Hacker News: owisd

New comment by owisd in "Gen Z is 10 times more accepting of violence against speakers than Boomers"

owisd — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:56:59 +0000

John Stuart Mill recognised over 150 years ago that free speech was only free if it was honest, good faith, polite discourse. Allowing it to descend into lies and ad hominems only benefits the elite who have the greatest resources to shout down dissent, in which case it's not really free if you're setting it up to favour one side. Not unsurprising Boomers would prefer the system that benefits them.

New comment by owisd in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

owisd — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 23:32:23 +0000

If the end goal was user identification then the digital ID + zero knowledge proof age verification methods would be disallowed, which they aren't. https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/google-...

New comment by owisd in "The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025)"

owisd — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:31:59 +0000

If you count Podcasts as RSS then surely RSS is more popular than ever. I can imagine that if Apple bundled a hypertext version of the Podcasts app it would be similarly popular. But they won't because it would compete with their own News+ subscriptions.

New comment by owisd in "Banned in California"

owisd — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:51:18 +0000

The EU started charging carbon tariffs from 1 January- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Carbon_Border_Adjustment_Me...

New comment by owisd in "Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database"

owisd — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:18:08 +0000

The problem with "cleaning the data" is it sometimes strips away so much context as to give you a misleading impression. Rory Stewart once said it took him 40 hours to fully understand a piece of legislation he was voting on, yet was expected by the whips to vote on multiple pieces of legislation every week, but most people wave an MP's voting record around like they 100% understood and agree with everything they voted on, despite it being mathematically impossible. If they'd voted differently would it have changed the outcome? Was it even a binding motion? Most of the real debate in the UK Parliament happens beforehand anyway and the government will withdraw any votes they know they're going to lose before it even gets into the chamber so the real rebellions don't even get recorded on theyworkforyou.

New comment by owisd in "The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling"

owisd — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 15:03:06 +0000

>> HN commenters are not legislators > That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it.

To steel man, there's a commenting pattern where if someone doesn't like a high-level idea they demand answers to a dozen specifics that, if it were a legitimate proposal going through a legislature, could take hundreds of people months or years of committees, reports & consultations to decide on all the answers to, but if someone can't come up with an answer on the spot in HN then that's taken as proof that the idea is unworkable.

New comment by owisd in "The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling"

owisd — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 14:55:37 +0000

There's been rules around what constitutes advertising or product placement on TV for decades, didn't seem to be such an insurmountable issue first time around.

New comment by owisd in "If you've got Nothing to Hide (2015)"

owisd — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:02:13 +0000

You can minimise the risk, but there's a point at which you have to accept that liberal democracy functions around these institutions so dismantling them creates the kind of vacuum that fascism thrives in, which is why Libertarianism has never worked.

New comment by owisd in "If you've got Nothing to Hide (2015)"

owisd — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 10:56:05 +0000

> For many years this system served well

Surely don't need to ditch the whole system then and just needs a better kill-switch.

New comment by owisd in "UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M"

owisd — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 06:26:42 +0000

The rules are inconsistent. You can be Mayor of Sheffield and an MP at the same time but you can’t be Mayor of Greater Manchester and an MP.

New comment by owisd in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

owisd — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:19:03 +0000

After the Nazis opened the Ark, Jones was able to tell the Americans where to pick it up from. Otherwise when the Nazis sent a crew to look for the missing men they’d have just found and taken the Ark again.

New comment by owisd in "Our approach to age prediction"

owisd — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:28:15 +0000

The EFF are fighting a losing battle:

> we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented.

All the momentum is in the other direction and not slowing down. There are valid privacy concerns, but, buried in this very article, the EFF admit that it’s possible to do age-gating in a privacy-preserving way:

> it’s possible to only reveal your age information when you use a digital ID. If you’re given that choice, it can be a good privacy-preserving option

If they want to take a realistic approach to age-gating they should be campaigning to make this approach only option.

New comment by owisd in "American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis"

owisd — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:51:28 +0000

Economics is usually optimising for a narrow utility function, usually something to do with price discovery, but that doesn’t normally align with more human societal goals. Take, say, surge pricing. Maybe without surge pricing you pay $60 for a taxi but have to wait 30 mins when it’s busy. With surge pricing at busy times it’s $120, so people who can afford $120 wait 0 minutes but people who can only afford $60 have to wait 2 hours for surge pricing to end. “Economists generally” would say surge pricing was better, but voters and politicians are considering the wider trade off of whether it’s fair some people get to jump the queue and some people have to wait longer. There’s also usually a bait-and-switch where the people having to wait 2hrs are told that the $120 will generate more in taxes so if they vote for surge pricing they’d actually be better off, then the $120 is spent lobbying to ensure the taxes never materialise.

New comment by owisd in "So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?"

owisd — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:04:33 +0000

Then they scrape together their pocket money and walk into a pawn shop and hand over the cash for a second hand smartphone. Plenty of free WiFi around.

New comment by owisd in "So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?"

owisd — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:00:19 +0000

You roll out the ‘bad parents’ trope then immediately admit bypassing parental controls is trivial.

New comment by owisd in "Why Real Life is better than IRC (2000)"

owisd — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:06:00 +0000

> I think you can go back further

Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 —

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”

New comment by owisd in "The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)"

owisd — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 20:36:43 +0000

This works both ways though, ie there’s no point opposing the laws on the grounds that they might be abused in future because the future sovereign parliament could just pass the same abusable laws.

New comment by owisd in "The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)"

owisd — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 14:39:42 +0000

They’re also strengthening the criminal consequences for future governments that misuse their position: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4019

New comment by owisd in "Vietnam bans unskippable ads"

owisd — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:41:29 +0000

> how you discover a new product

Buying magazines for trusted 3rd party reviews used to be way more common, far better experience than trying to sift through SEO slop these days.

New comment by owisd in "Ask HN: How did you learn to code?"

owisd — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 08:27:11 +0000

qbasic mainly using previous generation books eg https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books

Personally find p5js/The Coding Train is the closest thing around to a modern equivalent.