judah

> people consistently work to minimize their tax burden and the effort scales with their means

That's ok. Given the tax burden also scales with your means, I find this an acceptable equilibrium.

> "If you want to hold people morally responsible..."

I reject the premise that it's immoral to minimize your tax burden within legal boundaries. And I find this kind of techno-moralizing completely hypocritical: we all try to minimize our tax burden, whether individuals or corporations.

This is a tougher question, but the answer is probably not.

For example, would it be OK for a person to say, "That person is from a bad country, so we don't want them"?

Some people want to make this OK to say about Jews but would never say it about Nigerians, for example. Indeed, anti-discrimination laws in the US prohibit discrimination based on national origin.

...would you change the law in your favor if you had the means to do so?

This. How many of us in this thread wouldn't take advantage of legal loopholes to pay less in taxes? How many corporations are doing the same?

I'd guess nearly every citizen tries to pay the least amount in taxes they possibly can.

The NYT article strikes me as disguised envy: "they make more money than us, so let's demonize them for doing something we all do: minimizing our tax burden."

Discriminating against Jews is immoral and reflects the antisemitism of 1930s Germany.

Update: TechWeek has stated the hackathon has been removed from TechWeek's calendar for violating terms of service. https://x.com/Techweek_/status/2105019580993483015?s=20

Earlier this year I went into the Lounge and made a post, so it wasn't totally read-only.

FYI, CodeProject.com appears to have been shut down a few months ago. I used to visit (and contribute) to the site regularly through articles and Q&A answers. When StackOverflow took over, I moved most of my Q&A answers there, and I suspect many others did too.

The site languished until a few months ago when it started serving a blank page. Now it appears totally offline. ;-(

The full thread[0] about how it runs on Wine is quite interesting:

> Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that it uses on WINE (triggered by using /wine). It lives in PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll. This was written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible and would NEVER have happened.

> Most of this code is, as they say, "vibe coded." By that I mean that it has not been thoroughly reviewed, it's more "trust me bro" style. I cannot possibly review 180,000 lines of code, it's just way way way too much. For reference, the rest of Paint.NET is about 700,000 lines of code and I've been working on it for over 20 years. I did thoroughly review any code that had to be changed or added elsewhere in the Paint.NET code base (refactoring and integration points, etc.). Over time I do hope that more of this code will be vetted by real humans and also by more advanced AI models.

[0]: https://forums.paint.net/topic/134563-%F0%9F%8D%B7-extremely...

> "So why keep talking to claim the opposite again, trying to absolve Israel of responsibility again?"

Because Israel winning a war they didn't start is a good thing, actually. Israel fighting until the hostages were released is a good thing.

> "And that old, initial version of their charter, since revised, is still a joke to bring up in attempt to deflect from what IDF and Israeli politicians showed and show us, right now."

Hamas still wants its original goal, it still wants to destroy the Jewish people and institute an Islamic fundamentalist state. Theirs is an antisemitic, genocidal agenda, encoded in the group's founding document and still believed and fought for by its members.

> "repeating such robotic one-liners is just the attempt to evade accountability for collective punishment plus other war crimes and crimes against humanity."

Hamas started a war and lost it. With Hamas thoroughly defeated, their foolish supporters in the West are now relegated to screeching false accusations against Jews online. I'm ok with that.

A real genocide -- for which the term was first coined -- looks like a population whose numbers are still lower some 90 years later. Nazi Germany committed genocide against Jews in Europe in 1939, killing 6 million Jews, and the worldwide Jewish population today still hasn't recovered to pre-1939 levels.

Hamas wants to do the same to Jews today. Israel won't let them. And this is the root cause of conflict in the Middle East.

> "you're behind on your propaganda"

Genuine dialog requires a willingness to engage with others' arguments, assess evidence and offer counterpoints.

That you dismiss the well-documented history and anthropology of the Jewish people as mere propaganda explains your worldview quite well.

If continuous presence in a land doesn't define a people's right to exist as a nation, you know what does?

The ability to create and defend borders.

Israel has that. Israel was invaded on the day it declared independence on May 14th, 1948. Invaded by 9 Arab nations and armies[0], Israel not only successfully defended itself and won the war, it even gained territory from the aggressors.

Israel has a right to exist because its people have had a continuous presence in that land going back longer than the British have been in London, longer than the French have been in Paris.

Israel has a right to exist because it defends its people and its borders and has the approval of the United Nations, UN Resolution 181.

The only people who deny this right of Jews to return to their native homeland? Bonafide neo-Nazis, Islamic fundamentalists, KKK members, and other antisemites.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War

History. Jews have lived in Israel for 3,500 years. They were forced out numerous times by numerous conquerors -- including the Islamic conquest of the 8th century -- but each time, Jews returned.

And there is no genocide taking place, just a war Hamas started and lost. The Gazan population has already rebounded since Hamas started the war in 2023. For comparison with a real genocide, the global Jewish population today has still not rebounded to pre-1939 levels[0].

[0]: https://factually.co/fact-checks/history/jewish-population-b...

It's incredibly cynical to demonize Jews for living in our historic homeland and turning desert sand into thriving cities[0]. It's what we prayed for daily for centuries after being thrown out of Europe. Now it's here, now we're living it, and haters call us by our persecutors' name for doing it.

[0]: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/tel-aviv-sand-plot-1909/

Do you hold the same standard for native Americans?

