Hacker News Reader

alexb_on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950

Personally, I hope that nothing Elon Musk ever does for the rest of his life succeeds. Maybe that's just me though.

alexb_on Slate EV truck starts at $24,950

The truck is cool. The blank slate looks good. Every other "suggested" design looks insanely corny, in the Cybertruck sort of way.

alexb_on CSSQuake

Doesn't work at all for me. I keep jumping around and clipping through objects, can't even leave the first room without being stuck in the doorway to the elevator.

alexb_on 1worldflag: A blue dot on a transparent background

As someone living in Omaha, this has just a little bit of a conflict lmao.....

alexb_on Canada's first sovereign wealth fund

Wow! This guy knew a lot about working in an environmental/social/governance framework, AND he knows enough about money to have been an international central banker?

I knew Carney was great, but I didn't know he was so well-qualified too.

alexb_on U.S. banks may soon collect citizenship data from customers

Yes. "Other people do it" does not make it any less anti-foreigner.

alexb_on Where the Heck Did My Taxes Go?

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/agency

Click down into a federal account and then change the drop down over the chart to "Recipient".

alexb_on Where the Heck Did My Taxes Go?

https://www.usaspending.gov/ is another great website for this stuff. I suggest using the Budget explorer. Here's the map by function (e.g. national defense, healthcare): https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

alexb_on Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating

Yeah, it's kind of annoying. But middle click scroll is something I use literally every single second of every single day on my web browser. It's a deal-breaker.

alexb_on Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

Even skipping the first step (which requires a second readme) the next step involves opening a terminal. Instant fail. The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work, what a file is, what a command is, or having to look up anything. If something needs to be done, it needs a GUI.

Linux is an important operating system, but anyone under the delusion that it is desktop ready right now needs to actually watch someone use it. I say this not because I hate linux, but because I love it. I want someone to make it usable for a desktop, and people claiming that it is usable right now are not helping that.

alexb_on Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating

Company? Most of the time this stuff is years (sometimes DECADES) old. That's why it doesn't work on Linux in the first place.

alexb_on Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

The last time I tried to use Linux, I said "fuck this" when I had to open up a text editor for something so basic as making a shortcut with command line arguments. This is the easiest menu in the world on Windows, but it took me looking up a bunch of things to get it to not work on Linux.

The real crime, by a lot, it middle click. I did not realize how often I use middle click scroll until I switched to Linux and it didn't work anymore.

alexb_on Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

Most people want a computer that works with their software. No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution. Especially because nearly everyone has some niche thing they like, some 5% that isn't covered by the FOSS solutions, that only a niche Windows program can actually do correctly.

And that doesn't even get into gaming.

alexb_on Chuck Norris dies at age 86

He actually died years ago. It just took until today for the Grim Reaper to work up the nerve.

alexb_on Conway's Game of Life, in real life

This isn't what this is about, but I wonder if anyone has created a fully mechanized version of Conway's Game of Life. The fact that you only have to follow 4 rules, and each cell only needs to observe its neighbors to follow those rules, makes me wonder if it's possible to track these things mechanically. I unfortunately don't know enough about mechanical engineering to do such a thing.

alexb_on MacBook Neo

Are you serious? This is Apple, the same company that purposefully made their messaging service less compatible so that children would get bullied into buying their products. You really think they would allow anything that isn't MacOS to be run on their hardware?

alexb_on Show HN: 3D Mahjong, Built in CSS

Disappointed to see that this is solitaire and not Riichi :( would love to see more implementations of actual mahjong

alexb_on Show HN: 3D Mahjong, Built in CSS

Riichi is the most fun one, in my opinion, but I would not go so far as to say "skill weights over luck". The absolute best Riichi players win less than 25% of hands.

alexb_on H-1B Exposed: Banking sector visa sponsorship investigation

The H-1B system is obviously flawed. For some reason, we've decided to tie the ability to live where you want and take advantage of your pursuit of happiness to having an employer. This creates massive power imbalances that are avoided by not engaging in national segregation policies. We don't demand that anyone born on this side of the border do anything like what people born somewhere else have to - how can a law applied differently based on how you were born be just?

alexb_on Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

Unfortunately, their common sense has been rewarded by the stock tanking 15% in the past month including 4% just today alone. Dell shows why companies don't dare talk poorly of AI, or even talk about AI in a negative way at all. It doesn't matter that it's correct, investors hate this and that's what a ton of companies are mainly focusing on.

alexb_on What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?

To clarify, these are percentages for the sample of students taking the remedial Math 2 class, not generally. Two percent is still crazy low though, that's practically nothing.

alexb_on This map is not upside down

By this logic, should we put east Asia on the top and have the less populated western hemisphere on the bottom? Why not have East be up?

alexb_on Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

The point of the rigidity and uniformity of school is not that it is the best way to get everyone to understand everything if they try. The point is that it forces all the kids to try. School is not just for the most interested, it is for everyone.

No AI you ever create will get a kid to choose learning how math works over doing basically anything else with their time. The point of school is not to teach, it is to discipline children to participate in education. Otherwise, why have it at all? Kids can find extensive information and guides for basically any topic they want on the internet right now.

The entire "AI education" thing misses this.

alexb_on US national debt reaches a record $37T, the Treasury Department reports

Land tax fixes this

alexb_on We built an air-gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries

I work on an air-gapped network. The most important thing that the words "air gap" communicate is that there is no connection, nothing at all, to anything outside the network. The only way to move anything on or off are using disc drives (no USB for security reasons). The word "private network" does not really communicate that there is a physical gap of no wires at all from the computers on the network and everything else on the internet.

alexb_on What happens when housing prices go down?

What? Strong Towns is not just their "content creation", they ARE local organizations. You might have a chapter in your city. This criticism tells me that you don't know what Strong Towns is, what they do, the actual specific policy guidelines they come up with and push that have real influence on local city planning.

Strong Towns gives actionable proposals all the time, and their main purpose is local organizations to actually do local change. To accuse them of being a content creation scheme that does no organizing tells me that you have not looked into this at all and are making immediate assumptions based on the aesthetics of their content.

alexb_on France launches criminal probe of X over alleged algorithm ‘manipulation’

Ah, the good ol' "Epstein Strategy"

alexb_on US authorities are collecting DNA information of children in criminal database

I'd love to hear your reasons as to why.

alexb_on Why does the U.S. always run a trade deficit?

Why on earth would we ever do that? That's a nonsensical proposal that would immediately make an immense amount of people poor (while also being hostile to so-called foreigners for no reason)

alexb_on So why *did* U.S. wages stagnate for 20 years?

Big correction: we want the value of land to go up. Under our current systems, this corresponds with the price of land going up, but that does not necessarily have to be the case. Taxation of land values causes the value of land to go up while keeping the price of land down, solving both problems at once.