hagbard_c
hagbard_c on Hacker News
No, a 42 kg backpack. A bit more than 88 pound. With a 10 kg one on front so 52 kg in total. I used it on a 3.5 month expedition from Vancouver via Whitehorse, then paddled the Yukon to Emmonak, then Alakanuk at the Bering Strait, back to Emmonak, then Anchorage, hitchhiked to the start of the Alaska Marine Highway at Skagway, then to Prince Rupert, from there to Vancouver Island, then back to Vancouver.
It was quite the trip. I don't really hold with the 'travel light' motto and mostly use old military gear, normal food instead of the freeze dried stuff, normal (but smallish) pots and pans, etc. On the Yukon trip I also happened to have a solar-powered water- and probably bullet-proof computer with me plus 2 10W solar panels, that was what I had in the 10kg pack on front.
To the down-voters: get a life, nothing in my post is downvote-worthy. Just because
The Party doesn't allow you to agree with anyone who points out that this is a solved problem in most nations doesn't mean you need to press that button, you're not getting any brownie-points and you won't get a cookie other than the one from the web server.
To all those who reacted with 'ID required to register to vote': you're missing the part where the postal services need to get involved to deliver ballots which this article is about. You're also missing the part where 'registering to vote' does not mean the ballot is filled in by the person registered to vote, let alone the part where voter rolls are heavily polluted with people who moved or died still registered at an address to which ballots get delivered. You know this to be the case, you've seen the reports on the voter rolls, you may even have received ballots for people who used to live on your addresses. Denying it doesn't make it go away. Maybe that's the point? It is getting harder and harder to take the reasons to refuse voter ID at face value given that, as said, this is the way it works in a large part of the world. Checking ID at the polling location is normal in most countries. It is the sane and smart thing to do, never mind the bollocks excuses The Party makes up against it. Once person, one vote (per election), close to guaranteed.
All this ballot-this and ballot-that is
so easily solved if only those who oppose showing ID would drop their objections. Here's how it works:
1: show up at polling location, either on voting day or within the early voting period.
2: show ID to poll worker who verifies it and hands over the ballots for the elections in which you have the right to vote
3: fill in the ballots, put them in the envelope(s) and hand these over to a poll worker
4: poll worker checks again whether you have voting rights for the specific elections and drops the envelopes into the correct voting urns
Done. No postal service involved. You can vote at any (early) voting location for national elections, for local ones you'll need to go to a local voting location where the required ballots are available. Early voting can start a few weeks before election day so nearly everyone should have the possibility to set aside half an hour to an hour to do their civic duty.
That leaves those who really can't make it to the polls. For these people there can be a verified postal ballot system, i.e. they get one sent home on request, fill it out and send it back in the required envelopes. Voting by mail always adds risks but since it would only be needed for a small fraction of the voters that risk is manageable. Mail-in votes need to be counted on election day so they need to be in the mail about a week before election day. Why you ask? Because the fraud risk of mail-in ballots makes it all too easy to use them to add enough votes to push a close race towards a specific candidate. Count them early on election day and publish the results, these need to be final results, before the rest of the votes are counted. There's plenty of countries where votes are counted this way, this is not rocket science. I have voting rights in 2 different countries in northern and western Europe, both use something resembling this scheme. Everyone shows his or her ID either to get the ballots or to have them deposited in the voting urns, this has never been contested and the mere thought of voting without ID is so clearly outrageously silly that nobody brings it up. All the arguments against showing ID have been proven to be specious at best, you need ID to do just about anything related to the government so insisting on voting without it only serves to undermine trust in elections.
> There is no security risk from Chinese EVs that requires a full ban.
Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to [map] you.
Of course there is a risk to allowing networked automobile sensor packages on your streets if they're feeding a potential adversary live info on everything going on on and around your roads. Denying this isn't virtuous or smart or benevolent, it is at the best naïve.
40 kg is nothing? A feed bag? A lead-acid battery? My backpack? I've put far heavier things in the back of our cars - generators, compactors, engine blocks - without a buckle or a scratch to show for it. That's in European-style station wagons like Skoda Octavia or Volvo V-series.
Have a look at Hister [1], a 'personal web history search engine' which by way of extensions for browsers captures your web history and stores actual page content on your own instance where it can be browsed and searched. It does not store images so if that's what you're mostly interested in it won't work for you. For text is works quite well, maybe sometimes too well since it also stores ephemeral things like HN comment pages unless you tell it not to.
