Hacker News: throw__away7391

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Religious scholars met with Anthropic"

throw__away7391 — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 10:40:01 +0000

This is immensely preferable to having a new order of self appointed alignment councils determine what is "in the interest of humanity".

We have already seen this play out to a much lesser degree in social media.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

throw__away7391 — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:02:24 +0000

It appears to me that in most of Europe there is an unspoken bargain: society provides you with a reasonably comfortable and secure life where your basic needs are guaranteed at least to some level, and in exchange you are supposed to stay in your lane, make sure your ambitions match and follow one of the approved tracks, and leave things like starting businesses to a hidden aristocracy with family money, who for their part generally accept higher demands on their contributions and avoid "vulgar" displays of their wealth in exchange.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Why do we assume everyone should be working?"

throw__away7391 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 06:01:33 +0000

Worth reading rather than reacting to the title. The author is basically arguing that "some people are too stupid to be worth the effort to employee them", not the more familiar way this phrase is used.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Identity verification on Claude"

throw__away7391 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:15:08 +0000

> As a non-US citizen Opus 4.8 is the best American LLM I will ever have access to

No, we are all just waiting for Dario to get scheduled for an Oval Office press conference where he can present a gold trophy to Liberace Hitler and extoll his praises for all the amazing winning he is doing like no one has ever seen before.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models"

throw__away7391 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 10:43:27 +0000

I see what you're saying, but I don't agree that it works this way. Parents' concerns for their children are far more self-serving than most parents claim. Consider that every "for the children" political agenda ever has nakedly ulterior motives--name one truly pro-child policy where children are directly prioritized at the expense of their parents? Consider the way that school schedules are oriented around their parents' convenience in spite of decades of studies showing the harmful health effects they have. During COVID we saw dramatic efforts to protect the elderly coupled with a push to reopen schools by parents tired of having to take care of them all day. Whatever you think of the restrictions one way or another, the prioritization of elderly was apparent throughout. These are the same parents who have repeated voted benefits for themselves at the direct expense of their children, saddling them with trillions of dollars of debt to support their own present consumption. I promise you, if seniors were regularly being gunned down like this they would have found a solution already.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models"

throw__away7391 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:24:51 +0000

Well they happen in schools and children don’t vote. If this had been a wave of senior center shootings, something would have been done a long, long time ago.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

throw__away7391 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 04:55:17 +0000

No, this is about the fragile ego of the President taking petty revenge on a company the didn't go along with every whim of his administration.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?"

throw__away7391 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:13:06 +0000

Not sure what you mean exactly. In the jurisdictions I have experience the utility is legally obligated to provide service to any residence within the territory. That resident can then decide to use 100% solar with batteries and pay us nothing, or use solar during the day and rely on the grid at night, or in our case we had net metering so resident were able to treat the utility as a free battery, producing excess kWh during the day and drawing it back at night, paying only the difference in total draw (or receiving a credit even).

I have not worked in water/sewage, but the characteristics are quite different compared to electricity--electricity cannot be stored, it needs to be sent directly from the power plant to the consumer at the exact moment it is consumed, but on the other hand electricity can be produced more or less on demand with the quantity limited only by your willingness to pay. Water is finite, and is simply being managed by the utility rather than created on demand. Someone collecting rainwater is still impacting the local water system and depending on the environment this still needs to be managed by someone.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?"

throw__away7391 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:39:15 +0000

The situation with the electric grid is pretty crazy. The cost to supply power to houses in sparsely populated communities is orders of magnitude higher than urban apartments. Not just the power infrastructure itself but all sorts of little ongoing things like maintenance visits, as well as losses from transmission and distribution. I worked on smart grid systems and getting apartment buildings online was a piece of cake, with one simple connection handling multiple buildings with hundreds of meters, meanwhile suburban homes required much more expensive equipment that was more difficult for technicians to install and serviced only a handful of homes. Everyone talks about this as if these were humble shacks out in the boonies but the bulk of these service points are suburban McMansions built on cheap land at the margins of the cities. Broadly speaking this results is poorer ratepayers significantly subsidizing services for wealthier ones.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "$3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year"

throw__away7391 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:34:54 +0000

I worked with a large number of these so called "legitimate" charities and after what I saw I will never give a penny to any non-profit. You will have far, far more impact figuring out something you care about and directly spending $100 to accomplish that than giving $5000 to any of these organizations.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic"

throw__away7391 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:46:09 +0000

I basically agree here, but I would add that the framing here can sometimes sometimes be better described as “extortion”. Politicians have tremendous power and influence over many industries, I’ve seen the inside of a few situations where the politicians framed themselves as “taking on big business” where behind closed doors they were 100% calling the shots and handing executives directives on what they could or could not say publicly. The companies had no choice but to play along. When I see a big company take exactly the same public position as the current regulatory regime or administration in power, I don’t assume that they necessarily have any choice in the matter.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

throw__away7391 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:00:33 +0000

This is not a cynical take, it is blindingly obvious. Right now, governments around the world are watching, salivating over what is effectively remote control over the literal thoughts of and total surveillance over their entire population. They are itching insatiably to get control over these systems.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Spain’s LaLiga has blocked access to freedom.gov"

throw__away7391 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 01:27:45 +0000

I am not an expert here, but I have spent many vacations in Spain as it is one of my favorite countries, and I distinctly remember it being in Europe.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "How did Windows 95 get permission to put Weezer video 'Buddy Holly' on the CD?"

throw__away7391 — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:58:40 +0000

There were stories floating around at the time of people who were interested in buying it, having no idea what it was, not owning a computer and not realizing you needed one to use it.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon"

throw__away7391 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:52:35 +0000

> the size of the US economy relative to the global economy is shrinking

This is not true, not at all, it dipped as China grew initially, but looking at the past few years this trend had reversed and the US was again growing as a percentage of the global economy, going from a low of about 21% in 2011 to nearly 27% today. It seems certain now that Trump has put a bullet in this growth, but it was hardly inevitable. In 2024 the US was in an incredibly strong position relative to the rest of the world.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica"

throw__away7391 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:14:00 +0000

You can watch the screen and see what it can detect, and it is impressive. On a dark road at night in Santa Monica it was able to identify that there were two pedestrians at the end of the next block on the sidewalk obscured by a row of parked cars and covered by a canopy of overgrown vegetation. There is absolutely no way any human would have been able to spot them at this distance in these conditions. You really can "feel" it paying 100% attention at all times in all directions.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs"

throw__away7391 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 11:01:56 +0000

Every government in the world right now wants to get their hands on the controls and put their thumb on the scales here. Modern social media has proven to be effectively remote control for their citizens, nothing like this kind of power has never existed before and is absolutely irresistible to politicians. Expect them all to be laser focused on this until they're able to seize complete control, no matter how long it takes or how roundabout the path to this is.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "When employees feel slighted, they work less"

throw__away7391 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 01:36:05 +0000

The basic problem there was that salespeople were viewed as the ones who actually made things happen, engineering and building the actual product was just an inconvenient necessity.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "When employees feel slighted, they work less"

throw__away7391 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:17:53 +0000

Some time ago I had my 10 year anniversary forgotten once in a company (where I had written almost the entire codebase for their core product myself) and I did feel slighted. I had felt invested in the company, to me this day was a big deal and my company was completely unaware. It felt like a disorienting mismatch of unreciprocated commitment and made me feel a bit sick in the pit of my stomach. I started looking for a new job the next day.

New comment by throw__away7391 in "European Alternatives"

throw__away7391 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:38:36 +0000

And the US still uses Arabic numerals in spite of banning visas for basically every Arab country in the world.