Hacker News Reader

winter_blueon America’s incarceration rate is in decline

> Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "meatball", and a list of medical conditions which all scream lifestyle change.

> Meanwhile at trail running meets, I bump into 60 year olds still giving some 35 year olds a run for their money.

Yup, this is very much key.

winter_blueon Microsoft Is Deleting Old Drivers from Windows Update and It Might Break Your PC

There’s no such thing as an “old version” for an in-kernel driver.

As the kernel is maintained, polished, and updated, all drivers are maintained as well.

Proprietary blobs otoh, will break quickly, and have to constantly keep up with new kernel releases.

winter_blueon Microsoft Is Deleting Old Drivers from Windows Update and It Might Break Your PC

If the driver is in the kernel tree, then the Linux community maintains the driver for you for free basically (if a refactor of some internal kernel API is done, all drivers are updated), but once the driver is old enough, new kernel releases might sometimes removes those old drivers (and even drop support for old CPUs as well).

Closed-source bobs are closely tied to the kernel version, since the kernel’s internal ABI and API is constantly changing. There is some documentation on why here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

winter_blueon My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

The author has a mini PC plugged into the EcoFlow as well. That uses the bulk of the power.

winter_blueon Programming Language Design in the Era of LLMs: A Return to Mediocrity?

I think perhaps automatic translators might help mitigate some of this.

Even perhaps training a separate new neural network to translate from Python/Java/etc to your new language.

winter_blueon Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)

> many companies ignored the rule change

How does that even work? You’re saying many companies committed tax fraud by ignoring the law change and continued to deduct software developer salaries as they had in the past?

I find that hard to believe.

winter_blueon In the US, not even $11,000 a month can buy you dignity at the end of your life

Why is no one starting a new care facility that isn’t as profit-driven / greed-motivated?

winter_blueon Earth's clouds are shrinking, boosting global warming

I just noticed that the author of the paper has a @nasa email address, and I feel sad thinking that this kind of research won't be happening anymore soon, because Republicans don't like the truth and prefer to lie / deny / obscure the truth about climate change, rather than face it sincerely head-on.

winter_blueon How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack

The U.S. Supreme Court has never struck down a constitutional amendment, that is true.

But in other common law countries, like India, whose legal system is very similar to the U.S., have had cases where the Supreme Court struck down a constitutional amendment.

For more on this, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_structure_doctrine

With regard to the Indian case above: while I support the goal of judgement, as the goal of the judgment itself is good, the idea of a Supreme Court overriding a constitutional amendment is quite startling.

The supreme courts of several other countries, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Uganda have copied this doctrine.

Who knows when the U.S. Supreme Court will decide to copy this doctrine as well.

winter_blueon How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack

The scotus would need to strike down the 22nd amendment. Even with as horribly morally bankrupt of a scotus as we have now, I don’t think they’d sink to the low of striking down the 22nd.

winter_blueon How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack

It might be better to say “Republicans” instead of “Americans” as you do. Americans are a deeply divided group of people: one-third republicans, one-third democrats, and one-third apathetic.

The one-third of Americans who are republicans put Trump in power, and are indirectly responsible for what’s happening — and the vast majority of them of course wholeheartedly fully support these violations of the First Amendment.

The democrats of course oppose all of these things.

Please stop using “Americans” as if this were one solid group of people who share the same views.

winter_blueon Boycott IETF 127

> the FAA imposes a hefty fee to flights over the country

The overland fee is $61.75 per 100 nautical miles (and it's a lower $26.51 per 100 nautical miles)[1]. Is this really that high? Let's say a flight from Canada to Mexico has to cross 1600 nautical miles overland the US. That would cost 16 x 61.75 = $988. Isn't that pretty low? On a flight with 200 passengers, that's an extra $5 per passenger.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/international_aviation/overf...

winter_blueon Watching nature scenes can reduce pain, new study shows

I can anecdotally confirm this is true.

winter_blueon Big LLMs weights are a piece of history

Apple Intelligence has an LLM that runs locally on the iPhone (15 Pro and up).

