Hacker News Reader

mullenon Existing smartphones will connect with new satellite constellations in 2023

The Republican party is a Fascist party (Support for a Fascist President and supported a failed Coup) and Elon has voiced support for the Republican party, thus, Elon is a Fascist (AKA, Super Villain). It's does not take much to draw a line between the two.

mullenon Is forced treatment for the mentally ill ever humane?

This is why we can't have nice things in this country. It's always comes down to some rhetorical discussion about edge cases and possibilities of how a tiny fraction of people might be negatively impacted, so let's not do it.

Let's frame it this way, "Is it humane to allow people be a slave to their mental illness and living on the streets?" The answer is clearly, "no". Allowing the mentally ill to live on the streets betters no ones life and causes many issues for everyone. If people with a mental health issue can not or will not take care of themselves, then someone else has to do it (IE: The Government).

It is humane for everyone if the mentally ill are forced to get treatment or confined if they refuse it.

mullenon Ask HN: What is the cheapest, easiest way to host a cronjob in 2022?

If your job is small enough and not ran too often, AWS is literally free.

mullenon Regulators OK largest dam demolition in history to restore salmon habitat

The problem is not the tech that is in the hydro-generators but the dams, themselves, silt up. They hold a lot less water and thus, less energy to drive hydro-generators.

To restore a silted up dam, you would have to clean it out, which is a whole nother environmental issue in itself.

mullenon The negative impact of Covid on working memory revealed using rapid online quiz

COVID-19 is not the Flu. Also, the Flu has been around for at least 1500 years, so humanity would have observed "Flu Brain" or "Long Flu" a long time ago.

To say that the Flu has not been under the same level of scrutiny as COVID-19 is ignoring 1500 years of human history.

mullenon U.S. fines airlines more than $7M for not providing refunds

Everyone is against government security until a bunch of guys fly airplanes into buildings.

mullenon Leaked documents outline DHS’s plans to police disinformation

> If the loved one of a politician was severely injured because of a drunk driver should alcohol be banned?

Bad example. We do limit the consumption of Alcohol and also Driving because of the possibility of Drunk Drivers.

mullenon Why is hydroelectricity unfashionable?

No. First off, most dams silt up, not only not of being use in storing water but also not in creating power. Second, once they silt up, whatever ecosystem there is also destroyed and artificially created ecosystems are never natural and usually are bad for local fish populations. Artificial lakes can also host a number of non-native fish and are not any benefit to the native species that should be living there. Also, dams also block the migration paths of native fish.

Just think of this way, dams have a life span and for the most part, most of them in US have hit the end of their life spans and should be removed. They serve no purpose to anyone.

mullenon The bosses who silently nudge out workers

Agreed. I don't know what she is complaining about. For Tech people, we don't understand that getting a new job only takes a couple of weeks at the most. In some fields, it can take 6 months or a year to get another job. People getting the polite, "You are done working here but you are not fired", is a huge help for them. They can look for a new job while still pulling a check and not having that gap in their resume. Also, there are other options for people at larger companies like transfering to another department or whole other subsidiary.

Now that I think about it, as a person in tech, I would rather have this than just get fired. Atleast I don't have to explain to anyone that I got fired or come up with a awkward lie about why I am not a company and looking for a new job.

mullenon Signal is secure, as proven by hackers

That is also not true either. My 80 year old mother uses Signal because she talks property management and money related issues to people. She does not trust WhatsApp because it is owned by Facebook (Which is weird because she uses Facebook all the time). For her, knowing that cell phone company employees can grab text messages is enough for her to switch to something that is secure.

mullenon Europe braces for mobile network blackouts

Due to Earthquakes, California asks that you have at least 3 days of supplies on hand at all times, with 7 days of supplies being prefered and 14 days of supplies being the best. Same thing from my county and city. They all know that when "The Big One" hits, your average citizen is going to be on their own for at least a couple of days.

mullenon San Francisco braces for commercial real estate crash

Florida could be a real option vs SF but not with Fascists in charge.

mullenon Nuclear-Powered Cardiac Pacemakers

Why not just draw heat from the person and convert it to electricity?

mullenon Google cracks down on VPN based adblockers

The best part about Adguard is that there is nothing to really get. You just start using the DNS servers and it just works. Some stuff slips through here and there but not for long as the DNS servers catch up on blocking new Ad Serving servers.

mullenon Facebook Gave Police Teenager's DMs in Abortion Prosecution

If there is a Subpoena or Search Warrant for FB messages, FB has no choice to hand them over. However, FB should have fought like hell in the courts to not hand those messages over.

mullenon Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

> Deglobalization -- In the US, we're about to be forced to rebuild all the manufacturing we outsourced since the 1970s. It's not going to go well for those countries dependent on imported food or energy

Hogwash. Globalization is good, Globalization is here to stay. Whatever is the current location causing issues with Globalization will simply be routed around. There are plenty of countries that would love to be part of the global supply chain with. The only way any manufacturing is coming back to the rich industrialized countries is that it involves a lot of really good robots. Which is also good.

