Hacker News: klaff

New comment by klaff in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

klaff — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:45:38 +0000

They are.

New comment by klaff in "Pluto.jl 1.0 release – reactive notebook for Julia"

klaff — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:13:39 +0000

I am also curious! A few things I would like to play with but haven't made the time for yet - real time FFT/spectrogram visualization (I want to play with some spiral things for chord / harmony visualization) - synth / live coding stuff (like supercollider but in Julia)

New comment by klaff in "Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says"

klaff — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:48:58 +0000

I absolutely agree. They shouldn't be able to vote and they shouldn't have free speech rights. Corporations are a legal structure - a way to allow risk sharing to encourage investment that would otherwise maybe not happen if one had to risk everything in order to invest. But when we choose to allow that, and it is a choice, we should not give those entities the rights of people. It is simply absurd.

New comment by klaff in "Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says"

klaff — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:43:58 +0000

Is this rich person also voting in the place where they actually live? I'm not against a rich person voting, I just don't want them to get more than one vote. I haven't read the opinion to see if that's addressed.

New comment by klaff in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

klaff — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:57:25 +0000

In current events: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5892633-lutnick-...

(Lutnick donated $5M to House GOP super PAC ahead of Epstein deposition)

New comment by klaff in "Trump Mobile exposed customers' personal data"

klaff — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:12:29 +0000

we started using the term obama for that just because we hate saying that other word

New comment by klaff in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

klaff — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:17:32 +0000

It's an interesting question. If we lived in a universe in which we weren't in fear of losing access to basic necessities of food, shelter, and healthcare, but had to work to have anything beyond those, what would happen? I don't truly know and I don't believe we have done the experiment anywhere. But I do know that the system we have not only produces innovative products but also corruption, oligopolies, and steamrolls over labor and the environment if not regulated.

I'm not naive enough to think communism is a magical answer (but Cuba is not some A/B experiment - the U.S. in particular has done a lot to make sure Cuba didn't succeed) - it ends up concentrating the wealth too. I would favor some form of democratic socialism, with leaders who can be kicked out if they abuse their power and limits on the influence of rich individuals and corporations.

On the latter, I think we forget that corporations are a legal construct intended to benefit society by allowing risk pooling - they are not people and should not be considered as such for things like free speech rights. Corporations should not be allowed to make political contributions in any way.

New comment by klaff in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

klaff — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:43:35 +0000

As one example see million dollar donations to inaugurations.

New comment by klaff in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

klaff — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:12:26 +0000

Anymore I think the question shouldn't be about some kind of economic fairness (the time value of money thing being discussed) but the idea that wealth accumulation is a disease that afflicts society. I don't think anyone should have the level of control or influence on others that having a billion dollars currently allows. If a millionaire gives $100 to a political candidate it probably doesn't require too much thought. It's impressive to note that a 10-billionaire can give $1M just as easily, and so we have a class of folks who can throw around influence, who can order a team of lawyers to do things, can employ their legion of sycophantic followers to harass people, or can threaten the employment of many people not-of-their-class because they can make decisions that threaten someone's employer's bottom line. And note that above I compared a millionaire to the 10-billionaire, but there are plenty of folks, especially around the planet, who economically live several orders of magnitude below the millionaire.

As a bit of an aside, "spending more time with family" is an often-used euphemism around someone being fired, but if you have more money than you know what to do with and you aren't using it to spend more time with those you love, then what on earth is it for?

New comment by klaff in "Seeing like a spreadsheet"

klaff — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:21:01 +0000

I know that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S2_Spreadsheet?wprov=sfla1 existed since '84 and was in use in disparate parts of the company (I hit the printer division in the summer of '88). IBM was still using mainframe tools, including FORTRAN and APL for engineering work, and we were using BASIC for some testing automation as well as stuff written in assembly (bit banging of parallel ports as GPIO).

New comment by klaff in "Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying"

klaff — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:18:02 +0000

How do you get $800k back? Where does that come from?

New comment by klaff in "Euphonics, the Science of Musical Instruments"

klaff — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:09:42 +0000

This is a lovely example of how to think about physical systems through an iterative approach of empirical testing and modeling of the physics. Kudos to the author, Prof. Jim Woodhouse.

Euphonics, the Science of Musical Instruments

klaff — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:09:42 +0000

Article URL: https://euphonics.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47428366

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by klaff in "Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back"

klaff — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:57:25 +0000

what is TFA?

New comment by klaff in "It's time to speak out against unchecked growth of satellite mega constellations"

klaff — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:23:11 +0000

https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/us-startup-pla...

New comment by klaff in "Rathbun's Operator"

klaff — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:48:32 +0000

>If this “experiment” personally harmed you, I apologize.

There were several lines in that post that were revealing of the author's attitude, but the "if this ... harmed you," qualifier, which of course means "I don't think you were really harmed" is so gross.

New comment by klaff in "Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial"

klaff — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:53:20 +0000

What evidence is there that ALL humans crave power over other humans?

New comment by klaff in "Jony Ive Designed Ferrari Luce EV Interior"

klaff — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:51:30 +0000

Oh, it has to aluminium not aluminum, and probably aviation-grade aluminium.

New comment by klaff in "India's female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI"

klaff — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:04:59 +0000

If the choice is let's have [facebook|linkedin|bluesky] and someone has to suffer like this, or we don't have those things, than let's not have them.

New comment by klaff in "India's female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI"

klaff — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:02:49 +0000

I get why a firefighter may be asked to take risks to save lives. We should not ask these women to take these risks so that billionaires can become trillionaires.