stevenwoo

I got suspended for criticizing the state of Israel’s treatment of civilians in occupied territories, but they didn’t delete my account, though I stopped logging in after a week. (Logging in retains your subscriptions). I've seen plenty of similar comments to mine so I assume it was the work of some oddball who I responded to that has an connection to somebody who works there so they could pull some strings to suspend my account.

Approximately 60 percent of Americans have unfavorable view on Israel. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/07/negative-... However there are national executive pressures and state mandates against speaking out or boycotting Israeli companies, notably in Texas where they bought these. https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/anti-israel-policies-are-ant...

Mr. Robot and Person of Interest(iirc) got a lot of details right.

No, I tried to express with the word “might” and the phrase “come to mind” as indications of what people could come up with on the spur of the moment without delving into research. I did not intend what you wrote.

Has it? My impression is in the USA the start was the normalization of "on our side or the enemy" polarization started with Newt Gingrich into ordinary sedate (for the time period) political debate and was weaponized in the aftermath of 9/11 when any criticism of Bush/Cheney actions was reframed as what side is one questions in the 'war on terrorism' with the implied positioning of any opposition as pro terrorism.

I had to look this up, the word doesn't have a very long history claims this bit https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/history-of-the-word... . The first authoritarian regime that might come to mind to most after the French Revolution, the Nazis, didn't use this word commonly for their opposition, either, AFAIK.

In addition to other comments, Windows 95 came more than a decade after the Commodore 64. The IBM PC at that time cost roughly three -four times as much in my memory, Apple II was almost as much. The Commodore quickly got a large game library , better than competitors. It was a golden age for smaller scale games not requiring the massive teams of the modern AAA photorealistic or open world games - this was during maybe the height of the arcade video game craze when some kids like me would spend oodles of quarters at convenience stores and video arcades. Eventually many of us would switch to Windows 3.1/95/98 for work.

The political challenge of funding a laser program just for research for centuries seems just as daunting - lacking the capability for some self repairing, self healing devices, the automated or (lobster-ai) probe going to stars is just as far away as when Charles Stross first wrote about it in Accelerando some twenty years ago. Given the collapse of political norms, looking back, the decades long research projects of the US space program appear to be soon relics of the past.

This matches what was lampooned in Erasure(2001) by Percival Everett and adapted into the movie American Fiction.

Some audiobooks can add to the experience - for instance in both Flowers for Algernon and Stranger in a Strange Land the main character evolves in ways the performer encapsulates in their voice that most readers probably did not do as well - I read both in print about 40 years ago and listening to the audiobooks recently was a revelation. There’s also A Confederacy of Dunces - this has multiple American accents that I bet no non native speaker could capture and possibly escapes most Americans as well. Another example is Infinite Jest - some people like the going back and forth with the footnotes but i preferred the audiobook incorporating the footnotes with a second narrator of different gender than the main one with an audio cue.

I’m doing something similar though some of these 100 classics are going to be a bit difficult for those with shorter attention spans, Austen and Dickens come to mind as requiring a high level of attention from me to keep track of all the self referential clauses, also with Homer, for those of us out of school for a long time, Stephen Fry’s four book overview of the underlying myths give a necessary background to fully appreciate Homer. I find for many of the classics I have to reference Wikipedia to understand the historical contexts and some of the archaic practices.

I’m only surprised it does not mention the road rage most drivers might only have in their mind but a few let it get the better of themselves and make the news -that’s always been present for most adult Americans daily lives.

Automobile manufacturers still use it for some new models in development - occasionally see photos on social media from passersby https://gizmodo.com/how-automakers-use-a-wwi-era-camo-techni...

I posted this in another reply, but this is relevant to your point about the market place (deeper in article) and for the hacker news audience - the current Defense Minister for Ukraine is a 35 year old from the tech industry, Mykhailo Fedorov https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/09/ukraine-russia-war-theo...

It appears that Ukraine is executing on this (after building up its internal defense production), and Russia is not adjusting well, yet. https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/09/ukraine-russia-war-theo...

It's sarcasm, a bit, because the last published deal revealed the USA was going to pay Iran 300 billion to end the shooting war that Israel and the USA started. https://www.npr.org/2026/06/23/nx-s1-5866577/iran-trump-deal...

Swear I recognized location/trees from TV show The Magicians in the latest adaptation of Shogun(standing in for Japan).

