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nickv

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Nick Vlku - Hey, I am working on something new. Stay tuned! nick at backplanes.com

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Om Malik has died 27 days ago

Mods, we should have a black bar for this.

He was a deeply influential person, who also was amazingly talented and a wonderful human being. The trifecta!

I sadly never met him, but even typing the word “was” above made me have the deepest sigh.

I think this is totally a fair way to do this. I know HN sometimes grumbles about this type of pricing, but totally get it. You’re not taking anything away, you’re just charging for new features after 1 year they paid. They don’t lose access.

(It’s like back when we had Photoshop 5 and then Photoshop 6 came out).

As long as you mention that security updates will be free, I think this is a good plan. It’s how you get indie devs paid to keep working on products.

The thing I'm most excited about here (other than Yay! Valve!) is that this will bleed towards making projects like Bazzite even better.

Yikes. I see Justin posted this, and I'm sure he can't say much - but this is an absolutely insane story.

Google has gone from encouraging 20% time (to create amazing projects like this) to firing people for doing it.

There seems to be some true maliciousness going on at Google. You have this, you have the open source Gemini CLI getting replaced with a shittier closed source Antigravity CLI, etc... etc... What is going on there?

GLM 5.2 vs. Opus 1 month ago

Or...

you go to OpenRouter and pay

$0.98 / $3.08per 1M for GLM 5.2 vs $5 / $25per 1M for Opus.

GLM 5.2 gives you OPTIONALITY so you can run it locally, but you can still just pay somebody for it.

This one is tricky, because FL/DeSantis is running against Trump on this position. Trump is the biggest booster of data center build-outs and AI supremacy. A Trump-friendly judge might hurt the odds of this lawsuit succeeding.

Ember.js 7.0 2 months ago

Isn't tanstack the new hotness now? Or is it Vite? Or is it htmx?

There's literally an entire section in the Treaty of the EU on the exact criteria to leave the EU. A country has literally _left_ the EU. Nobody is being held hostage to stay in the EU.

"Despite their citizens having opposed going in there." Can you point to a vote to invoke Article 50 that was not honored by the EU? Can you point to a country getting admission into the EU without a vote from their people?

Because wealth is also distributed in a very lumpy way across the city.

154 residents of NYC own 33% of the entire wealth of the city... notice I didn't say 1%, I said top 154. They are not contributing 33% of the tax income to the city.

So yes, the ultra rich pay "less taxes" if you look at how much of the resident wealth they control.

Also, property taxes are significantly lower than appraised value and the richer you get the bigger the disparity. That Ken Griffin’s $238M penthouse pied-a-terre? It's assessed value is $9M. So yea, he's paying like $150k/yr in property taxes.

And finally, it is a known fact that sales tax definitely hits poor people harder (re: "everyone pays sale tax equally"). What you want to look at is what percentage of a person's post taxincome vs sales tax paid, because if you make like $60k/yr you're probably close to 60% of all post tax income paying some form of sales tax (you buy with all the money you make). If you have $2B, your percentage of "tax paid as sales tax" is significantly lower, because you don't typically spend a billion dollars the same way you spend $60k.

Linux is good now 7 months ago

I have been watching this thread and you are triple downing on a point that you have no real experience with. Competitive e-sports is a real thing. There are e-sports arenas. (How are people even arguing this on HN?)

The International (a DOTA 2 competition) has like $40m in prizes. EWC in 2025 was $70m. 99.6 million people watched the League of Legends World Championship final. And we're not even talking about the millions of dollars of sponsorship involved.

That's great your mom isn't competitive in Valorant, but massively irrelevant. It's like me saying "I play flag football with friends, there is no competitive football."

Anti-cheat is important because this is how the best players are discovered, this is how they're recruited. If a game is 50%+ cheaters, the game will die... DOTA2 would cease to exist today as a big deal. Same with Valorant.

Aside from competitive gaming, GTA V online makes $1 BILLION in ARR. That would be $0 if the game was flooded with cheaters.

Now this isn't me defending kernel level anti-cheat, I think there are better ways to do it and some games do a great job here.

But man, calling GTA V online and competitive e-sports a "tiny bubble" is like calling the NFL a "tiny bubble".

I get it, remember the congestion zone isn't the entire borough of Manhattan. It's just below 59th street. And, if you were driving down there, good luck finding parking in the literal densest place on planet earth during work hours (187k people/sqm). Driving in the congestion relief zone is not a right.

(Also, this thread's root was "regressive tax affecting the poor" which I assert again, is just a silly mischaracterization)