Hacker News: jdross

New comment by jdross in "Vehicle Motion Cues"

jdross — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 02:46:01 +0000

One of the best and most clever "hidden" features. Very Apple.

I never get nauseous looking at my phone in an Uber anymore. My wife can barely handle looking at a screen in a car and this feature allows her to work with no issue.

New comment by jdross in "Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake"

jdross — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:03:57 +0000

These have become some of the most valuable companies on Earth. The idea that there are lapses in governance in these companies is insane. Any shareholder is buying in fully aware of the governance structure. Many because of it! Shareholders’ rights are clearly enumerated.

New comment by jdross in "Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective"

jdross — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:01:04 +0000

Instagram Reels? Your measure of “innovation” is just not how large companies succeed. They are specialized at optimization, and take seeds of things and water them. Instagram had 0 revenue and like 13 employees when acquired. WhatsApp had 50 employees, no encryption, etc

New comment by jdross in "Frog-derived gut bacterium eradicates tumors in mice"

jdross — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:07:21 +0000

Socialist Russia was an environmental disaster. https://www.gchumanrights.org/preparedness/the-environmental...

New comment by jdross in "Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4B Resort Triggers'Flamingo Revolution'"

jdross — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:23:44 +0000

we regularly depose those with political power. In elections.

And the wealthy die or stop participating within around 30 yrs of becoming wealthy normally. And compete themselves across idiology. Soros, Koch, Musk and Moskowitz all have very different packages of political beliefs they advocate vs each other

New comment by jdross in "An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight"

jdross — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:52:55 +0000

The villains are the people who let these people continue to commit crimes and make life worse for others in the name of empathy instead of quickly and forcefully moving them into compassionate care where they have any chance of recovering and joining the vast majority as contributors to society.

New comment by jdross in "The dead economy theory"

jdross — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:53:42 +0000

The whole post is premised on a fixed pie economy.

"The financial model underneath requires the elimination of human cost centers at civilizational scale."

No, it is not. It requires humans to collectively want more things if they are offered and available at a lower cost. Which then requires more humans to fill in the blanks to provide those things. We've been doing this since the industrial revolution.

New comment by jdross in "UK Biobank leak: Health details of 500k people offered for sale on Alibaba"

jdross — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:12:47 +0000

"certainly" is doing a lot of work here. I'm not "certain".

In fact the people I have spoken to who have worked on Palantir platform were deeply suspicious of their users treating data with respect, and so built security and immutable auditability as foundational tech.

New comment by jdross in "It's time to reclaim the word "Palantir" for JRR Tolkien"

jdross — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 04:49:28 +0000

Flame of the West? Seems like a pretty apropos name for an American defense company

New comment by jdross in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

jdross — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:00:56 +0000

They have over 300 falcon 9 launches in a row now, just in case you’re not caught up on the latest

New comment by jdross in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

jdross — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:37:12 +0000

I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there

New comment by jdross in "A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses"

jdross — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:42:38 +0000

It was 1T post merger with xAI being 250B of it, SpaceX being 750B

New comment by jdross in "AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying"

jdross — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:03:43 +0000

I'm pretty sure this is the school that was on the corner of a military base, and the school building hit was previously part of the military base.

New comment by jdross in "The 49MB web page"

jdross — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 20:33:08 +0000

“I’m going to either steal your work in a way you don’t consent to, or not consume it” isn’t really great. The alternative is paywalls

New comment by jdross in "Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job"

jdross — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:55:10 +0000

The steelman is that this issue is politically loaded, and there is not yet proven public evidence for the most explosive version of the claim. That makes it an easy target for partisan amplification, especially because it maps perfectly onto an existing fear people were already primed for. It is emotionally potent by design.

New comment by jdross in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

jdross — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:54:42 +0000

The opposite of this has been my experience.

HN comments bias far more negative towards technology, tech companies, and current politics than the people I know in real life. People who mostly don’t work as professional software engineers, at least not anymore. And the (employed) engineers I know are all having a lot of fun too.

New comment by jdross in "US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters"

jdross — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:50:31 +0000

We usually just call this collective extraction “taxes”

New comment by jdross in "Palantir and other tech companies are stocking offices with tobacco products"

jdross — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:39:36 +0000

“While the pouches are considered a tobacco product, they don’t contain any tobacco, and are instead made from the plant fiber cellulose”

It’s just Zyn, which doesn’t seem that dramatically different than coffee. But maybe that’s because I don’t drink coffee or use nicotine

New comment by jdross in "Layoffs at Block"

jdross — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:34:00 +0000

As you know, this is a subjective take. (I enjoy my experience there more now, for example, with less social politics in my feed.)

And their head of product claimed that X only has around 30 FT employees apparently working on it, so it's much more than 80% since then.

https://www.ndtv.com/feature/x-head-of-product-claims-compan...

New comment by jdross in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

jdross — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:15:05 +0000

Would nuclear energy research be a good analogy then? Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons. So we got the weapons but not the humanity saving parts (infinite clean energy)