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dfxm12on The case for physical media ownership

If your argument for piracy being unethical revolves around royalties, consider Hollywood accounting and how studios are actually screwing the creative types, regardless of sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Also consider that the rights to works aren't necessarily held by their creators.

dfxm12on Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself

It's not going to reinvent itself when it is compromised of few, like minded people. Government would need to step in, but the current US admin is in bed with media, so we'll be here a while, at least.

dfxm12on Spying on kids to save kids from spying is stupid

If you don't think a checkbox saying "I am 13 or older" is adequate, with all the behavioral tracking available to say Meta, they can tell well enough. OpenAI talks about this too: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-age-prediction/

Knowing who someone is in general is different from having a photo of their face or government ID confirmation.

dfxm12on What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance

i am convinced that enough people in power know it, too, but see this as their chance to get the full-dystopia version rolled out.

Correct. The goal here isn't "to save kids". That's just one of the Horsemen of the Infocalypse [0] used to market taking away our freedom.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

dfxm12on Never Give Them Your Face

and If I need to use a service now, I will give them whatever they want to get past the hurdle and use the service.

Need or want? We need very few of the services looking for our government ID. Also, this should not be the only way of pushing back. We can support the EFF and politicians who are actively fighting against this or candidates who vow to. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-ag...

dfxm12on Rent collections are down in New York

The landlord can divest themselves of the property. It's also ok if people lose money on investments. I don't think you have to feel especially bad for landlords.

dfxm12on How to feed a dictator

Why? It seems like you take umbrage with a particular quote, but you understand that the author of the article didn't make this statement, right?

dfxm12on I used sound waves to make espresso. It could cut coffee‑brewing energy use by ¾

I've noticed a lot of people lend the name espresso to things that obviously aren't espresso. Is there any reason for this?

I get the sense that these people think calling something espresso is a mark of quality, but it's just a brewing method like any other...

dfxm12on "No Feigning Surprise"

It seems arbitrary. Surprise (genuine or feigned, it can be hard to tell) can be followed up with ridicule, excitement, encouragement, etc. That's what's actually impactful, surely...

dfxm12on The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

Of course I've found some too good to be true auto listings on cl (so I stayed away), but this is a weird thing to fixate on when there are scams on Amazon, fb marketplace, newspaper classifieds, etc.

As an aside, I think getting involved in making people prove they live at an address to cl is not the right way to do anything, especially in the context of cl, where many listings may have many different people who live together at that same address.

dfxm12on The Harajuku Moment

The bit preceding this quote is pretty relevant to the discussion, specifically about BMR and generally making the right decisions using a data driven approach.

You try to stay under 2000 calories. Why? Is this number backed with data and helping drive you towards a specific goal?

Consider that the author's BMR might have been higher than you think.

dfxm12on Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

The famous cheap (€1?) houses in Sicily (and other places with similar schemes) likely do not meet most of these criteria. It's not like real estate is cheap in Giardini Naxos...

dfxm12on Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

Yes, of course, but consider the source. Who do you think this article, about literal rent seeking behavior is representing? Certainly not the working class...

dfxm12on A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

You don't have to be charged with anything to be arrested. Kennedy's wikipedia page suggests they were released from jail, implying LEO decided they actually committed no crime (and certainly weren't charged). If you're really curious, maybe the jurisdiction has public arrest records, but this assumes that the cops were doing everything by the book, which is not always an apt assumption.

My guess is that towns and leo get, let's say, passionate, when a big tourism draw gets defaced, or when something can get more dangerous, but cooler heads eventually prevailed.

dfxm12on Keygen.music

The Dunning-Kruger effect will grow with AI adoption.

dfxm12on How we made hit video game Prince of Persia

It's more popular, especially with the subsequent games and media franchise. FWIW, I hear people talk about Flashback's predecessor, Another World, a lot. That is also a popular game.

dfxm12on I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys

"The default state is the traditional key function"

What is the traditional F-key function? Today, on my laptop, I probably use the media controls most, then the brightness controls, then fn+f5 to refresh a page.

