Hacker News Reader

_DeadFred_on Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash

Just 5% of the population with no hope, no future, and looking at no survival can be extremely disruptive to a society. Take away all the daydream future job options and only leave the difficult labor that breaks peoples bodies by 40 and the youth could become disruptive to society. You can't add in Mana making sure every minute of those jobs left is productive and every dollar paid in wages gets clawed back from workers. People can't function in modern hyper optimizing of all the impacts on workers but no optimization in housing affordability, food affordability, enjoyment options that benefit the average person instead of all optimizations extracting all the previous slack/dollars in life.

You can't optimize away all the slack (in affordability, in time, in things to be enjoyed, in xyz, in 123). You can't optimize away all the future opportunity. You can't optimize away all the daydreams and hope and expect society to look anything like our current society.

_DeadFred_on Starbase, LA

Any day now all those tax cuts are going to pay off and trickle down. Any day.

_DeadFred_on US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons

Wild to see pro-AI datacenter people pushing the vegetarian narrative. For the last 50 years people have found the whole vegetarian narrative annoying (even to those of us who have been vegetarian). Way to pick like the worst positions. Anti-human, anti-jobs, and now (newly added) and preaching to people upset that they should be a vegetarian? For being the smartest people you are horrible at understanding people.

_DeadFred_on Electric shock gloves in use by police departments in Bellevue, Omaha

Yes, because they normalize the escalation to violence/to torture for coercion over de-escalation/actual policing while removing the optics issue of visibly using direct violence/torture on random citizens when using a Taser.

_DeadFred_on Electric shock gloves in use by police departments in Bellevue, Omaha

If time travel gets invented it's going to be on every social forum in the country, which would be grounds to not talk about it on HN I guess?

Authoritarian police state high tech cyberpunk torture devices seem about as 'hack news'ie as something can get.

_DeadFred_on Electric shock gloves in use by police departments in Bellevue, Omaha

The amount of effort non-voters put into justifying not voting is exhausting.

People died so you could vote.

You know how people put up rainbow flags so that others know they have support in the community? Your non-voting, that is the opposite, and you are telling others to feel exactly how your post feeling, doomer, can't change things, and other bs because the community only votes for shit. Your rationalizing does do damage. Put up a rainbow flag, add another vote not in line. Show people they aren't alone.

_DeadFred_on Weather apps are crushing America's small businesses

It means 10% of a region will receive rain that day.

_DeadFred_on Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

Our system has that built in. You can only be punished as to the norm and standards, findings can create precedent for other cases, etc. The workaround is they just use an 'as applied standard' so that it only can 'apply' to the one case due to that case's unique 'circumstances'. They do it all the time to prevent precedents from being set. 'As applied' rules are excluded from setting precedent.

As applied needs to be changed so that it can be included in setting precedent and when considering the norms given out for punishment because right now it's highly abused to prevent establishing legal norms from judicial findings the way our system is supposed to.

_DeadFred_on Gardner police discontinue Flock cameras as license plate readers face scrutiny

I remember when conservatives were anti-mass police surveillance.

_DeadFred_on Gardner police discontinue Flock cameras as license plate readers face scrutiny

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262204 "Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error."

_DeadFred_on Diesel Margins Top $100 a Barrel to Reach Record High as Supply Crunch Grows

No, that is why you vote for the person who isn't the fascist. But that was too much to ask in the last election. Just not voting for the fascist isn't enough. You need to support/improve/give energy to the alternative. Instead too many chose to just not vote for the better alternative and now here we are.

_DeadFred_on I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore

Telling that op didn't respond to this simple question.

_DeadFred_on First human trials of designer protein therapies stun US neuroscientists

You bring up murder and atrocities in order to.... just wave away murder and atrocities? Gross. Keep sweeping for horror.

_DeadFred_on As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value

Bob is the town mayor. The police want XYZ. The police request from flock a detail breakdown of everywhere that Bob went in the last 5 years (this example is after flock has been around a while) and then feeds that into AI looking for patterns. The police find a mistress. The police now get everything they want for the rest of mayor Bob's term.

_DeadFred_on As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value

This has always been how the dystopian sci-fi future works. If you can get just get to 'the <future/decayed sounding name> zone' you are outside the big brother tracking.

It's also why a big brother system will always become full on/more and more big brother, because it needs to suck up and remove all the dead ends.

