Hacker News: thmsths

New comment by thmsths in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

thmsths — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:16:44 +0000

This sounds like a successful implementation of the conjoined triangles of success :)

New comment by thmsths in "US Supreme Court drug users cannot be prohibited from firearms [pdf]"

thmsths — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:52:39 +0000

Looking at the first page, the circumstances surrounding the indictment are infuriating. I thought that search warrants had to be specific to avoid just that kind of fishing expedition. The initial warrant was for terrorism related charges, it seems they found no evidence of it. How come they can then turn around and go for other charges?

New comment by thmsths in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

thmsths — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:12:02 +0000

Not a bad idea honestly. Would be interesting to see how it affects tech companies since they rely on hypergrowth. My one worry is that instead of divesting they would just play shell games with complex ownership structures.

New comment by thmsths in "Sam Altman's Creepy Eyeball-Scanning Company Gets in Bed with Zoom and Tinder"

thmsths — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:42:43 +0000

And of course "just avoid these services" is going to be difficult or near impossible. Convincing your friends, families, acquaintances to ditch zoom is hard enough. But what do you do when you get a zoom link for a job interview? Tell them you object to using zoom and basically cost yourself the job? Or do you only use it when you really have to? In which case, how many interactions do they need from you to collect all the data they need?

New comment by thmsths in "F-35 is built for the wrong war"

thmsths — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:59:19 +0000

Except that the "quality" of their tanks was not exactly top notch, worse they used a lot of resources. At that point it was just a desperate gamble: "if we can make an invincible tank, then it won't matter how few we have", we both know it did not pay off, not even close.

New comment by thmsths in "Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness"

thmsths — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:59:11 +0000

This is part of why I now tend to go for the cheapest. I do a bit of research of course, but most goods have been commodified (and corners cut). Nowadays the only guarantee you have when paying more is that you have less money in your wallet.

New comment by thmsths in "France pulls last gold held in US"

thmsths — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:45:17 +0000

From my recollection, the plan was to grant French citizenship to every British citizen and vice versa, in effect "forcing" the governments to defend their citizens to the end. This was very ambitious, hence why it probably did not happen. But if it had happen, I have a hard time seeing how it could be undone, stripping people of their citizenship, even if they have a second one is no trivial matter.

New comment by thmsths in "OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation"

thmsths — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:08:56 +0000

Isn't that exactly how the iPhone won though? As another commenter said, once the cool gadget becomes a must have for executives, IT will be told to find a way to make it work.

New comment by thmsths in "Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music"

thmsths — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:50:55 +0000

The general public also get sold on the rosy idea that copyright (and patents to a certain extent), protect the little guy, that thanks to this mechanism their work will not be stolen by opportunistic freeloaders. It also resonates with the "one day I will strike rich" mentality.

What they usually "forget" to tell you is that your IP is absolutely worthless if you don't have the resources to defend it in court, which in turns actually advantages freeloaders who either have relatively low costs to sue (patent trolls are basically an example of this) or enough money that they don't feel the pain if they lose.

The current system basically incentivizes suing over IP NOT creating it.

New comment by thmsths in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

thmsths — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:49:23 +0000

There is also the angle of: even if there is an appropriate amount of controllers in the tower at a given time, how they do it can also hint at the issue. Being an ATC is a taxing job, mandatory overtime and 60 hours work weeks screams understaffing to me.

New comment by thmsths in "Roblox is minting teen millionaires"

thmsths — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:46:51 +0000

The problem once again comes when you decide to hyper optimize for profit. Ada and William will rely on word of mouth, maybe a few posters to drum up attention to their raffle.

Meanwhile large gambling orgs will run ad spots non stop with celebrities enticing you to join their app with free bonus bets and once you're in they will send you daily notifications to nudge you to place "just one more bet".

Easy to see how one would be relatively harmless while the other could cause widespread addiction.

New comment by thmsths in "Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony"

thmsths — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:21:45 +0000

Or maybe stop allowing people to pay for their own legal defense? Public defenders for everyone and then we will indeed all be equals before the law.

Billionaires being able to outspend the prosecution by such a wide margin that they can turn the legal battle into a war of attrition that they are likely to win is a complete travesty of justice. But I am not holding my breath on that one, too many people benefiting from the current system.

New comment by thmsths in "Paragon accidentally uploaded a photo of its spyware control panel"

thmsths — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:57:24 +0000

The message can't be intercepted in transit, since we are talking about spyware, I assume they get it from the device, hard to defend against that if they have access to your process' memory space.

New comment by thmsths in "The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)"

thmsths — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 23:35:15 +0000

Easier, and probably even cheaper to upgrade a pair of wifi transceivers than negotiating with the neighbor to cut his tree.

New comment by thmsths in "Our approach to advertising"

thmsths — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:27:56 +0000

Hard disagree. Advertisers (or people with worse motives) will be very creative in how they use the targeting parameters offered by chatGPT ads and suddenly they can make educated guesses about groups or even individuals. I remember a couple years ago, someone posted a story about how they were able to circumvent Facebook rules and display ads for just one person: their roommates and used that to freak them out.

New comment by thmsths in "Sinclair C5"

thmsths — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 17:26:21 +0000

The C5 seems like a pretty good deal: £399 (equivalent to £1247 today according to the BoE inflation calculator) for an electric trike with storage made in the UK. In contrast, finding a made in china cargo bike for that price seems impossible.

New comment by thmsths in "25 Years of Wikipedia"

thmsths — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:40:31 +0000

This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, while some of the content needs to be updated periodically, it also has A LOT of content that will stay relevant pretty much forever.

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

thmsths — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:24:55 +0000

And I am willing to bet that on top of the chilling effect on regular people, it will only act as an inconvenience for the bad actors as they will find ways to circumvent it. Controlling the online discourse is far too valuable, they are not going to just shrug and give up because the government puts up a barrier.

New comment by thmsths in "Flock Hardcoded the Password for America's Surveillance Infrastructure 53 Times"

thmsths — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:05:28 +0000

The dystopian tech does not seem that bad when you believe you will be the one controlling it.

New comment by thmsths in "Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach"

thmsths — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:55:01 +0000

I don't believe there is an easy fix though. The government will prioritize retention because it promotes institutional stability while at the same time offering low pay (and not just low pay but often a complete lack of flexibility regarding pay) because the electorate demands it.

Which means that the truly good people are basically quirky people with strong work ethic/believe in the mission that happened to join the organization for some reason.