Hacker News: ooterness

New comment by ooterness in "The Amazon tax"

ooterness — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:08:59 +0000

Amazon has turned the search ranking into a contest for who can give Jeff Bezos the most money. How is that an improvement on anything?

New comment by ooterness in "Heart aerospace completes first flight of largest electric aircraft"

ooterness — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:38:03 +0000

Megawatt-hours (MWh) are one billion times larger than milliwatt-hours (mWh).

New comment by ooterness in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

ooterness — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:38:40 +0000

This argument makes no sense, because the CPU and disk resources required to serve up a modern ad (and the megabytes of JavaScript that come with it) are 100-1000x more expensive than just serving up the content.

New comment by ooterness in "Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief"

ooterness — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:16:59 +0000

CISA was one of the first agencies gutted by the DOGE purge.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cybersecurity-agencys-top-recru...

New comment by ooterness in "Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees"

ooterness — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:53:04 +0000

Agent Smith was right when he was explaining The Matrix. Human civilization peaked in the 90's.

New comment by ooterness in "Californians' data deletion requests, DROP, become enforceable Aug. 1"

ooterness — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:40:07 +0000

I always liked the archaic form, "You are hereby requested and required to [insert naval orders here]." It's asking very politely, for now, but also making it clear that declining will result in jail or worse.

I don't know if it's apocryphal, but it shows up in the Hornblower novels and at least one episode of Star Trek.

New comment by ooterness in "Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year"

ooterness — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:55:00 +0000

Buy a separate tablet and a roll of duct tape. If you're careful, you can completely cover whatever obsolete nonsense is built into the car.

New comment by ooterness in "MAI-Cyber-1-Flash inside MDASH"

ooterness — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:48:25 +0000

All these different names and version numbers are too confusing. Just name every single model "Copilot". /s

New comment by ooterness in "The small, real, original web"

ooterness — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:17:32 +0000

Previous discussion: "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469

New comment by ooterness in "Em dashes are fucking amazing"

ooterness — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:17:38 +0000

You might enjoy this song by Lonely Island: https://youtu.be/M94ii6MVilw?si=VUEIm_VVEHQIn9Y3

New comment by ooterness in "The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter"

ooterness — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:06:45 +0000

Energy and velocity are science terms because they have very specific meanings. If you use them in a completely different way, that's not science, that's just science-themed marketing vibes.

New comment by ooterness in "The case for physical media ownership"

ooterness — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 15:19:23 +0000

If the disc is an abstract license, surely the seller will replace the disc if it's scratched. I already bought the license, so what is the real purpose of the physical token?

Somehow the concept of ownership has been twisted to so that obligations only flow in one direction. Rules for thee, not for me.

New comment by ooterness in "Never Give Them Your Face"

ooterness — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:00:16 +0000

I was in a similar situation this year. Miapplied a rule, overpaid slightly, IRS owed a refund on the difference. It took a while, but they did eventually send me a physical check.

New comment by ooterness in "Airlines Can't Charge You for What You Wear"

ooterness — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:47:45 +0000

Systems built into the landing gear do exist, but they're not very common. There are also ground-based systems (i.e., scale-on-a-cart for each wheel).

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16307/how-does-...

New comment by ooterness in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

ooterness — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:32:42 +0000

Valuable, sure. Most valuable on Earth? Ridiculous.

New comment by ooterness in "Everyone Against Us (2023)"

ooterness — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:36:27 +0000

Everybody gets the same constitutional rights, and for good reason.

If the cops can violate those rights at will, lie through their teeth to cover it up, and get away with it, then nobody has any rights.

New comment by ooterness in "White Rabbit – sub-nanosecond synchronization for large distributed systems"

ooterness — Mon, 25 May 2026 03:24:20 +0000

Two-way time transfer measures the round-trip propagation time. As a result, it's not directly relevant to the accuracy.

New comment by ooterness in "4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor"

ooterness — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:56:49 +0000

Functionally, biometrics are closer to a username than a password.

Fingerprints, DNA, iris scans, gait patterns, etc. are all something you can't change (much like a permanent account ID) and are constantly being presented to the world (much like an email address). In addition under US law, police can compel presentation of fingerprints, but passwords are protected under the 5th amendment.

New comment by ooterness in "Let's talk space toilets"

ooterness — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:29:44 +0000

Is it simpler to build a better space toilet, or to build a ship with centrifugal gravity and use a regular toilet?

New comment by ooterness in "People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account"

ooterness — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:12:37 +0000

Too little, too late. I switched to Linux and I'm never looking back. Good riddance, Microsoft.