Hacker News: rtkwe

New comment by rtkwe in "The looming college-enrollment death spiral"

rtkwe — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:58:24 +0000

Under the current admin's policies shrink. After that who knows.

New comment by rtkwe in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

rtkwe — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:42:44 +0000

Seems like a perfectly valid one. If the government is violating the constitution or a persons rights why should there be suits all across the country to get that recognized? Especially when the question isn't on something with a lot of particularized tests that's sensitive to the exact case, eg 4th amendment law? Why should rights be so dependent on someone in my particular part of the country having sued?

New comment by rtkwe in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

rtkwe — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:31:27 +0000

Probably though the old pattern was that the plaintiffs would request and the Circuit would issue a nationwide injunction with the ruling when finding that a law in full unconstitutional.

Now we have the weird situation where the constitution is more patchwork because you have to get rulings in all the Circuits or wait for one case to make it all the way to the Supreme Court.

New comment by rtkwe in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

rtkwe — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:36:25 +0000

The ruling only has binding precedent in the 5th Circuit, other circuits aren't bound to follow it. Formerly this kind of ruling would come with a nationwide injunction to force the issue but now that those are severely curtailed by the Supreme Court it's only binding to the courts under the jurisdiction of the 5th circuit.

Decisions in other circuits can be very persuasive to other circuits but they're not required to agree the same way a Supreme Court ruling is binding. Circuit splits are moderately common and usually trigger a review by the supreme court if an appeal wasn't filed for the earlier decisions.

New comment by rtkwe in "Claude Wrote a Full FreeBSD Remote Kernel RCE with Root Shell (CVE-2026-4747)"

rtkwe — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:52:11 +0000

The biggest question is can you meaningfully use Claude on defense as well, eg can it be trusted to find and fix the source of the exploit while maintaining compatibility. Finding the CVEs helps directly with attacks while only helping defenders detect potential attacks without the second step where the patch can also be created. If not you've got a situation where you've got a potential tidal wave of CVEs that still have to be addressed by people. Attackers can use CVE-Claude too so it becomes a bit of an arms race where you have to find people able and willing to spend all the money to have those exploits found (and hopefully fixed).

New comment by rtkwe in "AI has suddenly become more useful to open-source developers"

rtkwe — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:06:24 +0000

Doesn't for me until I scroll past the end of the article to read the next one. To get 3 you'd have to scroll through multiple articles.

New comment by rtkwe in "The Hateful Eight is 85% of S&P 500 Decline"

rtkwe — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:12:51 +0000

True short positions are out of reach for basically any normal investor except those with completely broken risk tolerances (selling unbacked call options), eg the degen gamblers of r/wallstreetbets.

New comment by rtkwe in "Newly purchased Vizio TVs now require Walmart accounts to use smart features"

rtkwe — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:19:03 +0000

I'd guess it's happening during silent updates to your android OS. Those can come packaged with anything Samsung wants. I had a similar fight lately with HP's printer software which insists on waking your computer up for a printer health check and reenables the scheduled task randomly even without updates. Finally excised it from my PC.

New comment by rtkwe in "Newly purchased Vizio TVs now require Walmart accounts to use smart features"

rtkwe — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:20:16 +0000

Yeah there's an appletv android app.

New comment by rtkwe in "Newly purchased Vizio TVs now require Walmart accounts to use smart features"

rtkwe — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:56:48 +0000

That's my main setup too. Sometimes still need to main TV remote but not often.

New comment by rtkwe in "Newly purchased Vizio TVs now require Walmart accounts to use smart features"

rtkwe — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:57:13 +0000

They're also cheaper because they're subsidized. I did the same thing with a FireTV but understood the extra crap they want to boot and use is part of why they're so cheap, they're hoping for information to sell or puchases they can monetize.

New comment by rtkwe in "Drone attack on parked U.S. Army BlackHawk in Iraq"

rtkwe — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 02:08:55 +0000

Feels like a massed attack using fiber optics would have lots of problems with drones getting tangled in the cables of those in front of/above them or cutting the cable. The trouble with making them autonomous in a city is that means more sensors and compute on board which raises the cost. It's a hard problem.

New comment by rtkwe in "Drone attack on parked U.S. Army BlackHawk in Iraq"

rtkwe — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 02:05:58 +0000

GPSing your way through a city to targets is a big ask.

New comment by rtkwe in "Drone attack on parked U.S. Army BlackHawk in Iraq"

rtkwe — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:57:45 +0000

Drones that can move that fast have extremely little cargo capacity for explosive charges and it's not fast enough to simply use the kinetic energy of the drone for much.

New comment by rtkwe in "Drone attack on parked U.S. Army BlackHawk in Iraq"

rtkwe — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:55:07 +0000

Right now one of the limits is just controlling that many let along sourcing it. Putting that many actively controlled drones in one area at once and you'll swamp the bandwidth.

New comment by rtkwe in "Slovenian officials blame Israeli firm Black Cube for trying to manipulate vote"

rtkwe — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:52:40 +0000

Judaism also has important black cubes in the form of tefillin worn by adult male jews during one of their daily prayers on weekdays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tefillin

New comment by rtkwe in "France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app"

rtkwe — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:06:07 +0000

It's more just that peacetime navy life is extremely boring and repetitive when you're deployed at sea. If you're lucky it's mildly mentally stimulating repetitive boredom but there are people who's whole life for 6+ months at a time involves chipping paint off various pieces of the ship and applying fresh paint in the unending fight against corrosion.

New comment by rtkwe in "Oregon school cell phone ban: 'Engaged students, joyful teachers'"

rtkwe — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 19:17:04 +0000

If they're allowed and help where phones wouldn't or don't there are still lots of options for stand alone MP3 players with minimal or no connectivity. They still exist as a market because they're dirt cheap to make.

New comment by rtkwe in "Oregon school cell phone ban: 'Engaged students, joyful teachers'"

rtkwe — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 19:14:09 +0000

It really depends on the level of the class and the goals. Usually by the time you're getting to calculus you're moving away from simply calculating a numerical answer anyways and the problems where you do need to find one just to test that final step can be finessed so they're simple to calculate by hand and eliminate the problem of full computer algebra system calculators that can handle the symbolic manipulation too.

New comment by rtkwe in "Oregon school cell phone ban: 'Engaged students, joyful teachers'"

rtkwe — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 19:10:43 +0000

Part of the problem is with each step down the ladder there's less authority and support and more chances for blowback from angry parents going higher up the chain. Teachers fear not getting support from principals if they're DIYing a device ban, principals fear blowback from complaints to the board or superintendent etc.

There's also the normalization problem at the teacher level where kids are used to using them in other classes so it's a bigger lift to get different behavior in one specific class.