[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/
Back in the day I was part of a 'commission' to produce a 5-yearbook for our student club. It being the digital age and we studying at the premier (and only...) agricultural university in the Netherlands I went and had a look at the possibilities to use university facilities to typeset the book. Those facilities ended up being a PDP-10 running TOPS-20 'cause the VAXen were too important for such work. After some experiments with TECO and RUNOFF I was convinced I'd never get the other members of the commission to work this way. Since my own C-64 was just that, my own machine and already in use for other things I ended up scrounging up an ancient tape-based word processing system consisting of a metal box with a tape drive connected through a thick cable to an IBM Selectric typewriter. While it wasn't the epitome of ergonomics it was more amenable to some of the more digitally impaired members of the commission. That the Selectric's motor burned out just when I was going to produce the master printouts which led me on a hunt for a motor (found one for ~$50) and a complicated repair (re-adjusting the whippletree linkage without documentation but with time pressure from the printers was not my favourite experience). Still, we made it, the book was published, all's well that ends well.
> After a few seconds, popup asking me to allow ads on the site. Ya, sure.
"No, sorry, I can't allow more ads 'cause I'm running out of memory. If you want me to allow ads you'll have to give me more memory first."
Halftime can be time-shifted to make bathroom occupancy more equitable. Apply to the local time office for your personal halftime slot.
No, it really is in the sense that a lot of technology is developed here. Where things go awry is when someone tries to use that technology to create something and is met by a sheer wall of regulations, taxes, levies, restrictions and demands. This often results in those people jumping over the pond to continue their efforts in the USA. A good example is the development of the first practical electrically driven regional airliner which started off in Göteborg, Sweden: [1]
In May 2024, Heart Aerospace announced the establishment of a new research and development hub in Los Angeles focusing on its hybrid-electric propulsion system, and the Forslunds moved there to oversee operations. The company subsequently closed its Swedish operations in 2025 and moved its headquarters to Los Angeles. In interviews with the Forslunds they quote better access to financing, ease of attracting those with the needed knowledge and experience to design and build these aeroplanes, easier access to the required materials and the general attitude towards startup companies. Mind, they're in
California, the place where many American companies are fleeing away from due to over-regulation and excessive taxation. Coming from the EU it still seems to win and that is unfortunate.
I think we can do a lot better in this respect but to get there we'll need to scale down the regulatory mammoth which is the EU.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Aerospace
OK, down-voter, I suppose you don't like some of my other comments and thought to 'take revenge' by down-voting anything I posted recently but, honestly, why this one? What exactly triggered you about my memories of reading Jules Verne? Don't you realise using the down-vote button in this way gives away your game? Some of you even tried to flag me yesterday, such a... sad... spectacle.
It should at least have been a woodcut of the AI skyline, just like those in those blue books. We had more or less a full set of those, printed in the late 1800s/early 1900s which I voraciously read as a child. Reading 'The Children of Captain Grant' and seeing those images of Tierra del Fuego or the jungle or any of the other scenes really brought the 'pathos' of the stories alive, as if I were a Victorian setting out to see the wonders of the world. They still do for me, probably 'cause of my early experience with those books.
Here's a site - ignore the warnings about the certificate - showing some of these images: https://jv.gilead.org.il/evans/illustr/
No, it is not euro-centric. The previous US regime also spent like drunks, did you forget about all the stimulus packages which pushed inflation up to almost 10%?
Please stop pressing that down-vote button on anything outside the desired narrative. What nbajka says is true, corruption is universal. It is also true worldwide, not just in Europe. Corruption knows no ideological boundaries. Power corrupts, politics is about power, those in power sometimes abuse it. Yes, right-wing politicians are sometimes as corrupt as left-wing politicians. Yes, left-wing politicians are sometimes as corrupt as right-wing politicians. There's corrupt centrists as well.
You do realise the same is true for moves from the left to the right? The left spends until the coffers are empty, gets voted out by those fed up with the miserable state of the economy, the right takes over and brings things back on track through austerity measures, the economy wakes up but austerity is still demanded due to the size of the mess left by the lefties. Those same lefties point at the blooming economy and complain that only the rich get to profit while we live in austerity, vote for us and everyone gets a free beer and pony. People vote the left in, they start spending like crazy until the cycle repeats. Been there, seen it happen several times.
Drop the labels, preferred victim groups and excuses for your preferred ideology, heap everything together and you're getting closer to the truth:
My big fear about politicians is corruption, authoritarian tendencies and stupidity
There, done, put a pin in it. There's corrupt politicos on all sides of the spectrum, there's authoritarians on all sides and stupidity seems to be endemic.
