Hacker News: thataccount

New comment by thataccount in "The two Christian saints who are the Buddha"

thataccount — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:07:44 +0000

Cool. Can you link me to them?

New comment by thataccount in "Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch"

thataccount — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:41:34 +0000

Well, there is another angle here from the Defense sector. Lotus Notes had a big ole backdoor in it: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html

The same problems keep being solved, and then nation-states get involved, and eventually the technology shifts to something else because the game has played out as far as it can in terms of those nation-states. It is not really so much as a steady march of technology, as much as it is a quiet kind of informational arms race.

New comment by thataccount in "Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit"

thataccount — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:36:05 +0000

Nothing new about that desire. Only thing different is the technology has caught up with the desire such that some technocrats can make living in that hell a reality.

New comment by thataccount in "The two Christian saints who are the Buddha"

thataccount — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 01:23:40 +0000

>Religious stories about the Buddha were readily and literally coopted into Christian lore by early Church writers.

That's just another assertion of "They copied it!" Where is the evidence that this is so beyond an inference that they were copied?

>Unless you presume the Buddhist stories were themselves historically accurate - which would start down a road of "both Buddhism and Christianity are true" - it's hard to imagine that these were coincidentally also stories about real figures.

Life is suffering, and the Messiah took all human suffering on himself? I'm not sure these are mutually exclusive.

New comment by thataccount in "The two Christian saints who are the Buddha"

thataccount — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:03:54 +0000

Ya know, the Divine sometimes works in mysterious ways. While it is possible these two fellas were a ripped-off Buddha story, it is also possible that they were actual people who lead these lives so that people who were Buddhists had some examples of how to adapt their previous Buddhist tendencies to Christian ones if they had an experience that caused conversion. Is there evidence to suggest they were not real people, or at the least, a large absence of evidence?

New comment by thataccount in "LibreOffice breaks download records after declaring it has no AI features"

thataccount — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:37:51 +0000

This is the way!

New comment by thataccount in "60 years later, Star Trek continues to live long and prosper"

thataccount — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:08:30 +0000

The diversity of Roddenberry is a different animal from the imposed diversity of the modern left that NPR is trying to stoke the fires of with this article. For one thing, last I knew, there are no versions of Star Trek on the air that are currently new for the first time in a long while. The reason this is so, partly, is that the series was strangled by diversity and politics that got too far away from the idea of "exploring strange new worlds".

New comment by thataccount in "Picolibrary: A Small Press"

thataccount — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:02:18 +0000

Why I Like Reading About Bugs by Bertrand Russell

New comment by thataccount in "There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis"

thataccount — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:59:57 +0000

I stopped worrying about getting indexed by Google around 2008ish when it became apparent they were trying to impose their own rules on the internet and how things were found. Nowadays, I'm content to not have google index anything at all.

New comment by thataccount in "QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes"

thataccount — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 13:28:04 +0000

They left out the part where they profit. Otherwise, it checks out.

New comment by thataccount in "What If We Had Taxed the Internet?"

thataccount — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 23:21:04 +0000

I still have a modem that looks like that, I just can't easily use it anymore. I also remember all the talk about taxes, and then how taxes in different states were applied to e-commerce and still are.

The issue with all discussions around the digital world is that the infrastructure doesn't have the same costs as say having a road. It is partly why ownership is being redefined so heavily when it comes to digital bits and whether you can own anything other than a license. Because the internet is not really physical beyond some cables and smart pieces of plastic, a tax applied to it is a little like trying to tax certain thoughts. Nothing makes solid sense in terms of how to impose a tax on anything since all of it is ultimately "wisps in the air" that ultimately exists chiefly in the mind.

New comment by thataccount in "Webring.rip – 160k generated 1997 home pages, no back end"

thataccount — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 20:42:05 +0000

This is a weird project. I'm not sure what the point of it is, exactly. Whole point of webrings was that they were not generated and were made by real people.

New comment by thataccount in "Quarto 2"

thataccount — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:28:20 +0000

I bet after all this time, it still doesn't have a glossary function.

New comment by thataccount in "Are Fewer Children the Future?"

thataccount — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 23:20:41 +0000

They are if the world doesn't stop trying to control how you have children and in what way you want to educate them, and how to look after their health.

New comment by thataccount in "Top Pentagon Official Contracted Personal Lawyer to Handle Minerals Deal"

thataccount — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 17:49:05 +0000

>Are you saying that senior military leadership has earned the right to a little light graft?

I'm saying graft isn't the only explanation at this point.

New comment by thataccount in "Top Pentagon Official Contracted Personal Lawyer to Handle Minerals Deal"

thataccount — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:45:01 +0000

There are a couple of ways of seeing this. One is that there is a conflict of interest. The other is that there has been a conflict of interest in the military for years, and this guy has proven himself to be useful in fighting it such that he has been given an unusual amount of power. Obviously, number 1 would be bad. Number 2, though, would be laudable. I'd be careful about jumping to a conclusion until more evidence comes to light in either direction.

New comment by thataccount in "Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight (2025)"

thataccount — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:33:24 +0000

It's like the Word of God succeeded where everything else failed. Probably some specific lessons to be learned there.

New comment by thataccount in "Babylonian Lamb Stew with Beets (1750–1730 BCE)"

thataccount — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:38:12 +0000

Uh, what? I'm not sure where you are pulling that accusation from. I said very succinctly that I was not talking about what was the majority in Africa. I think you are confused.

New comment by thataccount in "Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap"

thataccount — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:40:06 +0000

>It's news because it's the handoff of man to machine being the best at a particular thing.

That's a way to see it. Another way to see it is that for any given event in a zero sum game, one of two outcomes, where two players are involved, will occur. Man only had to beat machines for what, 200-400 years only for it to beat man how many times for it to be "best"?

New comment by thataccount in "Most Websites Don't Need Developers"

thataccount — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:34:25 +0000

>Photoshop showed up in 1990 and the people retouching photos by hand had every reason to be worried, because it took that work. It didn't take photography. Thirty-odd years on it's open on every photographer's machine and nobody calls it a threat.

Uh, the entire film industry went under, along with film developers and the majority of film cameras. Everything shifted to digital, for the most part, which is why "every photographer" has "Photoshop". (which also really isn't true. I'd say many probably have Gimp as Photoshop has lots its mind charging fees)