"

idkfasayer — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:23:58 +0000

How about East - West?

https://m.xkcd.com/503/

New comment by idkfasayer in "A 2k-year-old sun hat worn by a Roman soldier in Egypt"

idkfasayer — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 19:30:27 +0000

The only reason the Romans could not have invented the steam engine was that the Greeks already did before them:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

They had a Lathe too.

New comment by idkfasayer in "A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union"

idkfasayer — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 19:57:39 +0000

It would be a funny parody, if the path to 0% homelessness wasn't so brutal:

1) start a civil war killing a few % of the population

2) take every large property in the country killing or driving into exile its owners

3) deport ethnic minorities and take their property

4) artificially create a major famine killing many millions of people and driving half the country into slave like labour

5) start a major war killing a double digit fraction of your population

6) rely massively on foreign labour and foreign aid during and after the war.

7) cause smaller wars and crises around the world to extort more foreign aid.

8) jail and send to forced labour camps everyone not performing a government assigned job.

9) collapse, the second you can't extort labour internally or funds and goods internationally

New comment by idkfasayer in "I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models"

idkfasayer — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 22:42:01 +0000

Fun fact: There was at least on dip in Berkshire Hathaway stock, when Anne Hathaway got sick