Dissent from the desired narrative does not equal trolling? I may not agree with some of the west-coast liberal narrative and I am not wont to keep silent out of fear of karma loss but that does not make me a troll.
This is a discussion site, not a karma/likes farm. There are sure to be many others here who do not agree with the described narrative but who keep silent or, at most, create throwaway accounts to say something they know they will be 'punished' for. I think this is the wrong way to go so I just use my regular account even if that means I have to deal with people like you who call dissenters 'trolls' or worse, down-vote or flag in attempts to get dissent out of view. So be it, accounts are cheap.
My first modem, also around that time was... 10 Dutch guilders (around $4.50 at that time). That's 'cause I bought a suspiciously modem-looking (markings, phone line transformer, line relay, etc.) full-size rack-mount board at a swap meet, no documentation on the thing, bunch of switches and leds on the front, S100-like connector on the back, 'sold for parts'. I traced the circuitry, managed to work out its intricacies, figured out what voltage it needed to work, powered it up and started experimenting. After a few days I had it worked out, created an interface to my C-64 to run the thing through the user port - with pulse auto-dial! - and built
ye olde wooden enclosure with built-in power supply and a single-slot rack mount for the thing. It worked for years and was my first way to get online with that machine. It was the classiest modem I ever had, bar none.
I wonder what that board was originally used for, it was quite an elaborate thing, a half-size board sandwiched on top of a full-sized one, a bunch of expensive-looking white ceramic gold-capped circuits on the top board, the bottom one full of discrete components. It must have been something serious and expensive. Still, I suspect the C-64 I ended up connecting it to may have had more computing power than the original host.
A car battery with reduced range is still perfectly useable as a storage battery for a PV system. I got a high-voltage hybrid inverter when I built our PV (solar) system specifically for that reason: high-voltage EV batteries will appear on the market which I can use to create energy storage. Commercial storage systems are still too expensive for what they offer but used EV batteries are starting to appear at far more reasonable price levels. If a pack which used to store 90 kWh now only stores 70 kWh but costs 1/10 of a similarly-sized commercial storage system when combined with a suitable controller then I'd just get a bunch of them.
He probably just keeps it to remind himself what can happen when the facts about the ${TLA} spying on ${citizens} come out, i.e. make sure to keep it hush-hush this time or you'll end up in ${a_bad_place}.
> It takes 15 seconds to check. HN isn't an anonymous messageboard.
t is not the time it takes which is relevant, it is the interpretation of what is white supremacy and similar labels which I'm talking about. I checked his history and noticed a number of what I interpret as trollish comments from a number of years ago. That's not white supremacy but trolling - not something I prefer to see on this site but also not something I'm too upset about since those comments are easily ignored.
https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/07/maybe-we-sh...
Did you read that page? If not, do so, I think you'll learn something.
The first section of your comment does not make sense. I point out the possible proximal origin of the 'everything is political' line and mention that 'We' (which in this context clearly indicates the 'internet population' in a given time frame) did not as a rule throw slurs or label people. There's no contradiction here since these two lines - origin of a line, habits of an internet generation - are not connected unless you (erroneously) assume that the denizens of the early internet were all Marxists. They weren't, that was back in the days the '
Evil Empire' still existed and Marxism was still known to be a bad idea by most people.
Then to the rest:
The first line you quote - Comrade Knee-Jerk - is satire so that is in a different category.
The second is a good example, "useful idiots" of the "DSA" which in my opinion they absolutely are but you're right in calling me out, guilty as charged. They're still useful idiots though...
The third line isn't an example of me labelling anyone, there's no label there.
Let's take a gander at your rather prolific commenting habits, just to see what you're up to:
Their submission history is reminiscent of other motivated accounts that dilute the website's intellectual curiosity with zero-sum editorials. It's certainly deliberate, and their comment history seems to defend the submissions rather than conceding their obvious low quality.
No, you are willfully misinterpreting the purpose of their project and suggesting completely unrelated, insane and unrealistic remediation.
I stopped after two pages. Maybe you need to check the guidelines once more, especially those sections regarding astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like (first comment) and respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith (second comment).
Now that we've both taken apart each other's commenting histories maybe we can go back to the regular program, post and comment about things we're interested in and try to keep the politicking at bay? It has been made much harder by the way the don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle rule is applied but we can still try. Just assume that the person on the other side of the screen might not agree with you whom to vote for but otherwise has many of the same interests. That does not make him or her evil and it does not mean his or her opinion on unrelated subjects is not worth considering.
