Hacker News Reader

yummypainton Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production

Most people driving trucks in the US don't use them as trucks, especially in cities. I think most people willing to take on a $1000/mo truck payment for their personal vehicle in the current economic climate are doing so for social reasons anyway. Whether the electric trucks on offer at the same price can compete on that front is a much more slippery question.

If we can get some affordable electric trucks in the US, it will be very interesting to see how the more rational segments of the market react once they are no longer priced out.

yummypainton Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?

Digital signage displays might be the only out of the box solution at this point. I wish there were more open source TV firmware options in the spirit of dd-wrt

yummypainton ‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)

The nature of that ID is essential. If it used to authenticate someone for voting, which is a RIGHT, then every citizen must have a RIGHT to possess that ID. Not only that, but obtaining the ID must not pose any encumbrance beyond the effort to vote.

Americans manifestly do not have a right to possess a driver's license, it's a privilege. The process for obtaining one requires expenditure of time, energy, and money.

The only form of government "ID" that could presently meet the bar is social security cards, as every citizen has one by right. That is obviously a bad idea. There is no "move fast and break things" when it comes to democratic process. If something as important as this cannot be done right, then it should not be done. The right to vote is sacred and cannot be infringed upon, period.

yummypainton Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier

Try Qobuz. We switched off Spotify over a year ago and it's been better in every way.

yummypainton I know why the mathematicians weep

It's more important now than ever to hold onto the fact that human beings have inherent value. This exists independent of their ability to generate wealth for an employer. I know HN loves a technical solution for every problem, and so do I, but this is a political problem requiring political solutions.

yummypainton AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware

You will have to look at the candidates in your area and do your due diligence. Its unlikely a given candidate will be perfect, but there is generally tremendous differences between them as far as overall posture on privacy and surveillance.

yummypainton AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware

If such a thing were passed, it can't apply retroactively. But yes, google people would go to jail when they inevitably flout it as they are accustomed to doing. We should make this happen.

People in the US have a unique window of opportunity starting TODAY (Oct 2026) in many places with early voting. I implore everyone who is able to vote in the midterms to do so.

yummypainton Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking?

The US legal system is coin operated

yummypainton Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things

Where would they do it? There is not remotely enough available land near where most people live that isn't privately controlled.

What would they eat? Getting enough calories from hunting for it to become a frequent part of everyone's life is currently a thermodynamic impossibility. On top of that, food webs are actively collapsing or have already.

yummypainton Is AI Killing the Value of Human Writing?

As the article says, the actual semantic information to be communicated must still come from the prompt. While an LLM might improve the organization and prose wrapped around it, it doesn't add true information itself. I think historically we have conflated these things but these new pressures are forcing them apart. Writing style is going to become more information dense.

yummypainton Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists

Simply adopting reasonable labeling rules proven in other countries would fix a lot of problems in general. Japan has a great system for beverages. It wouldn't hurt if we adopted their safety standards around eggs either. https://xn--btro1dr1yrpow7m.com/en/what-are-the-rules-for-ju...

yummypainton US proposes $100k charge for international students to do post-graduate work

When we hit the academic brain drain tipping point in the US, talent isn't going to just start trickling away, it's going to be like a greedy cup siphon. Countries preparing to attract these people now will reap a windfall the US has carefully cultivated over a century. This administration has demonstrated the federal government cannot be trusted to keep it's commitments and long-term plans, and it will now take a generation of stability to disabuse people of that notion.

yummypainton PS5 Jailbreaks Are Escalating at an Unprecedented Pace

I'm wondering about a reverse engineering of the whole game with peer-to-peer and self-hosted server options. Grand theft Grand theft auto

yummypainton Functional Ultrasound Imaging (fUSI) from scratch

I wonder if you could image through the eyeballs? Someone must have tried it

yummypainton Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics

Like Disney World

yummypainton What would a serious AI product look like?

I think this is getting at the inherent tension between what people actually want from AI, and what makes a profitable AI product. People want control and data in their own hands, companies want the opposite. Improving an AI product means making it behave less like a product. So why are we hunting for products? We should be going after solutions without predication on profitability for some party.

yummypainton Palantir's Co-Founder Wants Us Less Judgmental About Deadly Iran School Strike

There was a time when it appeared nuclear war was the future of warfare. Thank goodness we refused accept that as fact.

yummypainton Splash-free urinals: Design through physics and differential equations

I was expecting you to say the opposite thing! In North Carolina they are so low that the stream angle ends up much steeper than intended, like trying to use a boy's urinal. I'm tall, but still fit normally in cars etc. There should really be more variation in mounting height, or bring back those tall ones that work universally. I guess it's cheaper to make them small but mounting the flush handle below penis height is asking for trouble.

yummypainton Black Hole of Los Alamos: Seller of surplus nuclear research materials (2011)

My Dad and I used to drive down there when I was a kid. We would call ahead to make sure they would be open and Ed would write a welcome message for us on the whiteboard. Put my first decent vacuum systems together with parts from there that would have otherwise been cost prohibitive. Such a great place to look around in.

yummypainton Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

The x-axis being log scale by default visually exadurates the effect if you are thinking about it in terms of area under the curve. This confused me also.

yummypainton VMs won't contain cyber-capable agents

Until now, human dev time has arguably been the bottleneck preventing more use of formal verification methods in software. Making it possible will likely involve completely rearchitecting many components, but that has become more realistic now. It would be interesting to see how close we can get to formally verified Linux if we are willing to make compromises on complexity

yummypainton Who Needs DRAM? We Have Fiber

Reminiscent of acoustic memory on early calculators

yummypainton SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

In NC there is a state rule that bans HOAs and local authorities from stopping people building cisterns to catch and store rainwater

yummypainton Cyberdecks, going analog, and convivial technology

For general compute they will lose to a laptop, but that isn't supposed to be their purpose. I think the best use cases require extra hardware that would make a laptop too bulky or awkward. For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment. The traditional computer capabilities are sort of extra. Any sort of diagnostic "cart" with a dedicated computer and a bunch of test equipment could be a candidate for miniaturization.

yummypainton BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork

That's what I'm asking... Why not? I'm alluding to what seems to be a culturally self-imposed refusal to seek legal remedies among makers and hackers. We have Jeff Geerling (who I generally like and agree with) disappointingly referring to the GPL as a "social contract," as though it can have no legal force behind it.

The biggest companies in the world use licenses to weild power over people, but heaven forbid people use the same body of law to their benefit.

yummypainton BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork

Where is the lawyer involvement? Why has no TRO been filed to prevent Bambu from selling in the US? This is a problem with a legal solution, yet we collectively just wring our hands and wish for a technological solution.

yummypainton The death of the brick and mortar toy store

This is exactly the business model of Poor Richards in Colorado Springs. They have a pizzarea, book store, and toy store. It's been around for decades and is a local institution.

yummypainton Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada

Because the procedure for changing the constitution is in the constitution. That would have to be followed at least once.

https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text

yummypainton Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations

There is something about the asymmetry of effort that is particularly galling. If a person couldn't be bothered to write something, then I can't be bothered to read it.

If someone contributes a software component, they are responsible for it whether they developed it properly or slop coded. The difference is that I will refuse to look at the slop, much less debug it or help with troubleshooting.

People who blindly copy paste from agents are completely replaceable, and should be at the top of the list when layoff season hits. They drag the whole org down.

yummypainton Microsoft to stop sending SMS codes for personal accounts

Recent updates to Microsoft account sign-in now support passkeys with device biometric authentication, making phishing virtually impossible.

So according to Microsoft biometric authentication will make people immune to being tricked. Pretty ironic stance.