Hacker News Reader

bediger4000on Northstar: A New Booster Engine with More Thrust and Less Mass

Interesting design. The article says nothing about live fire testing.

They appear to have designed the engine for gimbaling: there are 2 big lugs on the combustion chamber 90 degrees apart on the circumference, and the ground handling equipment mount looks like the engine might have a ball joint or something in flight.

bediger4000on Residential proxies detected on White House network

Why isn't this a 5-alarm fire for the National Security types? I mean, I've seen people fired on the spot for having their own WiFi access point plugged in to company networks, and that wasn't a particularly security paranoid company.

bediger4000on Ask HN: How do you find out when someone links to your blog?

You can look at back links in marginalia site data.

bediger4000on Do not ask "Is A a B?": Inheritance and the Is-A Trap

Wow, November 2026, an article about inheritance in objected oriented programming appears! This is great!

The author basically writes that equating inheritance with ontology causes problems. I suggest that very equation arises from the to be verb of the English language. Using forms of "to be" (like the "is" in the "is-a" of inheritance) often leads people to false equivalences, category errors and other mistakes. I personally try to avoid "to be" forms in business and technical writing because of the ease of errors. Is-a relationships lead people, and now LLMs, to confuse programming domain types with problem domain categories mostly due to the ambiguity of the "to be" verb.

bediger4000on Show HN: Trademark Screen – free plain-English trademark check with email watch

I'm going to guess this isn't anything at all, maybe just a query to an LLM. I entered the name "DongWangler", with fasteners as a line of business. I ended up having to check off a few related categories, "machines", "construction", stuff like that.

I got a "maybe" back. Come, come, my good friend! There's absolutely no entity named "DongWangler" in any line of business. I suppose "maybe" is the correct lawyerly advice, given that the USA has an adversarial legal system, and until several court cases end in your favor, you really don't now for certain, but that seems like a weak answer in an age of AGI.

bediger4000on The Mystery of the Snowden Saga – Solved

You've just made the same mistake. Under US law (before Trump), journalists who publish classified info aren't prosecuted. As you pointed out, leakers are criminally prosecuted. Bart Gelman has a copy of Snowden's material in "cold storage". He was never prosecuted for having the material, or for publishing it. The article's assertion on prosecuting publishers of leaked material is false.

I won't argue Obama's merits on this issue: he was as bad or worse than GW Bush on punishing leakers. But leaking isn't as severe a crime as others. Reality Winner and Chelsea Manning are already out served their terms. Obama could have taken the civilian oversight boards recommendation on government surveillance and ditched all or most of it but he didn't.

bediger4000on The Mystery of the Snowden Saga – Solved

And of course, the state-obedient journalists entrusted with Snowden's supposed knock-offs would be as jailable as the whistleblower himself if they'd published top secret information related to national security.

This part simply isn't true, or at least Before Trump it wasn't true. Snowden leaked in 2013. O think this article isn't a good conspiracy theory.

bediger4000on Ask HN: Why is it so hard to promote/market even when the product seems right

I think that all the previous advertisers and marketers have poisoned the well, so to speak. A great deal of advertising and marketing is sleazy, lying or otherwise filled with falsehoods. Advertisers have on the whole over advertised, which ruins whatever medium carries the ads.look at Google: great search, corrupted by advertising before "AI" put a,stake through the heart of advertising.

We've all gotten ripped off by advertising marketing, so we tend to ignore it, or subvert it when we can. I personally don't care that you say you're earnest and of good faith. Every other sleazebag before you has said the same thing, then sold me shoddy goods.

bediger4000on The US election could turn the country into chaos

People need to say it instead of observing the journalistic customs of not assigning agency to political conservatives, and not naming Trump.

bediger4000on My Favourite Laptop

Alas, as a Linux user, X11 doesn't seem to do that sort of thing: a 2-finger tap is nothing at all according to xev. 2-finger and 3-finger trackpad clicks are basically unreliable left and right mouse button clicks.

I haven't been able to put in .Xresources entries to make some other keypad event into mouse clicks either.

bediger4000on The US election could turn the country into chaos

This article puts the blame for potential in the wrong place. It's not "the election" (which means "the voters") it's Trump that could cause chaos.

There are zero states, counties or municipalities experiencing political violence right now. Nothing appears to be terrifically amiss anywhere. Yes, Alaska has 2 "Dan Sullivan" candidates for governor, but they're carefully identified on the ballot for governor, it's been litigated to AK Supreme Court, and the federal government isn't in charge of elections, especially state elections.

Trump, one person, is the wild card, and the source of potential chaos. Not "elections" not "Democrats" not "right wing paramilitaries". Trump.

