Hacker News Reader

seanicuson Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

I really have no idea how we can define most of this esp using the framework of previously established law but I do think that a definition of Dark Patterns could be tangentially worked into the psychological make-up of gambling.

seanicuson Flock Cameras Can Track Every Car in America. Police Love Them. Citizens Don't

The Tree of Liberty is looking a little thirsty...

seanicuson Dubious research tied to Red Bull has shaped energy drink policy

Not sure how things work on the backend but we're missing "alcohol" or "vodka" in the headline on HN, as it is on the page.

seanicuson It's a shame what's happened to radio

CHIRP radio https://chirpradio.org/ in Chicago is so, so good. Very very eclectic.

seanicuson Why are Flock employees watching our children?

I think at this point we have to accept the fact that SV and tech founders in gernal are 60%+ p##os and 39% p##o enablers.

seanicuson Why are Flock employees watching our children?

>>Great use of tax dollars.

I get the sentiment but just note that if you discuss this in public your answer to the problem of staff watching video of kids is... less regulation?

seanicuson Turns out the DOGE bros who killed humanities grants are sensitive about it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power

I'm an anti-imperialist so I do appreciate America's efforts to paint the international stage with it's brains. Not sure if what comes next will be better but I'm optimistic.

seanicuson $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

Any recommendations for how to approach K-12 math teaching? Got some (very) little ones and doing our best but both parents are definitely more humanities-brained

seanicuson Who sets the Doomsday Clock?

The Doomsday Clock really strains credulity; I'd love to see a case for how we're closer to (as defined in this article) total nuclear annihilation or even a limited exchange than we were at any point in the cold war. The case is not convincingly made by any of the subjects in the article.

Nuclear proliferation is still something to be taken with deadly seriousness but the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences needs to cut the hyperbole and present their case more convincingly.

seanicuson The New Kindle Scribes Are Great, but Not Great Enough

In the universe of the Butlerian Jihad are you SURE that replacing "program" with "pogrom" was a mistake?

seanicuson Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban

>>In China, the govt is more authoritarian

Gonna need a citation on that one

seanicuson Larry Ellison wants the U.S. to 'unify all the national data and then feed to AI

Yeah, but it's going to require a lot of thoughtcrime persecution before the rest of the US comes to that conclusion.

seanicuson Accenture to 'exit' staff that cannot be retrained for age of AI

"Former" CIA

seanicuson The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

Lived in SE Asia fora few years and my understanding is that tan skin = outdoor labor = lower caste.

My spouse is asian and I'm N Euro - I would kill to have skin that just tans no matter how much sun you get. I think I've seen her get burns twice in over a decade and we do a lot of beach time.

seanicuson China is eating the world

I love the threat of displacing billionaires out of our economy whenever taxing the wealthy comes up like the monied class aren't already incredibly sophisticated tax cheats

seanicuson China is eating the world

That firewall isn't going away anytime soon. Americans are inundated with a deluge of foreign influence campaigns from a variety of foreign powers and no way China wants that pain revisited upon themselves.

seanicuson China is eating the world

It's hard to imagine what could even constitute a modern Sputnik moment, but it's an interesting thought experiment. I just don't think that Americans care enough, and both countries are way more dependent on each other than the US and USSR ever were.

Caveat I've been wrong on pretty much every political prognostication I've ever made, so buy some defense industry stocks.

Maybe US gets really good at maglev trains and in reprisal China goes full throttle on inventing teleportation/hyperdrive tech?

seanicuson Whistleblower says DOGE officials copied Social Security numbers

Same admin that opposes any real reporting on what they're doing except for entities that report glowingly on them. Trump Admin has loudly clashed with any and all legit journalistic entities (bad news: Newsnation and Zero Hedge are conservative hacks) so no reporting can be believed except ones approved by the state/Trump admin.

seanicuson Whistleblower says DOGE officials copied Social Security numbers

If one wants to be called a nazi, one should not be surprised by their results.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...

seanicuson US retail giants raise prices due to tariffs

Lol wait wait... RRSP is equivalent to US 401K, right? You can't contribute to your 401K the entire year when you buy a house?

Agree w/ everything you said and have similar feelings. My SO is from Toronto and we've always considered moving but mix of job market/housing prices have continually convinced us otherwise.

seanicuson How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes

Well Actually I think you mean corporations exercising their right to free speech

seanicuson How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes

There might be a little more going on with Spain's (and the US's) economy than just Wealth Tax.

seanicuson Administration will review all 55M visa holders for deportable violations

Which is why the Trump admin will just default to Betar US, repping a foreign entity ethnostate, for their list of visas to revoke.

seanicuson Administration will review all 55M visa holders for deportable violations

1) I probably know very little about the rules & laws of your country, so it's fair that you clearly don't know much about America's Constitution/Bill of Rights. One of several violations of the constitution you're espousing, trashing Freedom of Speech is trashing an inalienable right in the US, arguably the MOST important. So yes, I want people incl. visa holders talking smack about the US and burning flags and perhaps most importantly not fearing losing citizenship for criticizing a foreign government. Esp. if it's a foreign power which is likely supplying a list of the visas that are to be revoked. Flag-burnings and criticism of the US govt are the chirping birdies in the mineshaft of freedom. You and other non-Americans think that they are experts in US governance from watching the TV. It's likely that you know more about it than the average US citizen knows about their (your) country's laws, but I'd suggest doing some more research. Or y'know just stick to expressing opinions about your country's govt, if they allow that.

2) Good to hear that my life (a born and bred 9th generation US citizen) and the lives of many others can be torn asunder as a rounding error. My community and myself have built their lives around people who are in the US on a variety of long-term visas that were guaranteed until oh say 213 days ago.

3) Unless your side can get the big dub (100 Year Reich), the pendulum swings both ways, baby. Probably going to be a while because there's no left-wing party in the US, but sooner or later this pain will be revisited upon your American counterparts tenfold. I don't like this, to be clear. I want that pendulum resting right in the middle.

4, I guess? I don't know anything about the Somali guy but sounds like you're admitting you don't either. You could start your research there but like many things foreign conservative critics of America point out, it doesn't sound particularly germane to national American politics.

seanicuson US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible

*Months/years/decades

I'm angling to die in bed of old age, but at full cognition and perfect awareness of what lies ahead I'm sure a lot of people would pick the Titan over the toll slow death and it's related miseries takes on a family (this is a very weird sentence to type about the Titan, lol)

seanicuson Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine

Thanks for the insight. re:#3 how do mistakes not get reported? Is it because this incident resulted in a police report and is unusual in this context?

seanicuson Netflix uses generative AI in one of its shows for first time

Netflix is building a large part of their production style around people keeping netflix running in the background 24/7. Writers are told to have the characters frequently "exposition dump" because the viewers aren't actually watching. Generative AI makes total sense if you have a product that no one is actually watching; just using employing it the same way I employ a white noise machine to help my toddler sleep.

seanicuson Show HN: FlopperZiro – A DIY open-source Flipper Zero clone

Flipper Zero: Sweded Edition

seanicuson Show HN: FlopperZiro – A DIY open-source Flipper Zero clone

As someone who's been an IT ops support on a hacker-firendly conference, from an admin perspective - not great! But at an operational level our team could just blame Kevin Mitnick (RIP to a real one) for any single thing that we wrong in the building,

seanicuson Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024)

Odds of Torment Nexus being invented this year just increased to 3% on Polymarket