Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | object-a's commentslogin

Do you have kids? Did you let them grow up the same way?

I'm father of three daughters and they grew up almost like this in nineties. My grandchildren don't have this chance any more. It's a little bit about changing times, but mostly because of public – it's just not acceptable for others to do all these things and parents would get into real trouble. When I was 10, I drove tractor, had already several scars from knife and axe and visited my grandmother more than hundred km away alone. My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.

> My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.

Yea, the problem isn't that we don't want to give kids the freedom we had as kids. The problem is the nosy public that won't mind their own business and instead call the cops when they see someone out just playing. Not willing to risk involvement with poorly-trained, amped-up, armed law enforcement.


I remember one vacation to Paris as a kid, maybe 12 years old. There was a science museum I wanted to see, so my parents stuffed a bunch of Francs into my hands and wished me luck and shuffled me out of the hotel room. You have to learn these skills at some point. I had a thoroughly lovely day pressing random buttons on random exhibits and I can still remember it all clearly now over 30 years later.

I'm loathe to imagine what kind of trouble they might get into now for that.


> My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.

Don't know where you're from, but where I am people love to state this but it's almost never true. Much like how everyone thinks there was some kidnapping epidemic in the US in the 90's which started the whole stranger danger junk.

I was told my kid would have CPS called on me, the cops arresting me, etc. due to the freedom I gave him at a young age. Sure the cops came around once in a while to check on things due to a busybody neighbor but not much came of it. I always knew where he generally was, had reasonable explanations over why I was letting him do what he was doing, was never high or drunk when the cops showed, etc. Yet if you asked any of the other parents in his classrooms? They would have bet money in the other direction and would have been aghast at what he did on a daily basis alone.

Yes, there are horror stories here and there when everything goes off the rails. I was prepared for such a fight if needed.

Luckily there were a couple kids in the neighborhood who had parents who were either not present or somewhat like minded. So he still had a few compatriots not utterly cowed by the Karens of the world to go get into (and out of!) trouble with.


Two daughters, both born in the 90's. Yes, I encouraged the same kind of freedom, but they weren't quite as adventurous as their dad. I thought they were a bit more adventurous than most of their friends, though.

How big of a challenge are hardware faults and radiation for orbital data centers? It seems like you’d eat a lot of capacity if you need 4x redundancy for everything


Orbital data centers are still nothing more than the current hyperloop.


Orbital datacenters is a hypothetical infinite money glitch that could exist between the times:

- after general solution to extra-terrestrial manufacturing bootstrap problem is found, and, - before the economy patches the exploit that a scalable commodity with near-zero cost and non-zero values can exist.

It'll also destroy commercial launch market, because anything of size you want can be made in space, leaving only tiny settler transports and government sovreign launches to be viable, so not sure why commercial space people find it to be a commercially lucrative thing? The time frame within this IMG can exist can also be zero or negative.

The assumption is also like, they'll find a way to rent out some rocks for cash, so anyone with access to rocks will be doing as it becomes viable, and so, I'm not even sure if "space" part of space datacenters even matter. Earth is kinda space too in this context.


They dont go into here.. but I thought that NASA also used like 250nm chips in space for radiation resistance. Are there even any radiation resistance GPUs out there?


Absolutely not, although the latest fabs with rad-tolerant processors are at ~20 nm. There are FDSOI processes in that generation that I assume can be made radiation-tolerant.


NOPE, RAD hardened space parts basically froze on mid 2000s tech: https://www.baesystems.com/en-us/product/radiation-hardened-...


You don't need 4x redundancy for everything. If no humans are aboard, you have 2x redundancy and immediately reboot if there is a disagreement.


Orbital data centres are a stupid concept.


Setting your age 8-12 probably bans you from using Gmail and other online services


That's why you give different ages to different sites.


Can minors really not have email accounts?


https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en Google's policy is that under 13 you can have a supervised Gmail account. I think that's fairly standard for major providers


Depends on the jurisdiction I guess, now that we’re Balkanizing the internet.


"configure your reported age on a application/website basis."


You’d need some script that updates the age category based on the user’s provided birthday (which is not shared with the applications) but otherwise yeah


No you don't, the compliant user will up date this information as necessary.


The law says the user provides the birthdate or age and the bracket is derived from it


I wish the legislators thought about the privacy implications of this, because anyone can learn your birthday by watching when the category changes.


The brackets are a few years wide, so it could take a bit of waiting. But yeah I’d consider setting a slightly different day/month for a child if I was paranoid.

I guess you could also make the bracket selectable instead of requiring the age


> The brackets are a few years wide, so it could take a bit of waiting.

There are millions of people moving between the proposed age brackets every day. This is a DoB-gifting firehose to ad tech.


Ad tech doesn't need this feature to know roughly how old you are.


Also, various sites were already legally required to gather this information anyway to know if someone is over or under 13.


I believe the California law (which has passed) requires operating systems to collect the DoB or Age of the user when setting up a user account, and then expose an API that shares the users age range (not their actual age or birthdate) when requested by an application.

It does not require the OS to actually verify the age, collect government IDs, or any other data.

The intention, I think, is to put the responsibility for communicating the users age on the OS, instead of having each application or service do their own age verification (by scanning IDs, requesting user data, etc). Since it’s set on the machine, a parent can set it once for their kid when setting up the device.


