Hacker News Reader

flatpepsi17on Aids Creeps Back in Parts of Zambia, a Year After U.S. Cuts to HIV Assistance

Time for Zambia to grow up and take care of their citizens.

flatpepsi17on NASA Will Let Its Astronauts Bring iPhones to the Moon

I love NASA, always have, but we all know that SLS is never actually going to the moon, right? NASA will get there, but SLS is just a fragile pork project that's launched once in 3 years. This isn't a serious attempt to go anywhere.

flatpepsi17on 73% People Detained by ICE Have No Convictions

>I have no idea of what it's like in the US

Why are you chiming in on another country's immigration policy? You deal with your country, I'll deal with mine. Opinion dismissed

flatpepsi17on 73% People Detained by ICE Have No Convictions

Yes- that's a big problem. The business owners are getting away with massive employment fraud, tax fraud, and any number of OSHA/employee law violations. They need to be arrested and brought to trial.

If you can't run a business without breaking the law (including illegal labor), then that business shouldn't exist.

flatpepsi17on 73% People Detained by ICE Have No Convictions

Wait- are you seriously arguing that everyone in the country illegally CAN'T be detained? That illegals are required to remain free, and stay illegally as long as they want?

That's a border control policy known as "no border control at all".

flatpepsi17on 73% People Detained by ICE Have No Convictions

> If you get hit with a traffic stop, you shouldn't be lumped in with violent offenders.

Yes, for whatever additional crimes they have committed.

Being here illegally, that's what ICE is after (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and they are fully in their prevue to send home people who are here against the law.

flatpepsi17on 73% People Detained by ICE Have No Convictions

Semantic games. ICE isn't going after people who have already been convicted of other offenses.

They are going after illegal immigrants.

Hence the name ICE - Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

flatpepsi17on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

Equality and Equity are vastly different things.

If a program treats people equally, that's a good thing. If you want equal outcomes (regardless of many very real factors), that by definition will require unequal treatment.

flatpepsi17on Lightweight Safety Classification Using Pruned Language Models

I'd pay good money for a local LLM with no "content safety" at all.

flatpepsi17on Anthropic calls Government to regulate AI in the next eighteen months

Company fears competitors that have gained success; calls for government to make them stop.

flatpepsi17on Boeing Dismantles Diversity Department

The real question is what's happening to that staff & programs. Are they just getting distributed around the rest of the org, continuing at a department level?

Or are they getting rid of the concept entirely?

flatpepsi17on Giant catapult launching satellites into orbit without the need of rocket fuel

They plan on launching a small 1st stage with the satellite. You need some delta-V to circularize & fine tune the orbit after the spin launch.

Time to break out Kerbal Space Program and see how well it works...

flatpepsi17on Giant catapult launching satellites into orbit without the need of rocket fuel

They haven't. They have done scale model and simulations, but nothing actually to space.

Article from 2022 said they planned on having a real launch by 2026: https://www.space.com/spinlaunch-aces-10th-suborbital-test-l...

...however the company is struggling. No website updates in a long time, lots of C-suite staff changes.

Would love to see this work, but I think it's dead.

flatpepsi17on Cloudflare employee records her layoff [video]

Very old video. If one has the time to track the rest of the story, there's predictable results.

Millennial puts employer on blast on social media, and gets a very brief window of job offers, she's too good for any of them, then lands in long term unemployment...

Perhaps having a public reputation of being a toxic employee (eager to damage brand reputation) who was let go because she couldn't close sales may have something to do with it.

flatpepsi17on Ask HN: Windows Backup Solution?

I take the approach that if I have a disaster, I'm getting new a new OS install, and maybe even new hardware. It's my data I care about, not the C: drive.

I store all data to a home NAS drive, and then on a regular basis run a ROBOCOPY batch file to a USB hard drive. I rotate several drives (all cold & offline) to have some versoning/protection against bit-rot and undetected corruption.

Once or twice a year I put a drive in a ziplock bag (water tight) to an off-site location that is fireproof and reasonably burglar proof.

I do not trust SaaS or online backups. Too easy to have my online copy get hacked or have my backup provider go out of business. My fate is in my hands.

flatpepsi17on COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it

Article starts mentioning 4GL's - a term I have not heard in a long, long time.

COBOL's promise was that it was human-like text, so we wouldn't need programmers anymore. A lot like "low code" platforms, and now LLM generated code.

The problem is that the average person doesn't know how to explain & solve a problem in sufficient detail to get a working solution. When you get down to breaking down that problem... you become a programmer.

The main lesson of COBOL is that it isn't the computer interface/language that necessitates a programmer.

flatpepsi17on Pediatricians Created the Peanut Allergy Epidemic

Yes. Google why kids in Israel don't have peanut allergies. Spoiler: Toddler snacks there have peanut dust mixed in.

flatpepsi17on Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?

No, but you can opt out at the Aggregator level. Currently, The Work Number is the largest salary aggregator, you may find this link, helpful:

https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze