owisd

6 ms·

1.
by owisd 4d ago
The path to deregulation creates a "market for lemons". Suppose any bank was completely unregulated and could abscond with your money and the government would just shrug its shoulders. Great, now there's no trust and everyone
2.
by owisd 5d ago
We already tried that. The companies had the option not to exploit kids and chose exploitation, and given trillion-dollar companies they can massively out-resource any parent's individual action - no amount of parental controls will st
3.
by owisd 11d ago
It was actually first cracked by Marian Rejewski at the Polish Cipher Bureau and the details were handed over to Bletchley Park at the start of the war.
4.
by owisd 13d ago
Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone strongly insinuates Kinney Services got started as a gambling front, so possibly a poor example of a boring business turning a healthy profit.
5.
by owisd 14d ago
If you've got an iPhone/Mac I recommend Apple's free Apple Configurator tool to lock down your phone to only the set of apps you whitelist and/or route all traffic through a VPN/Proxy that whitelists only certain IP
6.
by owisd 20d ago
Japan already did it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cjej4y3gvzlo
7.
by owisd 21d ago
All the recent evidence ( https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5736553/fast-food-scree... ) is that people who are best at self-regulation don't do it by surrounding themselves with tempting things an
8.
by owisd 27d ago
You know any time any legislature proposes anything they have dozens of people involved in months of debates and consultations and reports and committees to go through all of this kind of minutiae to decide where to draw the lines.
9.
by owisd 1mo ago
A few options: (a) load a digital copy of an existing ID into your OS's wallet app then the wallet app can simply attest to any service that the device is owned by someone over 18 (b) sell single-use tokens in grocery stores that requi
10.
by owisd 1mo ago
> I'm not sure if the EU would really go along with it again. Sounds like Project Fear to me! The EU needs Britain more than Britain needs them! The German car/French wine/etc. industry will beg the European Commission to
11.
by owisd 1mo ago
Could solve this, and in turn rid the world of a huge amount of algorithmic slop, by taxing companies according to how much personal data they hold.
12.
by owisd 1mo ago
The article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse since 2000 but not yet fallen to 1950 levels.
13.
by owisd 2mo ago
Feels like this has gone completely meta and it's now way more common to see people who don't care about children refusing to support that any proposal that might benefit children under the assumption that nobody cares about chi
14.
by owisd 3mo ago
It does seem to be a general internet discussion trend that any complicated topic that can be lossily compressed into a few useful rules of thumb will develop zealots that consider the rules of thumb the be-all and end-all, like Clean Code
15.
by owisd 4mo ago
Yet like cigarettes or lead you're not prepared to be very careful about results that claim it's all a moral panic being favourable to a very rich elite.
16.
by owisd 4mo ago
They don't really 'call' elections since they only publish probabilities. If you'd bet on the candidate 538/Silver was more bullish than the bookies, then the only election year you wouldn't have made money wou
17.
by owisd 5mo ago
Feels like one of these things that's been known for decades in the general form: tools that take cognitive load off your working memory (a calculator, writing) free your brain up for higher level thinking make you "smarter",
18.
by owisd 5mo ago
John Stuart Mill recognised over 150 years ago that free speech was only free if it was honest, good faith, polite discourse. Allowing it to descend into lies and ad hominems only benefits the elite who have the greatest resources to shout
19.
by owisd 6mo ago
If the end goal was user identification then the digital ID + zero knowledge proof age verification methods would be disallowed, which they aren't. https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/google-.
20.
by owisd 6mo ago
If you count Podcasts as RSS then surely RSS is more popular than ever. I can imagine that if Apple bundled a hypertext version of the Podcasts app it would be similarly popular. But they won't because it would compete with their own N
21.
by owisd 7mo ago
The EU started charging carbon tariffs from 1 January- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Carbon_Border_Adjustment_Me...
22.
by owisd 7mo ago
The problem with "cleaning the data" is it sometimes strips away so much context as to give you a misleading impression. Rory Stewart once said it took him 40 hours to fully understand a piece of legislation he was voting on, yet
23.
by owisd 7mo ago
>> HN commenters are not legislators > That doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to have a discussion about it. To steel man, there's a commenting pattern where if someone doesn't like a high-level idea they demand answers to a
24.
by owisd 7mo ago
There's been rules around what constitutes advertising or product placement on TV for decades, didn't seem to be such an insurmountable issue first time around.
25.
by owisd 7mo ago
You can minimise the risk, but there's a point at which you have to accept that liberal democracy functions around these institutions so dismantling them creates the kind of vacuum that fascism thrives in, which is why Libertarianism h
26.
by owisd 7mo ago
> For many years this system served well Surely don't need to ditch the whole system then and just needs a better kill-switch.
27.
by owisd 8mo ago
The rules are inconsistent. You can be Mayor of Sheffield and an MP at the same time but you can’t be Mayor of Greater Manchester and an MP.
28.
by owisd 8mo ago
After the Nazis opened the Ark, Jones was able to tell the Americans where to pick it up from. Otherwise when the Nazis sent a crew to look for the missing men they’d have just found and taken the Ark again.
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by owisd 8mo ago
The EFF are fighting a losing battle: > we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented. All the momentum is in the other direction and not slowing down. There are valid privacy concerns, but, buried in this
30.
by owisd 8mo ago
Economics is usually optimising for a narrow utility function, usually something to do with price discovery, but that doesn’t normally align with more human societal goals. Take, say, surge pricing. Maybe without surge pricing you pay $60 f

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