No, that 'everything is political' line is a marxist trope ("“Politics” is the general question of class struggle. Nothing in society stands above class struggle and thus nothing is above politics. In this sense, everything is political and politics is everything', [1]) which has been claimed by maoists [2 - search for the term in the document] in the context of the 'eternity of the class struggle').
People on the earlier internet - I was and still am one of them - did not so much share political views but were far less likely to consider those with different views not worth speaking to. We could speak about other subjects without needing to inject politics into everything, we could take others' opinions for what they were without needing to taint them with some political slur because he happened to vote for a different party or faction. We could actually make fun of those things and did not as a rule throw slurs and attach labels at those of a different view, at least not in anger.
Alas, how things have changed...
[1] https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-3/iwk-party-buildi...
[2] https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/...
I have no idea whether the parent poster is guilty of the things you accuse him of and it is actually hard to know what it actually takes to be accused of
white supremacist sentiments [1] nowadays since that term has been bandied around by the usual suspects so much. The problem I see is that this site has started to look like /pol/ more or less since Trump 1 when the 'ban' on political posts was seemingly lifted as long as those posts were aimed against the orange man and his ilk. Either bring the ban hammer down on all posts political or keep it only for those few occasions where someone really goes over the line. The mentioned holocaust denial would be one as far as I'm concerned, same for the denial or glorification of other atrocities like the Holodomor/killing fields/Chinese cultural revolution/etc. Political dissent should
never be a reason for flagging but unfortunately I've seen this too many times. The Athenians used to debate politics (among other things) on the 'agora' or 'meeting place'. They generally did not do this by kicking anyone who dissented off the square, they debated them. Sites like HN are the modern versions of that meeting place and kicking people off them because they happen to voice dissent does not do anyone any good.
[1] Here's a nice read-up on the subject: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-white-supremacy/ ... and please don't tell me that James Lindsay is a white supremacist to avoid ending up in an endless loop. He isn't, not even when he says something you don't agree with, see https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/07/maybe-we-sh...
Mine was as well, there seems to be an aggressive flag brigade watching this thread. I only pointed out that left spies on right while right spies on left which was too much for the trigger-happy flaggers. It doesn't bode well for the future of this site, there's plenty of censor-happy sites and services out there for those who can not abide to see anything outside of their desired narrative so it is sad to see how these narrow-minded hacks have invaded the hacker news.
A few hours ago I posted about the fact that left-wing governments spy on right-wing governments with a very recently discovered example of such while right-wing governments spy on left-wing ones as this article claims. That post was flagged for some inexplicable reason. Here's the link, no idea whether the post itself is visible to others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280200
Are the denizens of this site so intolerant of different views that they need to flag them out of sight? Whatever happened to the hackers in HN? They'd vociferously defend their own standpoint, pointing out all the errors in my post. The would not hide behind appeals to authority by pressing flag links. What gives, other than that you - meaning those who flagged this innocuous post - just can't stand anything dissenting with your desired narrative to remain on this site? If so, please hand in your hacker card at the exit and find your way to the closest subreddit where such behaviour seems to be cherished. Otherwise discuss, let us know what you think so we can respond or agree or maybe just shake our heads in disbelief but still consider your opinion yours enough that you are willing to post it.
No, this is not the first time I write something like this. I can not help but notice that I've had to write more and more such replies these last years though, things are not looking up here.
Yes, well, live by the sword and die by the sword as they say. The previous regime had its operatives aimed at not just right-wing (or, more accurately, non-left-wing) organisations but also individuals [1 (New York Post, the other New York publication did not see the need to publish this rather remarkable piece of evidence)], the current regime does the same to left-wing groups. When the "democrats" - by that time maybe the DSA - come to power again they'll do the same, again. Then come the Republicans who'll aim at left-wing groups again. Rinse, repeat.
[1] https://nypost.com/2026/10/14/us-news/jack-smith-kept-spread...
Because Musk->Tesla and Musk == bad according to the desired narrative to which a large fraction of the chattering classes adhere. While other car companies are generically bad (i.e. 'big company', 'climate', 'capitalism' etc.) Tesla is double-plus ungood and as such "we've always been at war with Tesla". If Musk ever decides to flip to the other side that'd quickly change and "we'd never have been at war with Tesla".
> NT was actually designed, versus being a reimplementation of an existing thing.
Well, yes, it was designed and it also was a reimplementation of an existing thing, this being VMS. Since it was designed by the designer of VMS (Dave Cutler) it would be comparable to the fictional ThoRix which would be a new OS designed by Thomson and Ritchie after they did Unix.