Hacker News: thrance

New comment by thrance in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

thrance — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:46:18 +0000

Looks amazing! Might I ask what tool you're using to design the 3d models? Some kind of voxel editor, like MagicaVoxel?

New comment by thrance in "Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million"

thrance — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:30:16 +0000

The less exposure to different people the more xenophobia there is... That's true everywhere.

New comment by thrance in "Measles surge in Utah sparks fears US could undo decades of progress"

thrance — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:00:25 +0000

There have been reactionary waves before social media was even a thing. The progression of fascism and the rejection of rationality that comes with it are well understood, blaming it all on social media is a little cheap.

If you really want culprits, look at the right-wing populists that have been peddling anti-education and anti-science fearmongering for decades, and the patrons, who finance their campaigns and buy media after media to platform their propaganda.

New comment by thrance in "Measles surge in Utah sparks fears US could undo decades of progress"

thrance — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:53:53 +0000

Also, distrust of educated elites and rejection of rationality are long-standing features of reactionary politics.

New comment by thrance in "How to earn a billion dollars"

thrance — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:28:47 +0000

Work implies the creation of value: physical artifacts, services, or more generally, stuff that adds to the world. Capital gails isn't work, you're getting money without adding anything to the world.

New comment by thrance in "How to earn a billion dollars"

thrance — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:17:08 +0000

What people mean by "you can't earn a billion dollar" is that there's no work that's useful enough, alone, to be worth that much in reward. How can we live in a world where a moron can have a trillion to their name, while others work arduous physical labor all their lives and end up with nothing?

You might not believe you've done anything "bad" to become a billionaire, but the mere fact that you accumumated so much wealth necessarily means others, somewhere, had to work for it. The mere existence of billionaires is the mark of an unhealthy economy, that doesn't distribute wealth in an efficient or fair manner.

New comment by thrance in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

thrance — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:49:21 +0000

> So there's decreased incentive to focus on wages as a form of income, and more incentive to focus on investments.

That's been the case for a while now, and is steadily getting worse. But the issue is, workers usually rely on their wages to live. It's not a choice for the vast majority of people.

And it's unsustainable. You can't build a society of exclusively parasites that feed on the work of fewer and fewer hands.

New comment by thrance in "Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4B Resort Triggers'Flamingo Revolution'"

thrance — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:15:50 +0000

0%? Foreign corporations should probably not be able to bribe their ways into getting unlimited concessions: that's imperialism.

New comment by thrance in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

thrance — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:44:06 +0000

EU laws are written like this to give companies maximum freedom in how they implement their solutions, not to lay traps for them to fall into.

New comment by thrance in "Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?"

thrance — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:38:01 +0000

Often, when I code in Python, it's because there are some libraries that aren't available in whatever other language would have been my first pick. Then, typing and type-checking are useful tools to stave off the codebase turning into the unruly mess that all Python projects eventually become.

New comment by thrance in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

thrance — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:31:15 +0000

Government officials are just revolving villains, send them to prisons and others will pick up right where they left. You have to uproot and get rid of the source: lobbying and moneyed interests.

New comment by thrance in "My Software North Star"

thrance — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:56:22 +0000

By "The one that provides most value", do you mean in the short or long term? Very often, in my experience, prioritizing so-called "quick wins" only quickly wins the codebase more tech debt, that puts the project on a sure path to development hell.

New comment by thrance in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

thrance — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 13:54:41 +0000

Will it support Linux?

New comment by thrance in "Do we need billionaires?"

thrance — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:16:54 +0000

Except billionaires are never on the side of the people. They functionally already own the US government, which is how they've been able to amass so much wealth while the rest of the world gets poorer and hotter.

They buy media to push their propaganda, buy politicians... They are not acting as "checks and balances" to power. They are power.

New comment by thrance in "India's surprise baby bust"

thrance — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:43:37 +0000

> Better to spend it while it’s whole.

Yes, that's the whole point. That's a good thing. Money is meant to be spent, not be hoarded and slept on forever. Money velocity is terrible right now, capital generates more income than wages, this is neither healthy nor sustainable, and certainly isn't fair to the ones actually doing the productive work.

In the ideal society there'd be no Epstein or Thiel, everyone would have a rewarding and productive economic activity.

New comment by thrance in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

thrance — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:06:53 +0000

There's a joke that goes something like this:

> A Soviet visits America and says: "Wow, the propaganda is so good here! Much better than back home", an American replies: "What propaganda!? We don't have propaganda here!", to which the Soviet responds: "Exactly!".

New comment by thrance in "What happens if Japan takes in zero immigrants?"

thrance — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:41:14 +0000

> plenty of issues worth worrying about

Such as? It looks like the country is doing much worse now that the border is closed.

New comment by thrance in "U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse"

thrance — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:37:22 +0000

I don't know about that. The GOP has been talking about the southern strategy for a while now, before the world wide web was even a thing. Our current neoliberal economies are starting to show how bleak the world they ushered is, creating social unrest from the huge inequalities that arose, that populists can easily exploit for political gains. It's the same story as all fascist takeovers, really.

New comment by thrance in "How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S."

thrance — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:52:27 +0000

> A non-zero rate of firearms ownership allows the people who aren't antisocial to suppress those who are antisocial and maintain peace.

Do you have an example of such a place? What you're describing is called vigilantism, and usually creates more issues than it solves.

New comment by thrance in "U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse"

thrance — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:01:28 +0000

> The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.

George Orwell, 1984.

The Republican project is one of making the population dumber while enriching military contractors and other private interests. This achieves it perfectly.