> It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them)

Again, hogwash. The market will force diets to change and producers will start producing more. Fertilizer production could be an issue but again, diets and markets will adjust.

> Energy Blindness -- We're so used to having free flowing oil cheap enough to burn for energy, it's an assumption built into everything. Unless we plan for the end of easy to reach oil, we could have supply chains collapsing everywhere.

A known issue that will not happen overnight. The world is racing toward non-oil based energy, so I don't see this being an issue. Don't get me wrong, this one I actually agree with, but it won't happen overnight. The world/markets will adapt.

mullenon Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

> This is entirely without evidence.

To make it clear, the Chinese government blocks any investigation by outside parties that they don't control or have influence over.

mullenon Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

> ignored scientific evidence

Any "scientific evidence" that can be touched by the Chinese government will be corrupted. Any influence they have over "scientific evidence" is not scientific evidence.

mullenon Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

> ...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue.

Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government? If anything, if the Lab Leak theory is provable false, they should be inviting outsiders to investigate and waste their political capital/time/energy. If your advisories want to spin their wheels on something that is not true, then let them.

> So if they don't react negatively and deny something, then the story is... false? That doesn't make any sense.

When it comes to the Chinese government and information, surprisingly as it sounds, yes. If the Lab Leak story was not true, the Chinese government would not even react to it. They might even entertain it as part of their information ops strategy since the Lab Leak theory is a plausible theory.

If you think about it, how does the Wet Market theory make China look better than the Lab Leak theory? It really doesn't. If serious pandemics are coming out of Wet Markets, then why does China still allow Wet Markets to exist? At least with lab safety, labs can be improved and managed better while Wet Markets are just ticking pandemic timebombs.

mullenon Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic

The one thing that makes me think the Lab Leak theory is true is that the Chinese government very very strongly denies the story and does anything it can to deflect or redirect the discussion to some other theory.

For anyone reading these kinds of stories and reports but is not a regular China follower, there is one thing you really should know. Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true. The Chinese government is really terrible at information management and addressing anything that might make them look bad or lose face.

Just admitting a Chinese lab collected, studied and by accident a lab worker got infected with COVID is just something China can not admit. It is perfectly reasonable that some lab somewhere would collect and study the COVID virus. What is unreasonable is that the lab or a lab worker just got sloppy and accidently released that virus out to the world.

mullenon Texas Has Always Been a Great Setting for the Apocalypse

And here is the really shocking part, if the local government wanted to clean it up and fix the problem, it could but it just does not have the willpower to do do. This is not the Apocalypse, it just local government sucking at its job.

mullenon FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

> Are we going to see a future where every country/economic block has their own separate social media/search engines like China and Russia?

You are way too late to this part of the discussion.

mullenon China mortgage boycott data erased by censors as crisis spreads

I call bullshit on statements like this. You think corporations would love authoritarianism until the corporations realize that one day someone who is really close to the head authoritarian could just demand 10% of their corporation and there is nothing they can do about it. They would also realize there is a whole class of people that can do whatever they want, when ever they want, to whomever they want (As long as the other person was not above them) and there is nothing to be done about it.

Corporations, while it might pain them on some level, want to exist in a free, open and democratic sociality since it gives them access to courts and people in power. In Authoritarian systems, people at the top, just take whatever they want and there is nothing to be done about it.

Also, a foreign corporation is never going to have access to the higher levels of the Authoritarian government because they are foreign. Places like China don't care about foreign corporations because at the end of the day, there is nothing they can do to help the head authoritarian.

mullenon A $3B Silk Road seizure will erase Ross Ulbricht’s debt

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32057717

You might want to give me a really good price.

mullenon A $3B Silk Road seizure will erase Ross Ulbricht’s debt

He really did try to have someone killed. Ulbricht is exactly the kind of person who should be in prison.

mullenon Copilot sells code other people wrote

I catch people using cut and paste code all the time. If there is a spelling error in code (Especially if it is in a code comment), I can guarantee you that someone copied and pasted it from StackOverflow.

mullenon Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

And make sure to explain the story to the Bank/Credit Card company as accurately as possible. You paid X for Y amount of service but want to cancel after Y amount of service and instead Dropbox just cancelled you right away and won't refund you the difference.

mullenon $35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII

The "Holy Roman Empire" was neither Holy, Roman or an Empire.

mullenon The 1936-1937 Purge of Soviet Astronomers (1991)

I would not compare anything that happened in the West to what happened in the USSR. I don't recall anyone in the West being sent to a work camp or shot because someone accused them of something they were not.

mullenon 5 Charged with Stalking, Harassing, Spying on US Residents for PRC Secret Police

The Chinese "Spies" are not what you think of as Spies. They are Chinese foreign college students in Australia who report back to China if any of their classmates do something that the Chinese government would not approve of. They also steal information when they can and just basically tow the party line while overseas. They all do it because the government is paying for their education and they are proven loyal to CCCP (That's why the government pays for their education overseas).