Hacker News Reader

dccoolgaion MeshCore, a new lightweight, hybrid routing mesh protocol for packet radios

Meshtastic UI is pretty far along that path right now. You can purchase a device for like $50ish that gives you a few miles of reach in the right conditions and has a decent UI built in (on the latest rev). If you want to run firmware on chips and use UI from your phone over Bluetooth you can run on like $12ish per endpoint.

dccoolgaion The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)

Unfortunately, when cheap goods are sourced outside the US "innovation" usually just means "slave labor" or "flouting environmental regulations".

Not the case for Europe, etc. but most Americans are better off without competing against slave labor so billionaires can become trillionaires while they lose social security, healthcare, etc. I'll pay an extra 20 percent for well-made things that aren't produced by indentured servants.

dccoolgaion Regulating Imports with a Reciprocal Tariff to Rectify Trade Practices

It's also the "lawyer/MBA's fantasy" that you can move the physical "making of things" to place B while the "good innovation jobs" stay in place A. It might work for a _short while_ but eventually the real innovation will happen with iteration in the factory floor in Shenzhen. All the Chinese leaders of the last 30 years were engineers and all of ours were lawyers and MBAs. Go figure.

dccoolgaion Restructuring Announcement

So if you took the deal last year you would have gotten 9 months, now the severance is 9 weeks. Way to reward "loyalty". Good thing we're so smart and better than everyone else and we don't need unions.

dccoolgaion Jeffrey Goldberg on being added to the group chat by Trump Administration

The house GOP guys that dragged Hillary through all those committees are going to be _so mad_ when they find out about this

dccoolgaion Ask HN: Why buy domains and 301 redirect them to me?

It could be a combo of 1 and 3: a competitor (or someone who thinks they might be in the future) ages those domains, then points it to their own product later.

dccoolgaion Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of "Saturday Night Live"

I was recently watching a short history piece about some of the attitudes/egos Lorne had to deal with (e.g. Chevy Chase) and it struck me how similar some of them are to certain "rockstar engineers" I've worked with.

dccoolgaion Updates to H-1B

The U.S. engineer can be fired on a whim immediately and lose their health care (COBRA) and the company that fires them can even contest their unemployment benefits (that the employee paid into) if they feel motivated enough. That's one of the reasons they get paid much more.

dccoolgaion Honeycrisp apples went from marvel to mediocre

Enshittification but for fruit

dccoolgaion Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

It would be an interesting idea if employees at tech companies organized unions _for each other_. Like the guys at Apple ran the union for Microsoft and negotiated for them and visa versa.

dccoolgaion High Levels of Banned PFAS Detected in Hershey's Packaging

Recently, I've found myself trying to avoid any food that touches any plastic mostly for this reason. It's so hard to do - even aluminum drink cans are coated with plastic on the inside, apparently.

dccoolgaion Former President Trump has won the presidency

The "Stupak amendment" was exactly that. There were a group of Dems who wanted concessions on federal funding that were holding out until that amendment went in the bill.

dccoolgaion Show HN: A minimalist (brutalist?) website for sharing all your links

I love this! Great work! Just an idea here, since you already have a form with the `action` set up, you could do some kind of `noscript` section with like 10 preset `input` elements, where the "n+1"th input appears when strings are present for the "nth" ones (using :has or something like that... the internet is lousy with examples of how to do this kind of thing). To go really hardcore "progenhance" you could even wrap that all in a @supports CSS rule. (So "if you don't want to use CSS, here's all 10 inputs. Have fun, sailor.")

dccoolgaion Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

A really level-headed take on what must have been a very tough experience.

I'm reminded of the Star Trek TNG quote "It's possible to commit no mistakes and still lose that's not weakness, that's life."

dccoolgaion FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerr...

"Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade. Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania alone — the three states with the worst gerrymanders in the last redistricting cycle — accounted for 7 to 10 extra Republican seats in the House."

Re: Citizens... I don't even know where to start. Read about the McCain-Feingold Act. It was in place for a decade when Citizens was decided and the only thing it prevented was billionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on electioneering. (Media companies love it: they get more spending on ads).