_DeadFred_on Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

In the United States legal system, when you take a plea because the Government was threaning you with a 20 year sentence the judge requires in court and under oath for you to state that you were not coerced/pressured in any way to take the plea (because pleas wouldn't be valid if the Government pressured you into them and into signing away your rights).

Before you push back at your work you have to consider possible loss of work and therefore housing/medical insurance/food.

The entire US system is designed around baked in blackmail of the individual into conforming. Not surprising at all to see the airline turn the no fly list into that pressure, it's the main technique we know to motivate people in the USA.

_DeadFred_on The Iran War Is a Whole New Level of Quagmire for the US

Look at the quality of discussion here. It's all just 'America is dead/dying'. Nothing of note. No talking about the crazy inflation in Iran, the government officials discussions on how they can't afford replacing their naval routes with land routes. The current distress in Iran about raising the subsidized gas prices, and how Iran is using more gas than they are creating/importing. No awareness/comparison/context of understanding of Vietnam and it's much greater impact on the Nation/it's understanding of self/understand of it's ability to project power.

These is zero serious discussion on HN Iran threads, and anyone that posts not in line gets voted dead so just gave up on posting to them yet the people that complain about topics getting flagged dead never once complain when an entire view/side/political thought just get's voted dead instead of discussed nor raise the quality level of the discussion to make it no longer flag worthy.

This thread's content/quality level totally 100% deserves to be flagged.

_DeadFred_on The Iran War Is a Whole New Level of Quagmire for the US

Did you miss the 1970s and the impact of Vietnam (that lasted through to the 90s for that generation)? The malaise about American from the 70s through the 80s? The corporate raiders of the 80s and the destruction of so many Americans lives in that period? The rust belt? Many many Americans of older generations losing their pensions because of Wall Street firms bs destruction of companies? The brain drain from the majority of the US into a few metro areas?

These are all things huge parts of the USA has dealt with for generations at this point.

_DeadFred_on First human trials of designer protein therapies stun US neuroscientists

What? Tiananmen Square was not more benevolent. When I worked in the bay area we had a ton of Chinese Americans who happened to be college students when Tiananmen happened who then stayed instead of going home. Do you people no longer work with them? Never talk to them? What is going on.

Also

https://www.google.com/search?q=china+execution+van

is pure dystipia.

_DeadFred_on First human trials of designer protein therapies stun US neuroscientists

So much better https://www.google.com/search?q=china+execution+van

_DeadFred_on Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

But China is already in decline before reaching this ascendancy.

I think new models will result in new structures, not just a switch from the US to China.

_DeadFred_on Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

As sophacles put it so well:

"Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262204

_DeadFred_on Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262204

"Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error."

_DeadFred_on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

No, cheap books came from the invention of cheap printing. But the quality of works was going down because printers were just printing with zero copyright protections. Copyright is what brought the wealth of works worth reading that were then printed using cheap printing. If the only money is in private works for private libraries, that is where the quality stuff is going to go.

Making the avenue of creating for the average person also the avenue for the most income was huge in creating our modern literature landscape.

_DeadFred_on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

Disagree. The printing machine was killing the industry allowing copies where people earned nothing. Copyright was created to ensure quality works existed to be copied.

_DeadFred_on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

Actually no. The original copyright laws were created in part because of the realities of needed profit motive to have high value writing done, time consuming compilation work done. It was even titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". The thousands of years writing you are talking about was often funded by patrons, who kept the output in their private libraries to show off (and maybe lend out) for prestige. It was a horrible limitation of knowledge and ideas. Much worse than the profit motive, copyright based system that came after that spawned a new age of knowledge in which everyone had cheap access, and those that didn't had access to the (no longer just private) libraries.

I'm sure the billionaire class would love a return to patronage based libraries, NDAs on authors of books, and the elitism they would feel with a return to private libraries locking away all kinds of knowledge that would happen if patronage become the only way authors could make money (such as with AI just regurgitating their works, or if the stupid 'do away with copyright' people got their way).

_DeadFred_on Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse

One California town found Flock's license plate cameras were wrong 71% of the time

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/06/california-town-says-flo...

_DeadFred_on Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium

Bankruptcies normally impact whole families. So 530,000 bankruptcies could easily be 4,000,000 people impacted, per year. Over the last 20 years that is over 20% of the population.

_DeadFred_on Why do we assume everyone should be working?

This was tried and we ended up with intellectual property rights because encouraging the creation of works was more important than having zero/poor quality works but a free for all.