Hacker News: rsingel

New comment by rsingel in "Tax Wrapped 2025"

rsingel — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 01:21:03 +0000

You can't meaningfully calculate the budget including social security. This is a trust fund that you get back depending on how much you made and how long you live. And whether the outlays are taxed or not depends on your income at payment.

The whole site would be way more informative if social security was broken out.

Even better if it included how much you and your employer spend on health care, because most people are literally spending more because there is no universal health care.

The only thing useful in the whole thing is how much tax money goes to "defense"

New comment by rsingel in "Show HN: Littlebird – Screenreading is the missing link in AI"

rsingel — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:22:12 +0000

If you thought Slack logs were damning in discovery, wait til someone suing or prosecuting you figures out that everything you typed and looked at, etc., is in the cloud

New comment by rsingel in "Long Range E-Bike (2021)"

rsingel — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:48:41 +0000

It was too early and a bit of a dangerous design, but the StokeMonkey was built for torque and worked great at low speeds.

Some pedicab folks in Austin used to use them.

Hill climbing video YouTube https://share.google/iLrHXvjAKMO4esAux

Design info https://share.google/iLrHXvjAKMO4esAux

New comment by rsingel in "Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info"

rsingel — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:02:27 +0000

R.I.P. Sheldon

https://www.wired.com/2008/02/sheldon-brown-w/

New comment by rsingel in "FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE"

rsingel — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 06:17:40 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by rsingel in "Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B"

rsingel — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:43:50 +0000

These are increasingly harder to get, sadly. My credit union won't anymore. I have to keep a debit card locked

New comment by rsingel in "Heavy metal is healing teens on the Blackfeet Nation"

rsingel — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 07:14:01 +0000

The video for that song uses excerpts from the movie version of Johnny Got His Gun. I don't know if the songwriting was inspired by it but the video certainly was. Because the video relied so much on the excerpts the band ended up buying the rights to the movie just to not pay royalties.

Hilariously, I won a writing prize about this connection as a teenager in 1989. Fun to see you had a similar experience

New comment by rsingel in "Steve Cropper, legendary guitarist for Booker T and the MGs, dies aged 84"

rsingel — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 17:45:37 +0000

What an amazing life

Booker T and the MGs also recorded one of the best Christmas albums of all time

https://tidal.com/browse/album/216317?u

New comment by rsingel in "Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)"

rsingel — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 05:12:24 +0000

I'd say too we aren't the only ones. Plausible Analytics is a great, mission-driven, open-soutce non-profit providing cookie-free web analytics.

And they let us bulk buy for our member publishers.

There's so much potential in what you are suggesting!

New comment by rsingel in "Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)"

rsingel — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 05:00:18 +0000

I agree and it's happening. I co-founded Outpost Publishers Cooperative as a member services co-op to provide enterprise-level subscription services to publishers on Ghost (which is a non-profit).

I'm biased but I think the model of member-service co-ops (like Ace Hardware) providing tailored software services to particular industries is fertile ground. Free of VC incentives, reasonably profitable, aligned incentives, and the state of software tooling makes this doable.

And since this model doesn't require capturing as much value as a VC funded venture, it's more sustainable.

But the hard thing is figuring out how to get to decent product without upfront investment, in lieu of investment models that don't require outsize returns.

I can think of ways to create early capital but I've yet to see an industry think through how to fund smart suppliers without falling into the trap of thinking they need to be VCs.

New comment by rsingel in "Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests"

rsingel — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 02:21:09 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by rsingel in "Analysis of Hedy Lamarr's Contribution to Spread-Spectrum Communication"

rsingel — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 01:20:18 +0000

Which itself was a sequel to Brooks's first and underappreciated Western, The Wild Bunch (1969)

New comment by rsingel in "Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time"

rsingel — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 18:47:09 +0000

California's net neutrality law bans these kinds of paid interconnections, but they likely exist as all these deals are wrapped in 15 layers of NDAs

New comment by rsingel in "Cloudflare tells U.S. govt that foreign site blocking efforts are trade barriers"

rsingel — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 16:14:02 +0000

There's a big difference between a company making that decision (an edge provider) vs a country doing that at the network level.

The rub comes in that nations, including the U.S., have laws about what they seem illegal content or services and reserve the right to force those to be blocked.

In Thailand that might be criticism of the king; in the U.S., pirated TV streams; in another country, that could be gambling sites.

Cloudflare seems to be trying to stop blocking that is trade protectionism, but is blocking overseas gambling sites trade protection or a legit state interest in protecting its citizens?

New comment by rsingel in "My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4"

rsingel — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 19:04:08 +0000

It's the first matte screen on a MacBook since 2011.

I ran that thing for like 6 years til the replacement for the failed GPU failed again.

More matte screens please!

New comment by rsingel in "Moderna has unraveled"

rsingel — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:41:51 +0000

COVID is a nasty virus. I need my brain way to much to FAFO.

COVID-19 may Enduringly Impact Cognitive Performance and Brain Haemodynamics in Undergraduate Students - ScienceDirect https://share.google/49ER4VjJUwipGotZO

New comment by rsingel in "Kagi News"

rsingel — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:56:58 +0000

Gabe Rivera has been doing that right for almost 20 years.

If you haven't seen it there's also an amazing feature that you can go back and see the homepage as it was from any point in time in the last 20 years

New comment by rsingel in "Kagi News"

rsingel — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:52:14 +0000

Looks like yet another aggregator that will send almost no referral traffic to the folks who actually put labor into writing.

Parasitic by definition.

And embracing the news from nowhere perspective.

So both a parasite and boring at the same time.

I wish more tech folks who want to "fix the news" would learn from Gabe Rivera's Techmeme, Memeorandum, and Mediagazer.

He's done aggregation right for 20 years

New comment by rsingel in "Court rejects Verizon claim that selling location data without consent is legal"

rsingel — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 07:25:30 +0000

Close but the Obama 2015 reclassification was actually upheld. Law of the land from 2015 to 2018.

Ajit Pai undid it, a court said reverting was fine because DNS.

Biden FCC took forever to reclassify and then lost in a Trumpy circuit court. Advocates didn't appeal largely because the courts are so screwed now and don't want an awful Supreme Court ruling.

But it's very clear for the law that internet communications actually are telecom, and I suspect we'll see this revisited in the future

New comment by rsingel in "Launch HN: Recall.ai (YC W20) – API for meeting recordings and transcripts"

rsingel — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 19:04:41 +0000

It's illegal in some states, legal in others.

Consult Linda Tripp