Before and after McCain-Feingold media companies by law aren't allowed to refuse any political ad - in fact, they have to offer them a slightly _below commercial market rate_! Weirdly, though, they are responsible for the _factual content_ of any ad they run. Election law is really interesting.

dccoolgaion FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

You may have misread "first and worst". Democrats eventually follow suit, but the cherry picked example of CA doesn't account for the partisan overrepresention of Republicans in gerrymandrered congressional districts. It's not even close on a national level.

For Super PACs: again this is from Citizens United which was pushed by Republicans and confirmed by an activist Republican Supreme Court. They own that 100 percent now and forevermore.

Sorry, again I know people want to be "ackshually bothsides" but it doesn't apply here.

dccoolgaion FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

No, from Super PACS (they were the Citizens United in _Citizens United_) to gerrymandering the Republicans do it first and worst. It's not even close. It's nice to think "both sides" but it's misinformed.

dccoolgaion Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?

One promising anecdotal is that I've seen a big uptick in the last 8 weeks of people leaving my current place (not FAANG but you've heard of it) with work secured whereas that wasn't the case much for the last 2 years.

dccoolgaion City of Columbus sues expert who exposed extent of cyberattack

But that "harm" was caused by the City failing to secure the data - not this one person who said "the city failed to secure the data - anyone can get it".

dccoolgaion A $10k stipend is available for anyone moving to Cumberland, MD

When the railroad was the internet, it was really the Silicon Valley of its day. Really makes you think.

dccoolgaion Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit

It would be odd, if the executives weren't paid 300x what the union assembly line workers were...

This "heads they win tails we lose" system is the thing that seems odd. They make millions on the theory that they take responsibility for things... If the union guys aren't doing their job: fix it. If some engineers aren't doing their job: fix it. Otherwise what are they getting paid so much for?

dccoolgaion Should the Hawthorn Be Saved?

If I'm not mistaken, the berries can also be used to make a drink (iirc mixed with lemonade).

dccoolgaion Freenet 2024 – a drop-in decentralized replacement for the web [video]

It was not the first, either: See "Cleveland Freenet" https://cfn.tangledhelix.com/

dccoolgaion With congestion pricing stop, New York City enters new era of economic gridlock

"suburbanites in Buffalo and Albany are not affected by the tax in any meaningful way, and should not have a disproportionate say in a policy that benefits millions of city residents."

But it says in the article itself and pretty much everything about this that "they want to try it in other places next". Are they not supposed to read or react to that part? Can you really blame them for trying to stop this at the point they have the most leverage?

dccoolgaion The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

yeah, I have a subscription there - you can jerry-rig it so 5 or more people can play on that (by creating the table with slots and not having players wait to join) but the game itself gets a little unwieldy with more people

dccoolgaion The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

Dominion is such an amazing game - the complexity that can arise from such a dead simple set of core rules is awesome.

It tends to break down with more than 4 or 5 players - I wish there was a version of it for larger groups to play online.

dccoolgaion The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

I was a big player on isotropic too. (I played Innovation after they shut down Dominion which was also fun).

The one at dominion.games really isn't too bad - not as good as isotropic IMHO but not bad either.

dccoolgaion The man who killed Google Search?

Yes, 100 percent. These dipwads pay themselves 100x salaries. The only way to defend that is that they take 100x responsibility for screwing things up. I would say differently if it was just a rank-and-file IC but this individual has enriched himself greatly. He can endure a little bit of scrutiny for that.

dccoolgaion Tech industry saw 46,000 layoffs in the first two months of 2024

If the Senate passes the Section 174 changes, this situation would reverse quickly and dramatically. I don't think most engineers understand the massive massive difference between "my salary is capitalized and amortized over 5 years" vs. "my salary is fully deductible as an r&d expense". The former is essentially the status quo now, it's probably the _biggest_ contributing reason to the glut in tech layoffs, and also no CEO/CFO is going to tell their rank and file that's why they're getting laid off because of how demotivating that truth is, but that's where the ball lies. The House actually got their act together and passed it - super disappointed that the Senate is sitting on it.

dccoolgaion Post Office lied and threatened BBC over Fujitsu dev whistleblower

IANAL but in my experience, the lawyers would say "doublecheck everything and if we're wrong, pay them so I don't have to spend a lot of effort litigating this". No, I would bet it's a combination of PR flacks and MBA/C-levels who would rather ruin lives than take a clear L on their record.