Hacker News: thmsths

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.

New comment by thmsths in "In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution"

thmsths — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:09:00 +0000

I recall a discussion on HN explaining that while true, this might be offset by the higher average weight of EVs, leading to more dust from the tires and the road. Again, no easy solution unfortunately, just trade offs.

New comment by thmsths in "“Captain Gains” on Capitol Hill"

thmsths — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:42:32 +0000

According to this link [1] 200k would put someone above the 80th percentile and not far below the 95th percentile in terms of household income for the DC metro area, so I don't see how that could be considered "underpaid", especially when you consider the benefits.

[1] https://statisticalatlas.com/metro-area/District-of-Columbia...

New comment by thmsths in "IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off"

thmsths — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:23:47 +0000

Because the entire western culture has shifted to instant gratification. Yes, what you suggest would most likely lead to increased business eventually. But they want better number this quarter, so they resort to the cheap tricks like financial engineering/layoffs to get an immediate boost.

New comment by thmsths in "Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth"

thmsths — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 15:44:18 +0000

This. It's not a spatial problem, it's a temporal one. They are somewhat aware there will be nowhere to run to (I say somewhat because they still spend millions in luxury bunkers), they are just betting that it won't get really bad during their lifetime, maybe their kids lifetime for the more empathetic ones.