anticorporate

Joined 2 years ago

Karma
2,376
Submissions
380
Member since
Dec 2
Making money is not the purpose of computing, and it's never an acceptable justification for unethical behavior.

HN user since 2013; decided to create an account not tied to my real name.

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 1 day ago
> without a veto proof majority, they might as well not be in the majority.

I don't understand this position. Two years of stalled government would be a godsend after the past two years. Dear lord, if we could just slow the daily assaults on people and the environment, domestically and abroad, I'd sing Hallelujah.

Comment · 3 days ago
That's for each person to decide on their own.

I'd much rather everyone think deeply about this question than merely hope we all come to the same conclusion.

Comment · 3 days ago
I'm not sure why people push this false narrative around jealousy. Well, I could speculate, but that likely wouldn't be helpful.

I have no desire to be rich, certainly not as rich as the far right 1% column. I find that level of wealth nauseating and embarrassing. But regardless, "legitimately earned wealth" is doing a lot of work in that last sentence. Perhaps (doubtful) it's possible to earn that much while being legally legitimate, although that speaks more to how fucked up our system is than anything else, but certainly not possible to do so in a morally legitimate way.

Comment · 4 days ago
I mean, sure, some advertisers might get more sophisticated. The garbagefest of internet advertising won't go anywhere, though. It'll still be as bleak and obnoxious as always, because someone will always accept a buck to let you barrage their visitors' eyes and ears.
Comment · 4 days ago
One crucial part of my role as my family's de facto IT support was making sure my mom's FreeCell score record (which was just a Windows registry value) made it from each computer to the next across countless upgrades. She hated the new version that came out somewhere along the way because the card decks changed. (Windows 7? Windows 10? I switched to Linux full time in the XP era so my memory is a little fuzzy.) So I made sure to keep a backup of the Win32 version she was used to, and loaded it onto every machine she ever owned. It wasn't quite the 33 years of its lifetime, but probably close to 30.

Mom passed earlier this year, so the FreeCell score record won't ever increment again, but I still made a point to back it up one last time when going through her desktop this summer.

Comment · 5 days ago
I wish I didn't have such a bleak outlook for community-focused tech publishing. Sites like LWN and 404 Media seem to be hanging on, but they're more likely the exceptions that prove the rule.

My paycheck for the better part of a decade came from publications run by a large tech company in an arrangement not too dissimilar from DO's relationship with CSS-Tricks. It was great while it lasted, but shortly after I left it was the first thing on the chopping block when the layoffs started. That was 3-4 years ago and the landscape for quality tech publishing hasn't gotten any easier.

Comment · 14 days ago
I just imagine a field of giant snails approaching me at a glacial pace, all loudly singing "Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve." Nightmare fuel.
Comment · 18 days ago
I like the confidence with which you through around "99%" when there is ample research suggesting that the percentage of smart phone users (at least in the US) who use their phone for banking is much closer to half.

I'm not offended at the idea that someone might want to bank from their phone, just, a lot of us don't have that need. Having my ability to run the software I want on my phone taken away, just to support corporations insisting that they be able to control my device for a function I don't need, however, is offensive.

Comment · 19 days ago
Then, as the parent commenter suggested, fork the dead project.

No project is obliged to accept your contributions. It's on you to market them, either to the maintainers of the existing project for merging, or to the community through a fork.

Comment · 19 days ago
> if you can't run all your favorite bank apps in your phone any phone is dead nowadays

I guess I've been running dead phones for ::checks notes:: a quarter century now? I actually don't even know if my primary banking institution (a regional credit union) has an app to begin with. It's never occurred to me to need it.

Comment · 19 days ago
> That's not entirely true: my work might get zero traction because nobody will know about it.

Being able to market your work and build community are key skills for open source contribution. The history of forges is littered with interesting code that never got enough attention to go anywhere.

Comment · 21 days ago
While I grant you that they are two different things, two-thirds of the average sale price in my area is from gains in value accrued over the time the home was occupied prior to sale, almost all of which is currently untaxed.
Comment · 21 days ago
> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.

My local government put exactly this on the ballot: a small percentage transfer tax on the sale price of the home, which would offset some of the costs we currently pay in ad valorem property taxes.

The local real estate community had a meltdown and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into defeating it, which my neighbors obliged and did.

Comment · 22 days ago
I could, but the security model would be different. Caddy plus my WireGuard configuration buys me some additional isolation and peace of mind. My VPS is always configured to be as locked down as I need it; I don't want to have to remember that I got high last night and did something funky to my local firewall.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton