Hacker News: lgleason

New comment by lgleason in "Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements"

lgleason — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:02:41 +0000

For years the social contract was that neither side did it to the other because once that rubicon was crossed, both sides would do it.

As a centrist my observation is that that left crossed it first, believing that they were doing it for a just cause. Unfortunately that broke the contract and now we are seeing both sides trying to grab power by any means necessary. Until both sides de-escalate, this will continue.

Just like war, many innocent people will pay the price as collateral damage until a truce can be negotiated.

New comment by lgleason in "Show HN: WhatsApp MCP running free on Cloudflare"

lgleason — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 03:31:09 +0000

I literally just went through it saying I was violating the TOS on my personal account for the crime of linking my Mac and IOS phone as a secondary account to my main account on my Android phone. I had been using this workflow for a few years and this happened all of the sudden earlier this month. This was using the Whatsapp official apps and recommended process for doing this.

When that happens it immediately cuts your access and makes you request a reconsideration that can take 24+ hours. Some accounts get booted without this option. So if you use Whatsapp for anything important that can be a really big problem. I was reinstated, and only discovered this from going through a couple of cycles trying to add these back.

So doing what you are doing with this seems almost like a guarantee that you will be perma banned.

New comment by lgleason in "Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence"

lgleason — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:08:43 +0000

Everyone is under the illusion that the US is still a democracy. It is not. It is a plutocracy. The rich control everything and the rest are modern day serfs.

New comment by lgleason in "ICE Flight Monitor Interactive Dashboard"

lgleason — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:11:08 +0000

Interesting that the total removal flights have not really gone up by much compared with the rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration.

New comment by lgleason in "Two Home Affairs officials suspended after AI 'hallucinations' found"

lgleason — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:05:09 +0000

If this happened in the US or Europe it would be an interesting story. In South Africa, this is just par for the course and the quality of the work may not have been any better had it been written by the current people staffing home affairs.

New comment by lgleason in "Kyoto cherry blossoms now bloom earlier than at any point in 1,200 years"

lgleason — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:07:09 +0000

this ^^^^ not to mention modern fertilizers

New comment by lgleason in "Bankruptcies increase 11.9 percent"

lgleason — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:18:28 +0000

Got to love that golden age.

New comment by lgleason in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

lgleason — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:34:48 +0000

So much for that golden age.

New comment by lgleason in "US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February"

lgleason — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:35:31 +0000

So the only golden age is the gaudy gold he added to the white house and the profits for all of his oligarch friends/defense contractors etc. while everybody else suffers.

Let them eat cake.

New comment by lgleason in "Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR"

lgleason — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:34:42 +0000

For that base display, it is essentially the same as the previous monitor with the addition of Thunderbolt 5.

New comment by lgleason in "Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR"

lgleason — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:32:34 +0000

The the smaller xdr has better brightness and thunderbolt 5, so it depends on what you are looking for.

New comment by lgleason in "We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science"

lgleason — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:35:36 +0000

If you create an economic incentive to go into math an science you will have no trouble attracting good people. But, for years, it has been a race to the bottom where the US over-produced researchers, scientists etc.. But then to put salt in the wound it also imported more of them to drive the wages down further. As more people have flooded in to STEM at bargain basement prices, the quality of the research has also gone down.

All of this was by design so that big corporate interests could get cheap labor and increase profits. Since the US government is for sale to the highest bidder, and the corporations have no loyalty to the country, they will feed off the host until it can no longer sustain itself and then look for another host to feed off of.

New comment by lgleason in "Canadians promised to boycott travel to US. They meant it"

lgleason — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:07:48 +0000

If only that was to translate to cheaper hotel room prices in the US. Currently they are sky high.

New comment by lgleason in "U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025"

lgleason — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:54:38 +0000

Only a golden age for the uber wealthy.

New comment by lgleason in "Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?"

lgleason — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:28:53 +0000

Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item.

It's interesting how as certain things age, such as cars, cottage industries pop up to do just that when new replacement boards and parts are not available.

The other issue is cost cutting. Many components are made cheaply and fail pre-maturely. Great examples of this are mains voltage LED bulbs where the rectifier circuits that power the LED's fail, but the only real option is to replace the entire thing, creating a lot of e-waste in the process.

New comment by lgleason in "Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?"

lgleason — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:22:34 +0000

repairability would help quite a bit. How many times do you have to replace an entire board in something when replacing just a component would actually fix things?

New comment by lgleason in "ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions"

lgleason — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:44:44 +0000

You have a tree that is full of monkeys that you want to get out of the tree. So you shake the hell out of the tree to get rid of them.

How many are left when you are done? Same number, just in different branches.

New comment by lgleason in "People who know the formula for WD-40"

lgleason — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:48:57 +0000

and yet their revenues are not even 1 billion.

New comment by lgleason in "Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring"

lgleason — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:08:43 +0000

The political dance of NVIDIA:

1. Offshore jobs, maximize profits and take advantage of incentives to offshore. 2. Political winds shift. 3. Talk a good game about needing to onshore, make some token moves to move a small token amount of manufacturing back to the US. (You are here). 4. Once the admin changes and/or mid terms, continue to spend more on offshoring.

New comment by lgleason in "Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost"

lgleason — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 09:26:39 +0000

It would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes.

When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.