HN user

imgabe

23,881 karma

Blogging at https://tiltingatwindmills.dev

Available for freelance work - https://kotsf.com

email me at gabe@kotsf.com

Current project: Peg Solitaire for iOS - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pegbrain/id6475374798

Posts168
Comments4,148
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www.raptitude.com 12mo ago

How to Surf the Web in 2025, and Why You Should

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3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

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50pts91
www.wired.com 2y ago

What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs

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www.theatlantic.com 2y ago

The Suburbs Have Become a Ponzi Scheme

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tiltingatwindmills.dev 2y ago

Wild speculation regarding the OpenAI fiasco

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tiltingatwindmills.dev 2y ago

Quitting While You're Ahead

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goodreason.substack.com 2y ago

The Truthiness of Hasan Minhaj

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www.nationalaffairs.com 2y ago

The Truth about College Costs

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92pts153
jackdevanney.substack.com 3y ago

Nuclear power is too safe

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lemire.me 3y ago

Can GPT pass my programming courses?

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thezvi.wordpress.com 3y ago

The kids are not okay

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vitalik.ca 3y ago

Some Personal User Experiences

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www.levels.fyi 3y ago

Levels.fyi scaled to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end

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www.nytimes.com 3y ago

The Story Construction Tells About America’s Economy Is Disturbing

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onlinelibrary.wiley.com 3y ago

The Enduring Price of Place: Revisiting the Rural Cost of Living

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levels.io 3y ago

The next frontier after remote work is async

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hongkongfp.com 3y ago

TikTok’s Chinese owner denied setting up a subsidiary company in Taiwan

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www.raptitude.com 3y ago

One Reason the World Seems So Troubled

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www.calnewport.com 3y ago

Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there

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www.mentalfloss.com 3y ago

Nub City': Vernon, Florida's Decade-Long Insurance Scam (2015)

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thezvi.wordpress.com 4y ago

Against Active Shooter Drills

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www.david-dahan.com 4y ago

Reasons MVC Frameworks aren’t dinosaurs but sharks

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www.raptitude.com 4y ago

Cynicism Is Boring

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sites.google.com 4y ago

Public Comments on the California Math Framework

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tiltingatwindmills.dev 4y ago

A Manifesto for the Metaverse

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www.raptitude.com 4y ago

What I learned during my three days offline

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tiltingatwindmills.dev 4y ago

Show HN: How Do I Type That Character?

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bariweiss.substack.com 4y ago

I’m a public school teacher – the kids aren’t alright

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tiltingatwindmills.dev 4y ago

Fix a Pothole

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tiltingatwindmills.dev 4y ago

Trouble Comes to Small Town

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It literally says “what if people could only make a hundred million dollars?” I agree they do not provide any specific details about how to implement that, because it is an incredibly stupid idea that would be impossible to implement. He does say he doesn’t know what the best policy is. Well, I am here to give a hint: not that.

Once again, OP is proposing not a tax but a wealth cap. A tax takes a percentage of whatever - income, wealth, transaction. It does not impose a limit on how much you are allowed to have. That is an entirely different phenomenon. We do have a whole constitutional amendment about the government unreasonably seizing your property and saying "well if it's more than this amount the government gets to take it all" is an unreasonable seizure of property.

Wealth taxes are also economic suicide but most of the "rah rah billionaires shouldn't be allowed" people seem to have absolutely no idea how anything works and think billionaires have billions of dollars sitting in their checking accounts and they could easily write an "end homelessness" check but just don't because they're mean.

I think the newspapers and books alone still probably made Waterson a decent amount of money. More than enough to live comfortably forever. I remember Scott Adams (of Dilbert) once saying his syndication deal was something like $6 million per year, I'm sure Calvin and Hobbes was at least comparable and the books certainly sold well. Newspapers used to be absolute cash cows.

I mean, when you're like "I have to make a hidden wifi server in a light bulb to distribute these books" that does kind of imply some dystopian totalitarian state that will put you to death for reading those books or something and not the reality that they are given their own highlighted section in literally every single bookstore in existence.

USA is ultra conservative on the average in comparison to just any European state for example.

Are you serious? The UK and Germany are arresting people for social media posts. That is actual impingement of free speech.

We already have taxes, the vast majority of which are paid by the wealthy. Taxes are not a cap on allowable net worth. That is a different thing altogether. That is economic suicide.

No, it's called rule OF law. Not rule BY law. We create a law, like property rights, and we work within that framework. We don't suddenly decide that property rights don't matter any more because someone happens to have stuff we particularly want to take. That's how dictatorships work.

None of the other workers know how to build a house. The electrician doesn't know how to build a house. The carpenter doesn't know how to build a house. The guy hanging drywall doesn't know how to build a house.

They know how to do one piece and finding and coordinating all those people (something else they don't know how to do) is work on its own that is valuable.

Sure if people could just pick whatever they want we'd all be sitting on the beach having drinks with supermodels, but then who's going to make the drinks?

People can pick among various jobs. If they picked warehouse worker that was the best option available to them. Taking it away means they have to choose something worse.

And a job is not a lifetime commitment. Warehouse worker may be a stop on the way to something else. I worked in a warehouse for a while, now I don't. People are not static blobs.

Who is going to cap how much a company is allowed to be worth? Or how much of the company you start you are allowed to own? Why should anyone have the power to do that? That is a far more evil power than any billionaire has.

Someone working a job they freely chose is not being exploited. This word is losing all meaning. Amazon pays more with better benefits than most other warehouse jobs.

This is something people keep saying out of inertia. It hasn't really been true for a few years. There's been a ton of original movies lately. I guess they just don't get a lot of press or people don't go to the movies anymore. Here's a few from the last couple years:

    Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
    Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die    
    Honey Bunch
    Cold Storage
    Send Help
    Marty Supreme
    Dust Bunny
    Fackham Hall
    Eternity
    Rental Family
    Bugonia
    Roofman
Ok, going to cut this short because I'm only back to October 2025 and it's already long. Seriously, there's lots of movies out there that aren't part of a franchise or other IP (other than maybe books).

Warning: the following video contains rapid strobing of light. I’ve written this out so people who are reading this with a screen reader know not to watch the video!

Uh...if you need a screen reader are the strobing lights really going to be a problem?

Being old enough now to have lived through several golden ages of this or that, you have to understand there's always another golden age around the corner. Don't spend so much time wishing for the past that you miss what's happening now.

If you just place the pie to cool on your window sill, the smell will cause some nearby hobos to float over, or so cartoons have lead me to believe. Then you'll have some friends.

Ian's Shoelace Site 6 months ago

I've been using the secure knot for years now. It's vastly superior to the standard shoelace knot.