And yes, people are responsible for their actions. Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist group whose founding charter calls for the violent overthrow of the world's only Jewish state, started a war on October 7th, 2023. Israel fought back and won, and now Hamas is paying dearly for what they did.

Jews have had a continuous presence in Israel for 3,500 years.

Many more returned home after the Holocaust and rebuilt cities, created new ones like Tel Aviv, turned sand into productive land.

> european zionist invaders

I never thought I'd see this kind of blatant anti-semitism on HN.

Jews in Europe were persecuted for hundreds of years as foreign invaders told to go back to their homeland. Immediately after the Holocaust, we realized it was time to return to our own country; we could not rely on the kindness of European nations.

And now that we have returned, we're labelled invaders of our own nation, our historic homeland of 3,500 years. But Jews have been in Jerusalem longer than the British have been in London. We built Tel Aviv from a desert into a modern city. We rebuilt Jerusalem and opened it up to Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

It's wild historic revisionism to claim Jews are stealing Arab lands. There are over 30 Muslim- and Arab-majority nations. There is only a single Jewish nation: our historic, 3,500 year old homeland: Israel.

Having just finished the book of Judges last week, this is fresh on my mind. Finishing the story of Samson, my first reaction, like the author of the post, is that Samson is just stupid. Delilah is likely a Philistine, the nemesis of Samson and the Israelites. Her intention to betray and destroy Samson is hardly hidden in her questioning him. How can Samson be so dumb?

But I thought about it deeper and how some men can be blinded by sex. In my own life, I've seen men stay with the wrong woman, tolerating all kinds of toxicity from their partner, even with all their friends telling them it's the wrong woman for him.

Samson is blinded by sex. He's recorded multiple times going outside of his community, even to enemy territory, to seek out attractive women and prostitutes. Even though Delilah is seemingly open about her intentions to destroy him, he's blinded by sex.

In that light, Samson isn't so dumb; he's just human.

In other words, a boil-the-ocean scheme.

Solutions that require a great many humans to change an ingrained behavior are usually non-starters.

> When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. (TRUE)

Uh oh...

The post author mentions in the comments he doesn't like the politics of the Mullvad and Brave creators.

Brave creator Brendan Eich is also the creator of JavaScript, which powers most of the web today. Eich donated to Republicans and pro-marriage causes, yes.

The author thinks that should disqualify his tooling from the open indie web.

I find that kind of political gatekeeping fit for a bygone and dead era. It’s a point of view that says we must cut off from our lives everyone who disagrees with our politics, even in the slightest.

Commercialized sites like Reddit are on the decline in part because of over-zealous mods driven by politics who ban and silence dissent. Facebook and pre-acquisition Twitter were also focused on silencing dissent; so much that they banned a sitting US President.

But the indie web of the ’90s? It was filled with free speech and live-and-let-live libertarians. Reddit originally was a bastion of free speech, and its founders were libertarian-leaning. Their vision has been polluted by the commercialization and big media takeover of Reddit..

The indie web is not likely to revive for many reasons. But it certainly will not revive with the kind of political gatekeeping the blog author is advocating.

This was really encouraging to read. Appreciate the honesty and vulnerability. Keeo going, keep sober, and I hope your future stays bright.

Same. I've been running a personal blog for over 20 years. Last year, I couldn't find any links to my blog on Google. Went to Google Search Console to find all my links are "Crawled by not indexed", with no reason given.

The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides once said, "You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes."

This runs counter to today's tribalism which says we must reject truth if it comes from someone who voted for our political opponents.

Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app?

I'm a developer who has built and published several apps. I want the biggest possible audience for those apps. Why would I limit those apps to Windows? (Or even to any single platform/OS?)

Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't make sense.

Just build for the web. You can package web apps for all the major app stores using PWABuilder[0], no Electron needed. Just fast, lightweight apps distributed by app stores and accessible from the web.

[0]: https://pwabuilder.com. Disclaimer: I work on this

FYI, Microsoft Store doesn't need an account. You can install apps without being signed in to the Store.

Source: I work on the Microsoft Store.

Everyone thinks they're the good guys, even the bad guys.

Increasingly, there just aren't enough incentives to write native apps.

This isn't a criticism of the article, but rather a tangential observation about why so many people turn to the web instead of using native toolkits to build apps, and why so many of native toolkits feel uninspired and lacking any real innovation.

If I choose to build an app using web tech, I get:

- Universal distribution

- No download and install process

- No "please wait while we update this"

- Users can easily share my app

- Users can link to individual pages within my app

- Users get autofill for forms and passwords and credit cards

- Users can block ads

- Users can scale and zoom my content

- Users can find text on any page in my app

- No "SmartScan couldn't verify if this app is safe" because it wasn't signed with a cert.

- A clearer security model: web apps prompt the user for access to e.g. microphone, camera, or secure disk locations. Native apps can kinda do whatever they want.

Why would I give up all those things to write a native app? A knee-jerk answer is often "performance", but honestly, most web apps load faster than their native counterparts these days.

Another common answer is app store distribution, but web apps can now be published to the major app stores without Electron or other frameworks. Google Play and Microsoft Store both support PWAs, and iOS App Store supports web apps via web view.

There are some scenarios where a native app is warranted. For example, hooking into some native component or OS API; e.g. HealthKit on iOS. But for many apps, the web is good enough.

More than a small kerfuffle. A supply chain attack by a state actor, believed to be China, resulted in undetected malicious code executions from June 2025 to December 2025.

I upvoted it after reading it. I thought there were a number of amusing, counter-intuitive studies in the post. Worth the read.