HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

etblg

724 karma · joined July 6, 2015

submissionscomments
etblg··on Why the AfD Wins
"Er ist wieder da", or "Look Who's Back" in English.
etblg··on Did the Pope use AI to write about the dangers of AI?
The em-dash tell makes sense for things like personal technical blogs, usually written by a non-professional writer, and without extensive editing.

It doesn't work so well for things that are professionally written and edited, in my opinion. I saw a similar statement in a thread about an nytimes article.

Em-dashes were not invented by AI, publications used them before, it's not strange that someone whose job is to write will use them, and its not strange that something professionally edited may have em-dashes added to it. It's only a tell when someone who has never before used one before (or is not likely to have ever used one before) suddenly starts throwing them around like candy.

etblg··on Ask HN: How do we handle the rise of low quality "This is LLM" comments?
Maybe people should stop posting shitty LLM-written articles that don't generate any good discussion beyond "I think this was written by an LLM" and we won't have this "problem".
etblg··on BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets
I'm not sure where you're getting that from, from wikipedia:

> Anker was founded in 2011 by Steven Yang in Shenzhen, Guangdong, but the company moved its headquarters to Changsha, Hunan.

And its listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange as a public company.

etblg··on Apple, What Have You Done?
I feel like you have to expand the taxonomy of people expressed in milli-jobs. Does anyone out there exceed 1000 mJobs? Does anyone come the closest? Is there a suitable conversion to other systems of measurement?
etblg··on TikTok is now collecting more data about its users
Damn, imagine if an Australian or a South African billionaire did that with big media companies, oh well, that's just a weird thought, nothing to take from that.
etblg··on America could have $4 lunch bowls like Japan but for zoning laws
The day of the dollar slice in NYC is dead, most places have switched to $1.50 slices.
etblg··on Influencers and OnlyFans models are dominating U.S. O-1 visa requests
> I hate to be that person, but the fact that so many people on HN think OF is prostitution is revealing of the site's demographics (i.e. older). It is, as some may put it, boomer thinking.

Well it's not non-existent either, there are a fair number of onlyfans models (and also general actors in the field of pornography who do the same) who do escorting on the side.

etblg··on xAI Raises $20B Series E
Judging from the recent news, it's also now so weirdos online can get an AI to make CSAM about your daughter's cousin. Fascinating twist.
etblg··on The ruin of Gaza: how Israel's two-year assault has devastated the territory
> 67,000 Palestinians

> 30,000 Hamas fighters

those are different things.

etblg··on America is now one big bet on AI
> the idea is to use AI to build super productive farms and greenhouses

How? What are the mechanisms in which AI will lead to farms and greenhouses being more productive? How will AI improve the existing automation that already exists for the farming sector, and has existed for a hundred years?

etblg··on Even light alcohol drinking raises dementia risk, according to largest study
Alcohol makes a good solvent so it extracts flavours in things that don't tend to go in a liquid. That's for liquors at least, for things like beer and wine, they're tasty drinks that also happen to have alcohol in them through the process of creating them.

Also it's fun having a drink or two!

etblg··on Delete FROM users WHERE location = 'Iran';
Third time's the charm, just one more revolution and we'll have it all sorted out, juuuuuust one more /s
etblg··on US Gov acknowledges that 100K fee does not apply to existing H-1B visas holders [pdf]
This unsubstantiated rumor coming from......the Secretary of Commerce?

"Reuters was not immediately able to establish how the fee would be administered. Lutnick said the visa would cost $100,000 a year for each of the three years of its duration but that the details were "still being considered.""

"Lutnick said on Friday that "all the big companies are on board" with $100,000 a year for H-1B visas. "We've spoken to them," he said."

https://archive.is/WYuI1#selection-1571.0-1575.32

etblg··on Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford tells Borderlands 4 critics: "code your own engine"
> The exec also said "less than one percent of one percent" of players are filing customer service tickets about performance issues, and asked people to "code your own engine and show us how it's done, please."

???

Why wouldn't we just use your competitors engines instead.

etblg··on On Hacker News and Charlie Kirk
> Charlie Kirk thought conversation was the only way we were going to heal America. He believed we had to learn to talk to each other without vitriol, without poison, without anger. We had to be able to listen, and say what we mean, without being mean. And to talk to each other across divides. These are exactly the kind of things good discussion here exemplifies.

And just so we're clear on what some of those surely great conversations were, to say what he meant, without him being mean, to talk across divides, here's some of the guy's ideals:

"If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?"

"Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more."

"Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge." – Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement

"We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately."

"The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white."

"The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different."

"America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America."

"Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America."

"There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists."

Choice quotes from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...

Can't lionize a guy for promoting what he believed in without saying what he believed in.

