Hacker News: msgodel

New comment by msgodel in "Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds"

msgodel — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 21:55:33 +0000

Growth in wages is meaningless if inflation consumes it.

My opinion is that inflation is generally a bad idea but the thing that really matters is inflation volatility. The market will adjust for whatever the inflation rate is (unless its extreme) but volatility just results in loss.

New comment by msgodel in "OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police"

msgodel — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:58:33 +0000

Every online service is compelled by law to answer subpoenas. You're supposed to assume the collaborate with the state.

New comment by msgodel in "The Little Book of Linear Algebra"

msgodel — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:19:49 +0000

I don't know, maybe it's because I read the book on the side in highschool when I was supposed to be doing something else but I really loved Linear Algebra. Once I understood what it was I used matrix operations for everything. Vector spaces are such a powerful abstraction.

New comment by msgodel in "The Tariffs Are Still Illegal"

msgodel — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:16:57 +0000

The enforcement penalty of the constitution is the state's ability to rescind delegated powers from the federal government. No one seems to think it's bad enough to be worth having a real conversation about that.

New comment by msgodel in "Removing Guix from Debian"

msgodel — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:14:40 +0000

Just using Guix requires a pretty substantial amount of administrative work. I'd imagine maintaining it is even more intense and that's why they're running into issues like this.

You have to be pretty slow to be outrun by Debian of all distros.

New comment by msgodel in "Experts: Trump DOE Climate Report "A Mockery of Science""

msgodel — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:24:31 +0000

Regardless dealing with this would be a luxury. The rest of the economy has to function first and then we can talk about this. If you intentionally sabotage the country with these ideas it doesn't even matter if you're right, the public will tear down the institutions you use to do it.

New comment by msgodel in "Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater"

msgodel — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:22:22 +0000

> by people grossly violating the constitution

I'm sorry what was that? You want rules after all?

New comment by msgodel in "FreeDroidWarn"

msgodel — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:06:27 +0000

Also features that people assume are part of the OS, like push notifications, but are really a service run by Apple that your phone is locked to using cryptography don't work with self-signed apps.

New comment by msgodel in "Use One Big Server (2022)"

msgodel — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:02:31 +0000

She was another software engineer and needed VMs too so I thought I'd just let her use some of my spare compute.

New comment by msgodel in "Ask HN: How much are you guys paying for AI coding tools monthly?"

msgodel — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 17:26:47 +0000

I'm 100% self hosted so it's just power, I had to upgrade my solar array so I suppose I could amortize some of that but I was planning on it anyway.

New comment by msgodel in "Use One Big Server (2022)"

msgodel — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 16:57:06 +0000

I used to say "oh yeah just run qemu-kvm" until my girlfriend moved in with me and I realized you do legitimately need some kind of infrastructure for managing your "internal cloud" if anyone involved isn't 100% on the same page and then that starts to be its own thing you really do have to manage.

Suddenly I learned why my employer was willing to spend so much on OpenStack and Active directory.

New comment by msgodel in "Deep Zionism"

msgodel — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 16:19:00 +0000

The domestic situation in the US is also a real issue. Israel gets unreasonably favorable political treatment compared to every single other country, it's a real issue from the isolationist right as well.

New comment by msgodel in "Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android"

msgodel — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:49:39 +0000

Language matters. I actually really like what Stallman does. You need this kind of thing to counteract repeated exposure to marketing material. It's similar to the Dave Ramsey situation IMO. Dave Ramsey's advice is objectively bad but you need something to be repeated as an alternative to the credit ads people hear multiple times a day.

These simple repeated ideas slowly absorb into people's subconscious.

New comment by msgodel in "We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own"

msgodel — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 09:57:06 +0000

Apparently they just can't live without Netflix and its even worth their freedom.

New comment by msgodel in "Show HN: Pol/ite – /pol/ but posts are all polite"

msgodel — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 01:24:02 +0000

Part of what makes 4chan 4chan is the lack of politeness. Politeness is nice and really important but sometimes it gets in the way and you want the honesty. You don't want that all the time but you need it occasionally.

New comment by msgodel in "Ask HN: How do you fight YouTube addiction and procrastination? I'm struggling"

msgodel — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:37:07 +0000

I wrote bingeblock.com to deal with stuff like this. It kicks you off sites by domain name with no opportunity for snoozing. You set a daily limit in minutes and then you get exactly that. That way you can still access useful sites from time to time without getting sucked into them.

I think Screentime does something similar on iOS so you could try that too but there wasn't anything I could find for Linux.

New comment by msgodel in "When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire"

msgodel — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 19:02:58 +0000

America? the Anglosphere? the improvements to India? The almost complete eradication of slavery? The web? The British Empire arguably has a greater legacy than the Roman Empire.

New comment by msgodel in "Is it possible to allow sideloading and keep users safe?"

msgodel — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 13:31:10 +0000

The people who fall for these scams will just get tricked into buying giftcards anyway. There's nothing you can do for them if you don't want to institutionalize them, stop bothering the rest of us.

New comment by msgodel in "Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything"

msgodel — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 13:29:26 +0000

It looks to me like we hit the end of the debt cycle. The market was predicting this by the end of the fall last year before Trump was even elected.

I don't think not doing tariffs would have had much of an effect.

New comment by msgodel in "University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test"

msgodel — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 13:27:35 +0000

Variance in income is more highly correlated with IQ.

But hey if you don't like it we could have it my way and bulldoze the public schools since personally I think they're a huge waste of money.