Is it worth defaulting to some tradition from a time when computers didn't play media or have dimmable displays? How many apps recognize the full set of f keys anyway?

dfxm12on Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

Does dice require that you buy tickets through their app and you're required to present the app as your ticket? That sucks too.

dfxm12on Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

If you like specific acts, sure. Or maybe some cities take independent venues more seriously than others. Growing up, ok I missed out on getting Metallica tickets because I didn't want to support clear channel (or Live Nation, or TM, etc...), but I still was able to see plenty of amazing metal bands in indie venues.

Another interesting note: Weird Al is playing three venues within driving distance from me. Only one of them is selling tickets through TM.

dfxm12on Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

Ticketmaster has more vertical integration. They own the ticketing, ticket resale, the clubs, concert production, promotion and talent management. When you own the venue, you can lock out other ticket sellers. Artists are probably looking for a one stop shop for putting a tour together.

As an example, stubhub can sell/resell tickets, but that's about it.

dfxm12on A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

Medicine researched even with government funding is out of reach for a lot of people. It's going to take a leap of faith to think that "breakthroughs" researched from a private business is going to be enjoyed by the masses.

Socialized risk and privatized profit is the default. AI isn't going to change that. If it is as successful as the hype, it's going to exacerbate it.

dfxm12on An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

It's not an economy problem, it's a policy problem. We can choose to treat drug addiction like a disease. We can choose to give people health care. We can choose to give people money to keep their lives together. Law makers would rather this happen though.

dfxm12on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

Ronnie Coleman, the bodybuilder?

dfxm12on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

This is part of it, but you only need a few dozen great players to put together a program. Another part is organization. Italy has kids playing calcio in the streets by default, but FIGC has been run poorly for decades. USSF tries, but similarly is a little in over their heads.

dfxm12on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

It's slightly more than that. These sports (and let's include hockey, since it's played widely intentionally too) are all organized the same way, meaning the players are largely trained the same way leading up to college and also in the pros. There's a clear pipeline to the basketball and hockey national teams. The best league is the one closest to home. The uniform pipeline and playing close to home makes training for, coaching and playing with the national team that much easier, which makes the team that much better.

American men gotta find their own way to become a world class soccer player. There's no pipeline like there is for the big 4. It's harder for teammates to gel when some went through the ranks in Germany, some in England, some in Italy and have only a few weeks with a new coach to buy into the system.

America's biggest rivals also aren't very good. So while the best European and South American teams constantly have to play each other and fight for survival, the US has to play middling teams like Mexico and Canada and tiny Central American and island nations.

dfxm12on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

A documentary, maybe it was China Heavyweight (which is maybe 15yo at this point, so it might be out of date today), suggested that kids are trained for many years for specific Olympic sports (and nothing else) based on their rough physical attributes. This shotgun approach has success at finding great individual athletes, and will probably ensure they have a reasonable chance at qualifying someone at as many events as possible. Maybe this is just how the boxing program is run though...

dfxm12on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?

Athletic American men can probably make more money playing another sport. You get perks like (mostly) free college. Paths to the pros are less uniform than the college -> pro pipeline, so even when the US has a generation of 11+ world class players, because they've been trained differently and play much further away from home, they can't come together with just a few weeks of training as easily as, say, a basketball team. Plus, the local competition isn't very good. It's just other middling teams and tiny countries.

Conversely, the NWSL is likely the most lucrative league for women besides the WNBA. In both cases, it's a legit pipeline from college to the pros. Women's hockey is similar. So you have a group of players who know each other, have been playing together for a while and were roughly trained the same way. Also, the second best women's soccer team happens to be in their "division".

They can come together as a team better than American men who all went through different training programs from youth.

dfxm12on Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows

I think it's ok that hardware and software are designed with the 99% in mind. After that you probably run into competing interests/trade-offs anyway (a system built for ergonomics probably looks different from a system built for speed).

dfxm12on Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other

If you have Claude write down notes, check them into the repo when you're done. It probably can't hurt and it might help.

LOL. It didn't even cross the author's mind to consider reading the notes himself to decide if they make sense.

AI is sending us down a path of anti-social behavior. It will be bad for us, of course, but AI is only as good as it is because it was able to be trained on info from github, stack overflow, etc. Without socializing interesting info, humans and AI will both suffer.

dfxm12on Are You Enjoying Our Linguine? (2025)

I understand some people are jerks, but that also includes those who monolithize an entire class of people based on a stereotype.