And since we need a disclaimer in all these threads: I don't care about the guy before or after his death, I don't agree with him at all, and I think his views were pretty bad, pretty bad.

etblg··on US backpedals as Hyundai factory ICE raid enrages South Korea
Well it's American immigration law, so who knows, really depends person by person. Like I legitimately think there isn't an objective answer to that question, it's a patchwork of laws and forms and guidelines that overlap and are interpreted by different people. Two different border agents can have completely different opinions on whether your work trip can be counted under a B1/B2 visa or not, and then USCIS (not CBP, border agents, but the immigration services agency, a completely different department) could have a different idea.
etblg··on Ghost kitchens are dying
The points the article make come close to my gripe with ghost kitchens but don't quite cover it:

they feel like scams and when I've accidentally ordered from a ghost kitchen it was by design a terrible experience.

I'm talking like, you order a 15$ main that is called "creamy pasta with prosicutto" and when it shows up its buttered spaghetti with a couple stamp-sized bits of ham. Ordering from actual restaurants come with some of the downsides the article assigns to ghost kitchens, like cold food and weird presentation, but ghost kitchens never seemed to reach the bar of "food someone would actually order, even if it was teleported to them instantly".

etblg··on Goldman Sachs says AI still not showing up in companies' bottom lines
I just assumed it was me getting old, but I do go "oh yeah that time when" and then realizing that was a literal decade ago. It all does just bleed together, COVID feels like it was just yesterday, 2015 feels like it was just last year, 2001 feels like a decade ago but that was 24 years.

I still just blame it on being old though.

etblg··on Several people fired after clampdown on speech over Charlie Kirk shooting
> Sure. Include all the politicians who have smeared Trump as a Nazi.

And as a fun note: one of them is now his Vice President and the other is the Secretary of Health.

etblg··on Hyundai battery plant faces startup delay after US immigration raid, CEO says
> Is the internal guidance you received different from what's published?

Probably, I doubt anyone in the US government has a consistent view of what immigration laws are _and_ how they're actually enforced. Whole thing feels like a giant slapdash of things thrown together and assessed in whatever way feels right that day.

Here's a fun one: do people born in Hong Kong count as being born in China for green card purposes? Used to be no, then Trump 1 said "yes" with an executive order, then as best I can tell no one in government really enforced that, then immigration lawyers tell me they're counted as rest of world instead of China, and now? Who the hell knows, whoever gets your case probably makes up what they feel is the law.

etblg··on Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens
Oh for sure, it's a very short amount of time to arrange all that. Just want to clear up the time it is, and that people do exaggerate it as having no options at all, which isn't quite true. It's possible and doable, but not as easy as just having the job you already have.
etblg··on Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens
Presuming we're talking about the job offers from the article, it's for PERM, part of the process for green cards, not for H1B. As far as I know, you don't need to post a job offer to consider local candidates for someone to apply for an H1B, only for them to get permanent residence.

Employee works for a company under an H1B, company likes their work, wants them to stay longer (H1B has a max of 6 years unless you sponsor the employee for permanent residence). Employee doesn't want to be in this weird temporary worker status forever (and again, after 6 years they'll need to), so the company has two choices: either hire a new employee, hope they've as good as the one you already have under the H1B, train them up to be as familiar with the job and its work as the H1B, and then forget about getting the existing employee permanent residence, OR, just sponsor them for the PERM process, put out a job ad with a really low likelihood of anyone applying, and move on with their lives.

The way the PERM process is set up, there's really no reason not to do the hidden job ad, it's not really regulated against, there's not much financial harm in doing it, and they already have an employee they like and who wants to stay, so for those two parties (and presumably anyone who likes working with this person, and any friends they have in America and so on), there's no reason not to just put out the hidden job ad.

etblg··on Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens
It's 60 days, not 2 weeks, and you can transfer an H1B over to a new job within that 60 days, or if you know you're going to be terminated (e.g. you're on a PIP) then you can transfer the H1B to a new employer anyway.

Wouldn't say it's necessarily easy to do so, but it's not an automatic deported from the country kind of deal.

etblg··on Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
Error: Compiler warning: Appeal to Authority fallacy detected on line 8, your argument is hereby invalid

or whatever fallacy nerds like bringing up in debates, just pick your favourite one and insert it here.

etblg··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
> One could find systemic examples of inflammatory rethoric from almost anyone in US politics: Biden, Obama, Trump, Waltz, Harris, DeSantis, Newsome, etc.

Damn, sounds like more terrible people who encourage violence then, wish they didn't encourage it either, kinda sounds like a problem America and its politics has in general.

etblg··on South Korea: 'many' of its nationals detained in ICE raid on GA Hyundai facility
In America's case, it often seems to be both at the same time!
etblg··on Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
> When I was an undergrad researcher back during the height of the Great Financial Crisis,

Keep in mind that was 17 years ago, how do you know the job market is at all the same now?

etblg··on FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores
How does she prevent them from falling through the holes and hitting the heating element at the bottom? Does she throw them in the cutlery basket? Wouldn't it be light enough to fly around inside the dishwasher and land somewhere undesired?
etblg··on Guess I'm a Rationalist Now
Plenty of those that similarly went bankrupt over the years, and now the USA mostly has Boeing that's reached a set of continual crises and being propped up by the government.
Page 1 of 8Next →