Hacker News Reader

jfon Walmart plans EV Charging network which will blanket the US within a few years

Thanks for making that decision, the title you picked is better

jfon ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation

Please note that the 14th Amendment does not “discuss” who is a citizen, a better word would be “establishes” or “determines” - the “discussion” happened during the drafting and ratification processes and all of those records are available for you to read. Post ratification, the court system uses those discussions as part of their decisions on issues related to clarification of questions that arose after ratification. Those court decisions are also available for you to read.

jfon ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation

Your example doesn’t make sense because the 14th amendment only applies to the United States and not the United Kingdom.

jfon Garfield Minus Garfield

This is the link that I had in mind when I was writing my comment, thanks so much for posting it here!

jfon Garfield Minus Garfield

Something that I find delightful about this project is that Jim Davis approves of it!

From Wikipedia: "Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, approved of the project, and an official Garfield book (also called Garfield Minus Garfield) was published by his company. It was mainly edited comics by Walsh, with some comics contributed by Davis."

jfon Val Kilmer has passed away

This is a riff on the tagline to Real Genius (1985) lest anyone think it’s an insensitive comment

jfon The 2005 Sony Bravia ad

It seems to me like working from home has transformed the residential neighborhoods. I recently visited Inner Sunset as was astonished at how many people were out and about.

jfon Saving U.S. Climate and Environmental Data Before It Goes Away

I think it’s more realistic to assume 6-8 more years of MAGA craziness. The King will not leave his throne.

jfon Vtm: Text-Based Desktop Environment

The text heavy emphasis in the UI is one of the things that I used to love in the Windows Phone

jfon A Letter to the American People

Then why are you complaining in the comments?

jfon TypeScript types can run DOOM [video]

Would he have made it past your recruiter screen though?

jfon We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality

> One of the things which gets very frustrating from the maintainer's perspective is development teams that are only interested in their pet feature, and we know, through very bitter experience, that 95+% of the time, once the code is accepted, the engineers which contribute the code will disappear, never to be seen again.

This was painful for me to read as someone who has seen how corporations think about “Open Source” - he isn’t wrong at all

jfon Is NixOS truly reproducible?

Aside from this being a great article with lots of interesting details, it's also a rare example of a headline that does NOT follow "Betteridge's law of headlines"

jfon Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

The highest price that the city owned electric utility in Alameda, CA charges on the standard rate schedule is $0.29453 / kWh

https://www.alamedamp.com/DocumentCenter/View/1268/FY25-Rate...

Edit: Oh, this utility runs at a profit and has for decades. The profits have been going into undergrounding transmission lines

jfon Mystery brain disease patients in New Brunswick say they welcome investigation

  Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

jfon FBI turns over details of 5000 employees who worked on January 6 cases

Surely there is an other way that doesn’t involve exposing American citizens to violence

jfon "A computer can never be held accountable"

It helps to understand the context for when this was written. Before the personal computer revolution, most people didn't have access to a computer and only knew about them from depictions in popular culture, which depicted computers as all-known-all-seeing entities (think HAL from Space Odyssey 2001)

Because of these misconceptions, some people at the time would think of computers as devices that were (somehow) perfect and infallible.

It was very similar to how people view AI today: The way that AI is depicted in popular culture gives people an impression that AI is far more capable than it is. You only really get a good "feel" for what AI can do if you try it yourself. The main difference between AI and pre-personal computers is that basically everyone can use AI now.

jfon The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

This is exactly right. The capability to do identity proofing via the USPS is in the code and available on GitHub for you to browse.

jfon The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

jfon Polish city is using mussels to monitor water quality (2020)

I recently learned about a similar use of animals for assisting humans:

In about 1915, he tried a more natural approach to control the street lighting in Brightwater – chicken power. They didn't have time switches in those days, so he connected a switch to the perches in his chicken house. When the chickens started to roost at night the weight would turn the lighting on and in the morning when they got down off their perches, the spring switch would turn the generator and lighting off.

Via: https://www.theprow.org.nz/people/robert-ellis/

jfon The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is

Here is an archived version, if needed: https://web.archive.org/web/20250201043959/https://freegovin...

jfon New speculative attacks on Apple CPUs

What is RUB?

jfon The Most Mario Colors

I vote "should"

jfon Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?

At least according to the “Easy Way” book, the physical addiction to nicotine only lasts on the order of hours. The book makes a compelling case that cigarette addiction is primarily psychological.

Alcohol, on the other hand, is physically addictive and the horror stories that I have read about alcohol addiction have been pretty upsetting.

jfon Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?

On the basis of the headline alone, I would say "cigarettes" because I have quit two different social media sites using the technique described in the book "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking"

jfon Calm tech certification "rewards" less distracting tech

I wasn't able to find a full list of all Calm Tech certified devices, but it looks like the union of these two URLs lists most of what they have certified:

https://www.calmtech.institute/calm-tech-certification

https://www.calmtech.institute/blog/tags/calm-tech-certified

jfon A Tour of WebAuthn

Agreed, I implemented TLS key pinning for a project at Okta using one of Adam's blog posts

jfon Microsoft Confirms Password Deletion for 1B Users

For Apple at least, you walk into an Apple Store, buy a new phone, and have them help you log into it again.

jfon Microsoft Confirms Password Deletion for 1B Users

You can get passkeys with knowledge-based access if you use 1Password, or if you set a PIN on your YubiKey: https://support.yubico.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402836718866-U...

jfon Microsoft Confirms Password Deletion for 1B Users

If they have a Google or Apple account on their Android or iOS device, then nothing happens.