Hacker News Reader

garciasnon Too many men suffering in silence, national health report finds (Canada)

Considering the parent was flagged, nope.

You may not have read what they wrote and I responded to, but you just invalidated what I was responding to by saying “wo(men)”. Yes; PEOPLE can be hurtful, but the parent was specifically talking about WOMEN.

garciasnon USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons

There are plenty of 'good enough' options that are free; just ignore the USPS' offerings unless you ABSOLUTELY have to match them 1:1 for business reasons.

garciasnon Too many men suffering in silence, national health report finds (Canada)

Someone hurt you; I'm sorry for that. But, you're making sweeping generalizations about ~50% of the world's behavior and, while this may be your perception, I think you could use some genuine therapy to help w/the struggles you clearly are facing.

E: I am so baffled how the HN community could be so very anti-female here that they would advocate for this sort of commentary by downvoting.

garciasnon America's economy is becoming zero-sum

> The real concern here is that, for many people, paid employment simply doesn't look like a viable way to earn a living anymore, so they feel the need to play high-risk, high-reward games in the first place.

This cannot possibly be the motivation; gambling is very rarely a worthwhile investment.

Manipulation through advertising, mobile app behavior alteration, and ease of access are the sole motivators here.

garciasnon Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory

It already exists: Glassdoor.

garciasnon Show HN: A working Nintendo in ~1GB of Qwen weights

I think you may be conflating two different arguments.

I'm not disputing productivity improvements can lead to smaller teams, particularly in a shareholder-driven org; that's a separate conversation, IMO. The fact I work at an employee-owned organization, currently, I suppose I'm simultaneously a worker and an influential shareholder.

I was trying to say, running counter to what is frequently mentioned on HN about FAANG Eng Leaders, that I don't equate engineering success with growing headcount. I've always preferred building small, highly effective teams that can accomplish more without needing to grow, just for the sake of growing headcount. My want to do more with the same number of people isn't an argument that headcount won't shrink. It's an argument that growing headcount was never my measure of success in the first place.

No that you asked, but, my measures of success are: are my engineers happy (being that many of them have worked with me at least one company before, and one at 4, I feel they are); are we playing with the latest technologies; and are we learning new things every day?

garciasnon Show HN: A working Nintendo in ~1GB of Qwen weights

Because I don't live in a world where my team needs to grow for me to feel more successful? My teams have been small and tight-knit at every place I've been an Eng leader. I left a job with 13 engineers and they're at >90 now, apparently doing less; but, that's just what I hear second-hand.

I want to do MORE with the same amount of folks.

garciasnon Show HN: A working Nintendo in ~1GB of Qwen weights

Two years ago: nice toy.

18 months ago: it can do some things but it’s generally not useful.

12 months ago: wow; this can write ok code that a human has to do a lot of review to make sure it’s ok.

6 months ago: holy fuck I’m shipping great stuff with only the occasional redo.

3 months ago: Jesus Christ this is actually pretty fucking great. I have to work entirely differently; becoming a manager of my single agent launching sub agents.

1 month ago: my god I am shipping more, faster, and more useful than ever.

Today: we have fleets of highly effectively domain expert agents working entirely autonomously and shifting between fleets depending on domain, available usage remaining, and we’re shipping 10x with 100% better reviews than before—expanding by the day and self-improving its own harness.

—-

Next week: the agents will prioritize code golf.

The week after that: everything is written in ASM.

We’ll come full circle in 3y

e: fyi; this is my personal progression with LLMs.

garciasnon Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop

And this is when you get on each and every single school board meeting agenda and sit in on every single public meeting available.

You ask them repeatedly why there’s a delay in public record release. You ask them all privately at every meeting for an update.

Be patient. Be polite. Be kind. But be fucking absolutely persistent; especially at the public meetings.

They want to be a fucking obstructionist? No problem; be persistent and public. School board members are not generally career politicians; they’re largely single issue members who leave once their kids are done with the district or they move on to another office or area.

School board members don’t like political pressure from the public. School district administrators are largely shielded from the public. Make them feel the pressure.

garciasnon Woman charged with computer fraud due to scam CashApp account being in her name

I absolutely despise the world we live in where the default answer to everything is effectively “no.”

I wish we could get to a point where we default to “yes” and find solutions rather than making it easier to say “no.”

garciasnon Where Wealth Is Moving in America (2023)

They're not 'hospitable,' they're 'advantageous' due to being lower tax rates. If anything, lower tax rates make places less 'hospitable' in the long run.

garciasnon The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving

There is a downvoting campaign going on too. This points to potential manipulation.

garciasnon The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving

Reading reviews about almost any movie is like this. But, I expect the comments on HN to be more genuine than I’m witnessing in this thread.

It almost as if the comment section is filled with HN-trained LLM-backed bots intentionally being absurdly vague; just like the trailer last month was.

I am seriously concerned this is all some sort of ingenious marketing ploy to get people to watch the movie instead of just saying, “I genuinely don’t give a shit about Holmes any more now than I did a decade ago.”

garciasnon /dev/null: social network for developers

Based on what I read, it was effectively that; just like all social networks.

garciasnon How Tabasco Became the World's Hot Sauce

That's interesting. I find most of those that you listed, aside from Valentina (I am NOT a fan), as something I can put on basically everything--and actively do.

Out of the hot sauces, Tabasco is my least used these days. 30y ago, it was really all that was available; but, now, we have such a wide and varied option set at just about every restaurant that I find myself almost never using it.

garciasnon Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Buddy; governments move over decades and centuries, not minutes and hours. You cannot measure the effect of government action in the immediate like you want to.

The fact that the government is moving to collect these data as well as partner with third-party private industry (e.g., Palantir) to avoid direct data collection that runs counter to current/settled law, you have to begin to piece together the future.

Regardless of your apparent desire to avoid accountability for the US government's actions, potential or actual, these are truths for which the citizenry need to protect themselves against both by their own individual actions as well as the collective actions of their voting behaviors.

garciasnon Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Yes? https://www.law.georgetown.edu/privacy-technology-center/res...

garciasnon The Corporate Happiness Treadmill and the Case for Doing Less

None of this meets the definition of ‘slave’ and any claims to the contrary are disingenuous at best.

garciasnon The Corporate Happiness Treadmill and the Case for Doing Less

> Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

This is not only offensive, but dehumanizing, reductive, and the co-opting of trauma in a hyperbolic way.

No one reading this is a fucking slave to their company. They may very well be in a third world country or a repressive regime; but, let’s be honest: those folks are not the intended audience here.

This is more of the, “quiet quitting trope,” rephrased in an objectively horrendous way.

garciasnon Germany transforms former coal mines into Europe's largest lake landscape

Stumbled across this one later in my recommended videos that I like even better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC267JdGN24

garciasnon Germany transforms former coal mines into Europe's largest lake landscape

The Minnesota Iron Range is full of these and they're absolutely beautiful; terrifyingly deep, however.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAL_d-5FsGQ - Tioga Pit Mine (225' deep)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Mine_Pit_Lake (450' deep)

garciasnon US man given prison sentence for bot-farming music streams

Generating the AI music wasn't illegal. Using bots to inflate /listens/ of an AI-generated song probably is against a platform's TOS, but isn't inherently illegal.

However, using bots to collect royalties on the songs generated definitely fits within the definition of wire fraud as he was using electronic communications (i.e., the internet), to carry out a scheme to defraud streaming services of money.

garciasnon Beauty in DVD Menus

I used to specifically re-rip DVDs that had menus. They were hideously designed, overly complex, or just pointless when I just wanted the content to start when I put the disc in. Why?

1. Because it would cause confusion with my kids when they were trying to watch movies in the car as toddlers.

2. It was an annoyance when we were watching a movie at home.

I am finding a similar annoyance w/AppleTV's content ad/preview, recap, and intro skips. Like, for fucks sake, just play the episode already.

garciasnon Book recommendations from Hacker News?

It always blows my mind that Lonesome Dove is recommended across so many different communities, especially nerd-related ones like HN. I read ~100 books a year on average and it continues to top my all time favorites list; but, in all honesty, I cannot believe it appeals to the wide audience it does due to its content.

That said, here are some of my all time favorites (no particular order):

01. Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)

02. Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)

03. A Painted House (John Grisham)

04. A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles)

05. The Great Alone (Kristin Hannah)

06. All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

07. Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer)

08. The First Law Trilogy (Joe Abercrombie)

* this encompasses three long books; however, I consider them one long epic novel

09. Mailman (Stephen Starring Grant)

10. Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver)

11. Lessons in Chemistry (Bonnie Garmus)

12. Hench (Natalie Zina Walschots)

13. Personal Librarian (Marie Benedict)

14. In Cold Blood (Truman Capote)

15. Life We Bury (Allen Eskens)

16. Ordinary Grace (William Kent Krueger)

17. God of the Woods (Liz Moore)

18. Maid (Nita Prose)

19. The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell (Robert Dugoni)

20. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (James McBride)

garciasnon California closed the Montana license plate loophole

I’m sure they were able to put pressure on her in order to stay silent; or, they had a gag order placed on her.

If she was doing it for him, she was likely doing it for others and thus it was in her best interests to stay silent for one to protect the revenue stream from the others.

garciasnon Big Oil asks Supreme Court to kill climate lawsuits before trial

The Oil Companies are attempting to avoid this by claiming States do not have the authority to bring claims against them for pollution.

The States, figuring this would be TOCs stance, are attempting to argue this is not about regulation, but about collection of damages as a result of TOCs deceptive practices about the realities of pollution-created downstream effect.

With Alito recused, there is a potential for this to land as a split decision which would allow the current lawsuit to proceed.

garciasnon Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'

https://networks.imdea.org/your-cars-tire-sensors-could-be-u...

Sort of. The problem isn’t necessarily the speed but the range. But it could be used. Bluetooth and WiFi tracking would be more likely in most real world scenarios.

garciasnon U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels

You're going to murder people over a $126MM fraud? I know you're trolling and will eventually be flagged and downvoted into oblivion, but come on; that's just absurd.

garciasnon 'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us

Your entire premise is one that's missing important context. Based on the numbers you provide, you're probably in Chicago or Dallas, maybe Austin, but that's pushing more like 400K.

Homes in the median are generally not viable unless you don't have a family or don't care about quality schools. In my city (90K), two houses that are identical but divided by the school district boundary between rank #1 and rank #265 out of 359 is a difference of $300K. One would be within the median and the other well above.

And let me be clear: ALL HOUSING IS A SCAM FINANCIALLY. Rent screws you one way and housing screws you another.

garciasnon Meta VR Glasses

From the video they have on their site: watching movies in places where you normally would stare at a tiny screen; they also show folks using virtual floating keyboards in front of a VR desktop to work.

So: no problems solved.