Hacker News: voakbasda

New comment by voakbasda in "Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO"

voakbasda — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:55:28 +0000

Does anyone really believe this is more than performative? Increasingly the most likely outcome of such scrutiny is… nothing. He hasn’t stolen enough from the rich to earn any sort of punishment, and he’s not doing anything too different from the Congress critters that are “investigating” him.

New comment by voakbasda in "New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater"

voakbasda — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:53:38 +0000

In the US, this will never happen due to NIMBY zoning laws.

Ask HN: Fight Traffic Cam Tickets?

voakbasda — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:39:29 +0000

My wife got a ticket issued by a traffic camera in Albany Oregon. We do not live there and had no idea they had started such a program.

She is a ridiculously safe driver and was flowing with traffic. If they got her, then they likely got dozens (if not hundreds) of other vehicles from this speed trap.

Such red-light-turned-speed-trap installations are repugnant beyond words and needs to be stopped. We would like to know whether it is worth fighting. Willing to pay an order of magnitude more than the $165 ticket to make the department completely miserable.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104246

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by voakbasda in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

voakbasda — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:38:55 +0000

Where would you do that? Realistically, the question is one that cannot even be asked safely: are there enough of us to overthrow the existing systems and replace them with something better?

The answer to either question, really, is no. The powers that be have systematically implemented policies that keep us divided to prevent that eventual outcome.

New comment by voakbasda in "Securing a DoD contractor: Finding a multi-tenant authorization vulnerability"

voakbasda — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:40:15 +0000

With software? Good luck with that….

New comment by voakbasda in "Dav2d"

voakbasda — Sun, 03 May 2026 05:45:02 +0000

Stop big companies from ever forming. They are not a natural force that cannot be reckoned with. We allow them to exist. Revoke the charters of any business over 500 employees.

New comment by voakbasda in "Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw""

voakbasda — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:55:02 +0000

You will find that morals and ethics at that scale are too expensive to maintain.

New comment by voakbasda in "Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta"

voakbasda — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:11:15 +0000

The government does NOT let people have choices in many cases. People should NOT be forced to choose between medical privacy and potential prosecution.

That your comment even implied that would be acceptable in this context is appalling.

New comment by voakbasda in "Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta"

voakbasda — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:06:23 +0000

Parallel construction like that is unambiguously fruit from the poison tree. It should never be allowed, and the fact that it is used routinely is one of the many ongoing travesties in the US.

New comment by voakbasda in "Humpback whales are forming super-groups"

voakbasda — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 15:40:40 +0000

Because they think it might make people give a shit enough to do something to change that outcome?

Fear is a strong motivator, but it is not a good one in this case. To really be effective, there must be the threat of direct, immediate, and severe consequences.

Instead it causes people to treat their messages as hyperbolic and undermines their entire movement.

New comment by voakbasda in "Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?"

voakbasda — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 14:58:17 +0000

And a lesson in the psychology of sunk costs.

They probably did not suddenly wake up after six months and realized the Indian developers were mot getting the job done. They probably lied about how long it would take. The consultant that said they could do it in a month probably also lied about their estimate.

Now, might think I should be generous here and give them the benefit of the doubt. However I once had the chance to talk with the CTO of a major embedded consultancy about how to get those first few jobs where you really can’t be confident about any estimate, and that was the explicit and unambiguous advice he offered to me: lie. Tell them you can do it.

Once a company hires a consultant, it can take a lot of pain to make them go back to the drawing board. They do not want to admit they made a mistake hiring someone, so they will accept less than they expect… but only up to a point.

New comment by voakbasda in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

voakbasda — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:49:03 +0000

I want to see math on how a single GPU will pull down that much revenue, because that seems like a dubious outcome.

New comment by voakbasda in "The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew"

voakbasda — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:19:19 +0000

You will stop being asked when you give up McDonalds. There is no other way out.

New comment by voakbasda in "The buns in McDonald's Japan's burger photos are all slightly askew"

voakbasda — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:14:35 +0000

This. Leaning into touch screens and apps were the last straw for me.

New comment by voakbasda in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

voakbasda — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:28:42 +0000

They don’t have to hand over control to lose control to AI. People are easily manipulated, and AI has proven itself able to manipulate people. How long until a tech is tricked or coerced into doing something dumb on a planet scale, based on intentional misinformation given by its apparently benevolent AI assistant?

New comment by voakbasda in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

voakbasda — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:46:13 +0000

Wait, you think AI won’t eventually have full control over a bio lab, where it can manipulate an unsuspecting tech to produce and release a bioweapon to accomplish that explicit goal?

Because I think that seems virtually inevitable at this point.

New comment by voakbasda in "The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE"

voakbasda — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 04:13:36 +0000

This is not a rule designed to ensure compliance. It’s designed to punish anyone they choose.

Make no mistake, getting targeted by this will be severely punishing, even if the courts ultimately throw it out.

New comment by voakbasda in "Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall"

voakbasda — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:18:17 +0000

Because they lack any better signals from within the company. At several places I have worked, hiring is almost fully detached from the groups that need the workers. They never could find good candidates for our teams. This kind of disconnect is what corporate cancer looks like, and it is endemic in big business.

New comment by voakbasda in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

voakbasda — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:24:31 +0000

That was never in question, even before AI. It just took more monkeys at typewriters.

New comment by voakbasda in "Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)"

voakbasda — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:01:09 +0000

That might seem to be the case, right up until he gets taken to court over it.

Never presume that a thing is legal (or will not later be punished) on the basis that someone is already doing it.