I used to encounter maybe one person who did not have a head of gray hair, i.e. obviously retired, in a variety of mid peninsula parks in Silicon Valley on weekdays pre covid during the work day and nowadays I run into a dozen or more in a typical half day outing on a week day and this trend definitely started during pandemic. But I don’t know if it’s unemployment or WFH now.

This study and most similar do not take into account bone density, this is a concern for women who have to actively build this up early in life to have a reserve (to account for the continual decline after about age 25 that is worse for women) to stave off osteoporosis - as well as continually work on maintenance after that with weight bearing/resistance exercise and diet. At least this is what I learned from my exercise and physiology textbook, the best antidote is building up of bone density in a woman's younger years and I doubt there's research into a substitute for that.

Unless one is a right wing protestor like Kyle Rittenhouse.

Many of the subplots have been reused for entire romance movies, and lots of the mini adventures would not be out of place in something like Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as odd as that sounds.

I swear it took me six retries to make it past the start. But if you have six hours the BBC adaptation is pretty good IMHO and captures many of the essentials of the book if not all the details. The show made me cry and the book did not have the same effect but maybe that was because it focused on certain aspects. I particularly remember the combat scenes in the book would have been difficult to match - the prose capturing the chaos and randomness of brutality in the neighborhood of D Day landing in Saving Private Ryan but with horse cavalry charges and cannon fire.

One thing is a lot of common television/movie tropes are instantly recognizable in one form or another in there, the murder in Crime and Punishment is a series of coincidences and lucky timing for him to initially get away with it that would not be out of place in modern thriller or comedy. I had the same issue with the names so I took notes and bookmarked the Wikipedia page for the books to refresh my memory of whom was whom until it stuck. Audiobooks (most of the russian classics are free from my local library)help a lot with the pronunciation if one is like the writer and pattern matches names - hearing them a few times initially is very helpful. Side note - not a sea person but only from audiobooks learned i didn’t know how to pronounce English words boatswain, gunwale and forecastle.

Two of those people were not involved in any of the planning and discussion of weapons via Signal and still got 30 year sentences, for the magazines bit. The shooter claimed he only shot because he saw the officer shooting at the back of fleeing unarmed protestors - this type of law enforcement is frowned upon in most other countries but regularly happens unopposed in the USA and officers will claim and most of the time get qualified immunity. The whole prosecution feels of a kind of the misuse of laddering and felony murder charges.

Motorcycle licensing is a bit specific( at least in California ) even if one has an automobile license, I only looked at it casually, have to buy special clothes for the training class and pass before getting learners permit to get practice for taking state test, but most of the skills learned in the training class are not applicable to this vehicle AFAIK. I would speculate it's closer to a Japanese small form factor Kei truck which are importable under certain restrictions - which must be 25 years old or older, not legal for public road use in many(most?) places due to bumper/crash testing/airbag requirements, though I've seen a couple in California in suburban/rural areas. Also see tourists driving essentially golf carts in places like San Diego on downtown streets. It seems murky to me.

The sewing machine stays in that library so I’m going to make the assumption they have a bit of in house expertise for advice and counsel - they have a photo of the anecdote in question and it’s only a starting point on how Finland is trying to use libraries to promote society and democracy by providing tools and spaces and opportunities - you might be focusing too much on minutiae - one of the librarians speaks about the ways they work to increase library use. There’s a short contrast with the USA and UK closing libraries in recent years and one of the librarians interviewed moved to Finland from the UK - that may also be a reason the BBC went with this story.

I’m surprised this does not mention humans can grow back the tips of their fingers (past the white part of cuticle) https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/06/10/1903854... Supposed to be only kids but I’ve chopped off a few mm by accident it came back as an adult or I can’t tell the difference.

I had trouble finishing Zen and the Art because my recollection is he drones on and on about the philosophy after the initial set up. The story disappeared. I felt kind of being had because I remember being intrigued by the title in a used bookshop as a teenager and buying it (this was before the internet) so my viewpoint is biased by that. My college philosophy textbooks managed to be more interesting and deeper than Zen, even a book about Aurelius was more interesting to me.

Using Marxist as a denunciation feels like a shibboleth considering how often it comes out of the mouths of conservative politicians in the USA when talking about stuff that is not remotely related to it.

I went to the Electrical Engineering ceremony, the only speakers were from the faculty and one newly minted B.S.E.E. I biked there and saw there were a lot of smaller ceremonies across the campus outside of the stadium the photo captures.

Tactical means battlefield, attacking cities and infrastructure means strategic. Tactical nuclear weapons took a while to develop after 1945 - they have never been used.