Or I guess the kid can set it if they're smart enough to reinstall the OS or spawn a VM. I'm sure there will be online resources to help them that kids know how to share


Yeah if you have admin access to your device and know what you’re doing it’s basically a non-issue. I’m guessing a savvy high schooler can change their age bracket easily.

If you want to give a young child a laptop or computer though, it maybe helps keep them away from objectionable content.


The California law says nothing about verification or immutability, what if someone made a mistake when putting in their age? Why do we need to hide it? Better to just let the user change this at will.


Yeah the most likely thing (for the California law, at least) is that compliant OS's expose a form at account creation where you input a birthdate or age, and have either a CLI/file/setting where you can change the birthdate or age with admin permissions. No verification is needed


LD_PRELOAD can intercept getpwnam(). Why not getpwage() as well?




It would be nice if the site cited the regulations and costs that make the different facilites impossible — are they outright banned? Are there environmental regulations that don’t exist elsewhere? Is it a long process for permitting with tons of inspections?


I'm a little skeptical that Palantir pre-2009 (when Joe was there) focused on communists at all


CIA, FBI, foreign government, and corporate security needs drove its initial services. Basically, software to protect rich people and eliminate troublemakers in the way of profits.


Mercenaries. Like KBR/Halliburton/et al. except focused on tech rather than just physical security.


Sure, it may be post-hoc chest thumping theatrics, but also he was a tween during the fall of the Soviet Union and the end days of the Cold War along with having close family of Jewish descent since his mother was Jewish (Irish Catholic father). So there could be some baked-in, rather than acquired later, antipathy- understandably- towards communism. Especially the Soviet variety since its still warm corpse was around in the '03/'04 era when Palantir was founded. At that time, Hanssen had just recently been arrested, poking those coals again. Heck we're still living with the scars of all that and its fallout- if Lonsdale meant specifically former members/supporters of the CPSU and its shambling corpse then the statement is a little bit less over the top.


I mean, I’m even more skeptical that Palantir or its customers were concerned about killing former members or supporters of the Soviet Union prior to 2009. The focus was probably the War on Terror and related crimes.

Alex Karp was calling himself a self-described socialist as recently as 2018.


If it's about the War on Terror and related crimes, why have they also (since their inception) gathered such vast troves of data and profiles on U.S. citizens?


War on Terror means watching all of the brown people, many of whom are citizens


I am talking about at the founding. Their mission has obviously shifted from then.


Hasn't Palantir been gathering and storing data on U.S. citizens since the earliest days of the company?


Communists were probably just one of the domestic counterinsurgency concerns that drove its founding.


> drove its founding

IMO drove its funding.


Yes, the "spontaneous lab experiment that proved wildly successful" mythology around many of these companies is just elaborate camouflage.


I don't think this has to do with counterinsurgency but more like what the actual communists and fascists did: destroying an ideology by physically destroying the persons that associate with it. An ideology in this case communism (a broad term) that Palantir founders considered even an intellectual threat to their own ambitions. People who have understood Marx' theories and can apply them to analyze what's going on might be in theory immune to the hypercapitalist spectacle that a coalition which includes Palantir might stage. Which is kinda what happens the spectacle I mean with the current administration.


For anyone who has tried cars from both automakers, how does BYD compare to Tesla on similar trim vehicles?


If you had to pay US/EU prices for a Tesla vs BYD you'd go with BYD no question. But the majority of Teslas are made in China and when put a Chinese made Tesla alongside a Chinese made BYD it's a coin flip.

So as an Australian I'd roughly rate them the same with BYD high end matching Tesla's high end and BYD having a low end that Tesla doesn't compete with (the Atto which is ~USD $15000 for a small electric hatchback has no Tesla equivalent).


Isn't the seagull the cheapest model at like $8k?


Same car, called the Atto 1 in Australia and with the steering wheel on the other side and slightly better than base specs in Australia.


Correct. I believe the cheapest I could buy it for is about 60,000 rmb.


BYD doesn't sell in USA.


The point is the difficulty of the comparison. They are tariffed in the EU and NA to the point of near inviability so I don’t see that as a valid comparison. Outside the EU and NA they are Chinese made cars.

So basically you either compare current NA/EU Teslas to a hypothetical untariffed BYD (I don’t think this is fair) or you compare Chinese made Teslas to BYDs (which of course leads to similar prive perf ratios).


Byd Auto Motor, Inc. 1800 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90015 https://www.byd.international/city/los-angeles


Ok, but "where the rubber meets the road", I've seen 0 BYDs in the wild in the US, including a recent 1,800 mile trip half way across the country. Earlier in 2025 I took a trip to Scotland and they had 2 dealerships I saw and I saw a couple of them on the roads.


Leasing a building and having an english section on the website doesn't mean they're available here yet.

The pricing page shows none available in the USA:

https://www.byd.international/pricing


I don’t know how, but there are BYD city buses in Miami.


BYD makes buses in SoCal.


BYD Sealion 7 is better than a 2025 Model Y Standard and worse than a Model Y Premium in terms of ride quality/suspension and driving dynamics.

The interior is more taste dependent, but the Model Y Standard is clearly a low budget version (with fabric seats) that's below the BYD. The Model Y Premium interior and seats felt higher quality to me, but it has a more minimalist design while the BYD has a more traditional setup with a screen behind the wheel.

The Tesla screen/app seem more responsive and premium. Also above for example VW where things are often sluggish and don't feel as well designed from a UX perspective.


Thank you for answering the question


In my opinion, BYD car looks more premium than Tesla. Reasonably priced too.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: