Hacker News: labster

New comment by labster in "Large ancient Hawaiian petroglyphs uncovered by waves on Oahu"

labster — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 21:55:08 +0000

Were used to it in Malibu. The publicly owned shoreline can be reached through the legally mandated passageways, if you can make it through the locked gates and avoid being seen by security.

New comment by labster in "Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth"

labster — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 02:25:49 +0000

You should have bought in when Prop 13 went into effect, you’d only be paying $3k in property taxes today instead of $40k.

New comment by labster in "Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome"

labster — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:42:18 +0000

Another statement that I would have simply accepted as fact a year ago, but now I believe is false. The US government is now primarily one person, and occasionally a small set of people, making cost-benefit decisions on what will benefit themselves more. The complex system is mostly gone, soon to be washed away, in favor of layers of patronage and favoritism. Much simpler.

New comment by labster in "Electric cars produce far less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars"

labster — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 05:58:15 +0000

But tires are black, and black carbon has additional climate effects — even once the aerosol lands, it can still have effects like black carbon on snow.

New comment by labster in "Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers"

labster — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 02:35:36 +0000

Yeah but no matter what, you gotta pay for the bear necessities.

New comment by labster in "The surprising geography of American left-handedness (2015)"

labster — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 22:17:07 +0000

I often wonder if it would be best for English to lose grammatical gender entirely. Encoding assumptions about gender is leading to endless debates about pronouns which other languages avoid entirely.

New comment by labster in "The surprising geography of American left-handedness (2015)"

labster — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 07:51:44 +0000

Or in other words, educators in red states are more effective in suppressing sinister tendencies in children.

New comment by labster in "Peep Show is the most realistic portrayal of evil I have seen (2020)"

labster — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 07:13:30 +0000

Did you miss the day they taught ethical calculus in maths class?

New comment by labster in "Stone blocks from the Lighthouse of Alexandria recovered from seafloor"

labster — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 02:47:53 +0000

Lighthouses fulfill roughly the same purpose as hazard signs on freeways — everyone makes more money when ordered goods actually arrive. Rocks on the sea are more dangerous than falling rocks on the roads.

Monument lighthouses have an extra purpose: they project power and wealth. Merchants know this place is Important. Like modern day monuments, whether people need a giant expensive building/statue/obelisk to learn this or it’s just a vanity project for the ruler is a matter of opinion. People aren’t really all that different over the last 2000 years.

New comment by labster in "Where's Firefox going next?"

labster — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:18:13 +0000

Running a browser without an adblock extension is an even worse cybersecurity issue, since tracking online is so extensive. I live in a country where the government routinely buys surveillance data from data collection companies to spy on us. But even if you don’t live in the US, it’s still a good thing to protect your privacy.

New comment by labster in "LIGO detects most massive black hole merger to date"

labster — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 01:34:34 +0000

> black holes are essentially perfectly sticky

Black Hole brand adhesive: when you absolutely, positively need something stuck down for eternity.

New comment by labster in "'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'"

labster — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 21:45:06 +0000

Sir, are you aware that this very website is run by VCs as an advertisement for hustle culture? You are, in fact, “anywhere near” this particular vast wasteland.

New comment by labster in "At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says"

labster — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 01:09:52 +0000

In America, a skilled tradesman is middle class. There would be no reason to treat a member of the group any differently. (Incidentally my grandpa was a plumber.)

A teacher is lower upper class though. Teaching is used by some as an early step to a political career — I have a couple of friends who have done so. They don’t have an upper class income, but teachers have the merits to be high class.

New comment by labster in "At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says"

labster — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 02:59:56 +0000

Wealth is not the same as class, either. Even in America. A teacher with an annual salary of $60k is higher class than a plumber making $100k annually. Unless the teacher is black, of course, then racial elements of class come into play.

New comment by labster in "The ChompSaw: A benchtop power tool that's safe for kids to use"

labster — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 05:49:11 +0000

See, it builds character!

Kids get really dull scissors, shared with other kids. Of course they’re difficult to use.

New comment by labster in "Turkey bans Grok over Erdoğan insults"

labster — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:18:08 +0000

Of course not. AGI has advanced to the point it can topple governments with a single embarrassing meme.

New comment by labster in "Dynamical origin of Theia, the last giant impactor on Earth"

labster — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:14:26 +0000

I think they were referring to metals like carbon and oxygen, but I’m sure Led Zeppelin is important too.

New comment by labster in "DOJ goes after US citizen for developing anti-ICE app"

labster — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 03:31:48 +0000

We are getting back to the original meaning of hacker from a millennium ago, one who chops, cuts, and hews apart, especially hacking apart our fellow man.

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

labster — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 03:29:21 +0000

The damaged interpret internet censorship and route around it.

New comment by labster in "Europe's first geostationary sounder satellite is launched"

labster — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:14:15 +0000

It’s exactly that. In fact, information propagates along with the winds. If you don’t observe upstream, you instead propagate an information hole. Each new model run incorporates the output of the previous run to preserve sparse weather information. It’s not that there are few observations, it’s that Earth is really big.