Hacker News: polarix

New comment by polarix in "Show HN: Scriber Pro – Offline AI transcription for macOS"

polarix — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:48:47 +0000

Do you have a mailing list?

New comment by polarix in "The Headlines Are Evil, and They're Bringing Us Down"

polarix — Thu, 29 May 2025 19:29:22 +0000

Sure, those headlines are misleading.

But all of those other headlines are wrong and misleading as well, in their own way.

The "court"(s) cannot "block" Trump from doing anything. They don't control the military. All they can do is "say" something about the "legality" of the actions of the commander in chief of the military. The first two headlines that (according to the link) "beg to mislead" are closer to accuracy on this dimension -- the courts said something.

New comment by polarix in "Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024)"

polarix — Thu, 22 May 2025 02:25:38 +0000

It is not just a login wall, they have restricted access even for logged in users, presumably to only the uploaders. A magnet would be nice.

New comment by polarix in "Framework temporarily pausing some laptop sales in the US due to tariffs"

polarix — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:38:02 +0000

One obvious benefit of this link and the bsky ones is that it is actually possible to read the comments on them, unlike the last one.

New comment by polarix in "I Was Illegally Fired by Amazon for Speaking Out About a Coworker's Death (2023)"

polarix — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 16:31:59 +0000

True! There might be other solutions, like having management treat people as they themselves would want to be treated. That kind of thing just sounds fairly unrealistic.

New comment by polarix in "I Was Illegally Fired by Amazon for Speaking Out About a Coworker's Death (2023)"

polarix — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 16:28:43 +0000

(presumably Geis’s comment was sarcasm?)

New comment by polarix in "I Was Illegally Fired by Amazon for Speaking Out About a Coworker's Death (2023)"

polarix — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 16:26:41 +0000

No, of course it’s not easy to quit. But perhaps it’s wrong to even offer these terrible jobs as an “opportunity” to people who have so little choice.

New comment by polarix in "I Was Illegally Fired by Amazon for Speaking Out About a Coworker's Death (2023)"

polarix — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 16:23:14 +0000

I hope courts worldwide continue to punish Amazon for these kinds of things. They need to change the calculus — to ensure that the total operational cost of hiring people to do these terrible jobs is much higher than using robots.

New comment by polarix in "Ask HN: Anyone else finding Google Maps terrible?"

polarix — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:42:26 +0000

Yep. Switched to Apple Maps and (as backup) Organic Maps recently.

New comment by polarix in "Understanding ‘Why’ (2021)"

polarix — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 14:46:18 +0000

Purpose is a really helpful way of organizing thought about the world.

But “purposeful” does not mean “having to do with the concept of purpose”, so “teleological” ends up being a pretty useful word. Despite the smell of old books it carries.

New comment by polarix in "ASU: The New American University (2021)"

polarix — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:55:16 +0000

A large helium balloon with an open lip perhaps?

New comment by polarix in "The Overflow Offline project"

polarix — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 16:17:13 +0000

This has been available for a while but it's great to see some acknowledgement especially since the most recent data set was stuck in 2019 for a while.

Here are the datasets: http://download.kiwix.org/zim/stack_exchange/

It's not clear to me why the data set shrank between 2019/3 and 2022/6; was something excluded? Compression improvements?

> stackoverflow.com_en_all_2019-02.zim 2019-03-12 19:53 134G

> stackoverflow.com_en_all_2022-05.zim 2022-06-17 12:36 75G

New comment by polarix in "The 20-Hour Flight Is Coming, and It May Have a Gym and Bunks"

polarix — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 03:58:12 +0000

Looks like these were cancelled -- https://www.china-airlines.com/us/en/fly/on-board/fleet/fami...

New comment by polarix in "The Middle Child Is Going Extinct"

polarix — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 20:46:13 +0000

I see the number of children a couple has as a vote on how many people should exist on earth. If you have 0 or 1 child as a couple, you are voting that there should be fewer people. If you have 2 children, you're voting that there should be about the same number of people. If you have more than 2 children as a couple, you're voting that there should be more people on earth.

With that context, I can clearly see why nobody in a city would want to have more than 2 children.

New comment by polarix in "Mumbling Is a Clever Data-Compression Trick"

polarix — Tue, 15 May 2018 04:59:46 +0000

Clearly they just always write everything that needs to be said on a topic!

New comment by polarix in "Testimony of Mark Zuckerberg – Hearing Before US House of Representatives [pdf]"

polarix — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 17:19:02 +0000

> Facebook's "data privacy" problem is not fixable if they have to ultimately run valuable ads against that data.

Do you have a citation for this? I've been trying to clarify the argument recently and am looking for other perspectives.

New comment by polarix in "Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data"

polarix — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 14:56:25 +0000

It's Hard to connect with someone if they're dead.

New comment by polarix in "Four DB2 Code Bases?"

polarix — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 07:32:35 +0000

I liked "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture" which sounds related... I hadn't heard about PLATO before, and the book was strongly redolent of "online culture".

New comment by polarix in "Ask HN: What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?"

polarix — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 16:18:29 +0000

One value of an unordered unannotated book list is in reinforcing books you've already read, and providing a little extra push towards the action potential on the ones you haven't.

New comment by polarix in "Ask HN: Do you make more than $200K? What did you have to do?"

polarix — Sun, 26 Feb 2017 22:21:42 +0000

1. To be able to live well and pursue my hobbies without a partner or cohabitant.

2. To travel comfortably. More generally, to be able to seek out distant experiences without fear.