Trump can follow laws, regulations, the US constitution, and democratic norms and stay out of it. If there's chaos, he's the source and the cause.

bediger4000on My Favourite Laptop

The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?

bediger4000on [dead]

This is the third time this PII-stealing "quiz" has been posted. Spamming is evil, dude. Renounce sin, retire to a life of contemplation and penitence for your spamming.

bediger4000on Slopstructions

Yes, this existed in the past. It didn't come in the form of a long winded essay full of jarring phrases that you have to decode. Also, you used to be able to go ask what a weird sentence or phrase means. Now, the human often has no idea and because Super Intelligence wrote it, assumes you're the fool for not understanding circuitous windy prose.

bediger4000on Haley Stevens: I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today

She lost the primary. This is just sore loser/sour grapes.

bediger4000on What a mother's 1834 letter about measles tells us about MAHA

According to Politico, MAHA is “made up largely of women who followed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the MAGA fold.”

I think the "followed" part is important. It makes RFKJ the leader. It looks to me like RFKJ's motivations are not as pure or as sympathetic as his followers'. It looks to me like RFKJ wants to destroy "medicine" so that quacks who have no ethical obligations or duties in law, can peddle bullshit. All that is outside what this article deals with, however.

They discount a protection [measles vaccine] that works, because measles has become a stranger.

And that's where the article fails. Why do the "they" in this sentence (MAHA followers) discount the protection? Because RFKJ as a leader, as an authority, says so. The article fails to pin the blame on RFKJ or examine his motives.

bediger4000on The Soft Machine (1961)

Every time I read something about "soft machine" in this essay, I was reminded of "meat proxy".

bediger4000on Ask HN: Are you using AI to do election choices like Mayor, Special Measures

Even that use of "AI" is sus: when I have Claude write some code, it has goofy problems a lot of the time. Bit-fields off by 2, missing field structs, public enums and variables that aren't and shouldn't be used publicly. Why is use of "AI" in other contexts not as error prone? I stand by my answer. I'm not even going to offload my mistake-making to a program that gives wrong information every so often.

bediger4000on Ask HN: Are you using AI to do election choices like Mayor, Special Measures

No. I think it would be unethical of me to offload decisions that important to programs that create output on a statistical basis.

bediger4000on Fair Use Benefits Everyone

But you haven't. You've had maybe 40 years to read books, web pages, watch movies listen to music etc. Every LLM has millions of books, nearly every web page ever written, and every image available on the web. There's not even a rough order of magnitude comparison, your content consumption is not even a rounding error on the amount of text every LLM has in its weights.

Quantity has a quality all its own.

bediger4000on Democrats' Secret Effort to Stack Alaska's Ballot

Slight correction:

NYT: omg Democrats did something devious! stop them! Don't look at the Trump rape allegations while you're at it.

bediger4000on Reddit shares drop and it plans login requirement as search traffic sinks

Why was reddit ever ranked? Every time I asked a question, I'd get stale jokes and pedantry. I learned to not expect anything useful from redditors.

bediger4000on Reed Hastings says Big Tech should get used to being hated – like Big Pharma

Don't forget make one by 3D printing.

bediger4000on Democrats' Secret Effort to Stack Alaska's Ballot

This is almost ex post facto. In January, every Dem was very gloomy. They said they could probably win the House majority, but a Senate majority is out of reach.

Beyond that, what law was broken? This has been litigated in Alaska (elections are still the province of the states, not Trump) and found legal. This is a conservative biased NYT hit piece, trying to gin up an October Surprise Scandal.

As far as Trump deciding to tip over the election chess board and eat a bishop, if it doesn't go his way, he'll do anything. Democrats aren't morally responsible for Trump, Trump has agency of his own. Trump can do the adult, ethical, legal thing and let Alaska run its own elections. If he does otherwise, that's totally on him.

bediger4000on The Pentagon is quietly building an elite new tech sabotage agency

Why do this? Isn't the old such agency, the NSA, good enough?

bediger4000on Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers–Including Undercover ICE Agents

Again, let's think of two children fighting over their shares of a cookie. Child A says he should get all of the cookie. Child B says that wouldn't be fair, the cookie should be split evenly, half and half.

The adult in the room decides to promote common ground, and gives 75% of the cookie to A and 25% to B.

bediger4000on ADHD quiz no account or credit card required

These kinds of quizzes are mostly attempts to get PII out of you, aren't they? At least that's what I've been taught.

bediger4000on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements

This is an illegitimate argument in the context of Second Amendment. The "second amendment people" are pretty vocal proponents of strict adherence to the US constitution - hence the name of the group.

Whatever reasons Trump was voted in for, second amendment people should insist on him following the constitution. He's not. That's not even arguable on rhetorical grounds. Trump regularly defies court orders, spends money on things not authorized by Congress, and impounds money allocated by Congress. That behavior is the constitutional definition of tyranny. Therefore second amendment people should be at least metaphorically, if not literally, up in arms about him.

Again inarguably, they are not. Therefore their self proclaimed basis is a lie. They are just blowhards and we should disarm them ASAP. They have no sound reason for existing as an armed group.

bediger4000on Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson

No obvious date but it says: Computer recently visited Ken Thompson at Lucent's Bell Labs

Maybe early dotcom boom days?

bediger4000on Anthropic Threw Away Git

Client/server asymmetry is what will sell big companies on Scion. Central control is important to build an organization around which is how managers become directors become Vice presidents. Also licensing is better this way. Got the choice of giving away clients and charging like crazy for servers, or charging for both.