Hacker News: jzackpete

New comment by jzackpete in "Detecting and countering misuse of AI"

jzackpete — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 16:40:14 +0000

their whole point is that the law can be abused

New comment by jzackpete in "From $479 to $2,800 a month for ACA health insurance next year"

jzackpete — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 02:17:30 +0000

I'm talking about the regulatory capture of everything related to health care: medications, credentialing, insurance, etc. Any regulation imposed on the production of a good or provision of a service is a constraint on the supply. Reducing supply increases costs. I fail to see how the imposition of one insurance company (a monopoly) would improve that.

When Medicare was created, medical care accounted for less than 7% of GDP. It's around 20% now[1]. If you extrapolate life expectancy from before Medicare to now, has that massive increase in spending changed the trajectory at all?

You see the same phenomenon in higher education: we subsidize demand through government-backed loans, and costs and administrative overhead skyrockets.

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

New comment by jzackpete in "From $479 to $2,800 a month for ACA health insurance next year"

jzackpete — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 21:46:18 +0000

It's silly that believing more government intervention will solve the problem, given that a big reason healthcare became tied to employment in the first place was wage freezes by the government, from which employer sponsored health insurance was exempt.

We're not going to solve it by constraining the supply of healthcare by regulating every aspect of it, and then subsidizing the demand.

New comment by jzackpete in "Lab-grown salmon hits the menu"

jzackpete — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 18:24:46 +0000

neither, for the same reasons

New comment by jzackpete in "Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery"

jzackpete — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:54:34 +0000

Yeah it's probably a combination, which might explain why my experience isn't the norm. Ever since I had it done, any poke, foreign objects like sand, etc. is much more painful than before, so the pain from dryness gets amplified. I've used eye drops and gels, but the most effective thing is just avoiding things that mess with electrolyte levels, like alcohol, medications, and certain foods.

New comment by jzackpete in "Lab-grown salmon hits the menu"

jzackpete — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:36:30 +0000

you mean artificially colored canola soy extrusions, with an unspecified (i.e. very small) quantity of chemically replicated salmon cells? how about counterfeit biohazard salmon?

New comment by jzackpete in "Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery"

jzackpete — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 16:47:09 +0000

I had PRK 15 years ago. I also woke up multiple times last night because my eyes felt like they had a bad sunburn (eyes so dry they stick to your eyelids + REM sleep.)

Some unsolicited advice: wait for widespread adoption, and review data on long term side effects from sources without a conflict of interest before you have a procedure like this. I went from 20/150 to 20/15 for a few years (which was pretty cool) but they're 20/40 now so I wear glasses/contacts when I leave the house anyway. Glasses and/or contacts aren't that bad.

New comment by jzackpete in "JetBrains working on higher-abstraction programming language"

jzackpete — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:18:55 +0000

having been a customer for more than a decade, I've noticed an inverse correlation between their org size and the quality of their products

New comment by jzackpete in "Trump signs executive order going after debanking"

jzackpete — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 22:08:48 +0000

by that logic every business in the country should be nationalized, given the existence of the civil rights act

New comment by jzackpete in "Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp"

jzackpete — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 16:18:48 +0000

perfect is the enemy of good, with WhatsApp being neither (at least wrt privacy)

New comment by jzackpete in "US judge finds administration wilfully defied court order in deportation flights"

jzackpete — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 13:02:46 +0000

yes, as a citizen of the USA, deporting the non-citizens feels exactly like slavery

New comment by jzackpete in "Trump says he is not joking about third presidential term"

jzackpete — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 13:41:40 +0000

how many people do you know who actually believe in the 2nd amendment and don't support trump? do you even live in the US?

New comment by jzackpete in "A 10x Faster TypeScript"

jzackpete — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:59:10 +0000

that would imply the existence of an objective authority on the meaning of the statement, which is debatable

New comment by jzackpete in "Thinking About Why YouTube Is a Monopoly"

jzackpete — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:56:58 +0000

piracy probably wasn't the reason they won back then, but I think the point was that the change in IP enforcement since then might be the reason they can maintain their lead now

New comment by jzackpete in "X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links"

jzackpete — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 20:24:22 +0000

more like kicking out the staff after they convinced everyone that your house is a hotel that they own and operate

New comment by jzackpete in "India: It's Worse Than You Think"

jzackpete — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 03:50:06 +0000

unless the US selects people at random to immigrate that chart is irrelevant

New comment by jzackpete in "Do adults have the skills they need to thrive in a changing world?"

jzackpete — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 13:22:04 +0000

because he's the only one that people whine about like a jilted ex girlfriend

New comment by jzackpete in "Steam drops Windows 7 and 8 support with the latest client"

jzackpete — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:14:16 +0000

are you referring to the act of playing video games or the act of not playing video games

New comment by jzackpete in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

jzackpete — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 13:29:12 +0000

Nope. When I worked in a factory as a teenager, ICE came in and presumably deported all of the illegals, because they didn't show up the next day. A big reason Trump got elected is because they stopped doing that, and "mass deportation now" is effectively enforcement of the same policy as it was back then.

New comment by jzackpete in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

jzackpete — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 14:12:04 +0000

You mean a country that is more white?