But the quality of Apple Intelligence shows us what happens when you use a tiny ultra-low-wattage LLM. There’s a whole subreddit dedicated to its notable fails: https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleIntelligenceFail/top/?t=all

One example of this is “Sorry I was very drunk and went home and crashed straight into bed” being summarized by Apple Intelligence as ”Drunk and crashed”.

winter_blueon Tesla sales in Europe down 45% in January

I agree.

winter_blueon DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

> absent a progressive corporate tax structure

AFAIK, we had a progressive corporate tax structure prior to Trump’s 2017 TCJA bill.

winter_blueon UK's hardware talent is being wasted

I wouldn’t mind an indoor farm, if they come up with some system to control the smell.

I don’t think there should be any restriction on what people can build.

You could have a rule on bad smell, that applies to equally to everyone, so a farm would be legal, if they can control the smell.

Egg-laying chicken farm in between two multi-family units would be perfectly legal. I see this as a good thing.

winter_blueon I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

I’m not Peter, but you can renew your re-entry permits forever, in 1-year increments. You can even have them delivered to the U.S. consulate abroad. It’s a hassle since they only give you 1-year renewals after a certain period of time (with initially getting 2-year ones), but it’s better than losing the status.

winter_blueon UK's hardware talent is being wasted

> Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy.

They could do this is one fell swoop with a single bill by the Parliament that dissolves these local councils, and land owners the right (and freedom) to build whatever they want on land they own.

Building safety codes would still apply; but zoning permitting could be erased in one fell swoop with a single bill.

winter_blueon I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Recent amendments to work visa rules published in the federal register (and that took effect on January 17, 2025) enables being a founder of a company while on an H-1B, and perhaps might similarly allow that for a TN, but Peter Roberts or another expert would likely know best about it.

winter_blueon Researchers design wearable tech that can sense glucose levels more accurately

Or maybe just a signal processor is being rebranded as AI.

Soon a Fast Fourier Transform will be rebranded as AI as well.

winter_blueon Updates to H-1B

Isn’t housing extremely unaffordable in the UK though? That erases a lot of these benefits, doesn’t it? (I’m aware this is true of a lot of HCOL areas in the U.S. as well.)

winter_blueon Updates to H-1B

I don’t know if you’re making a joke or not, but getting NHS isn’t worth $200,000 USD per year.

Most Americans get employer-provided health insurance, which costs money (the amount specified in the DD section of the W2), and its often in the $1500/month range. That DD amount isn’t part of your income or the salary Glassdoor mentions. It’s an added benefit of top of that.

In the UK and elsewhere, around $500/month/person in taxes pays for your healthcare. That’s essentially subtracted from your income. So the uk income is even lower when you subtract the taxes the NHS costs.

winter_blueon Updates to H-1B

Yup, I’m in Canada as well, and I was quite a bit thrown off by the redirected Canadian pay range.

For anyone curious, the Canadian pay range is:

Base pay $66K - $95K/yr

$79K/yr Average base pay

The low end of that base pay ($66k CAD) converts to $45k USD.

While the U.S. pay range is:

Total pay range: $266K - $463K/yr

$346K/yr Median total pay

Pay breakdown $137K - $223K/yr Base pay $129K - $240K/yr Additional pay

winter_blueon The RAM Myth

To/from what sort of devices could the GPU read or write at 1TB/sec, besides main memory?

The fastest consumer SSDs top out at several GB/sec (I guess with massive hardware RAID they could be faster, but not sure if they’d be 1TB/sec fast).

Even a network adapter that does 10 Gbit/sec is only recently becoming slightly more common for the average consumer. Not sure if any consumer adapters in the 10 or 1Tbit/sec range exist at all.

winter_blueon Rust's Two Kinds of 'Assert' Make for Better Code

If you created a custom NonZero type, how would the Rust compiler figure out how to optimize that?

How would one communicate properties/traits of a custom type (like a non-zero unit) that a compiler can leverage to optimize (in general, for any programming language)?

winter_blueon Trump wins presidency for second time

And it was just high inflation (albeit still lower than the inflation in other countries). Not the depression Weimar Germany had experienced in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

winter_blueon Hacker News Data Map [180MB]

Doesn't GitHub Pages have a CDN?

winter_blueon Using static websites for tiny archives

What do you use to sync Obsidian on your phone? Is it syncthing as well?

winter_blueon UCLA professor says he's homeless due to low pay

You mean an artificial economic situation that NIMBYs have created by making it nearly impossible to build new homes.

It’s not a fair situation from any perspective. NIMBYs are slowly destroying California’s heart, and turning it into a place where only people with a 100k+ (and soon 200k+) income can afford a home.