wadadadad (u/wadadadad)

wadadadad commented on Wholesale prices rose 0.9% in July, more than expected cnbc.com/2025/08/14/ppi-i... · Posted by u/belter

FredPret · 15 days ago

I don't know how this is even a talking point.

The top 5% of taxpayers in the USA pay 61% of the taxes.

The top 1% pay 30-40% of all the taxes and have done so for decades.

https://usafacts.org/articles/who-pays-the-most-income-tax/

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

wadadadad · 15 days ago

When the top 5% makes 3x more than the bottom 50%? The top 5% makes 38% of the total, while the top 1% alone makes 22%, per the same sources you just quoted. Yes, the ones who make the most can afford to pay the most in taxes.

You didn't even cover GP's main point about getting the top to even pay taxes; the top 1%, per your own source, only pays 26%, while the top 50% pays 16%.

Top x% tax bracket should at least be 32%, per current brackets. So one could argue they aren't even paying what they 'should'. https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...

wadadadad commented on Tell HN: I underestimated how lonely building solo can be · Posted by u/paulwilsonn

yieldcrv · 24 days ago

Oh god, then you’ll be like one of those founders calling them family because you have no friends

Just talk to an AI and go volunteer at a farmers market

wadadadad · 24 days ago

I onboarded a junior (not an intern though) as an otherwise solo engineer, and there definitely is something different about both being able to explain to them in such as way that they start to understand, and also watching them grow. I find it fulfilling, something that I don't think can be replicated with AI (and also good for everyone in sharing experience). Maybe it helps that the junior is very interested in the job and growing.

That being said, there's also a lot of time in teaching and explaining that isn't directly pushing work forward, so there's that to consider.

wadadadad commented on Dumb Pipe dumbpipe.dev/... · Posted by u/udev4096

jerf · a month ago

"Interested to know how you've been burnt by wireguard; what did it not do that you were expecting?"

Speaking just for myself, I expected it to be as easy to set up as Tailscale. Not to be set up in exactly the same manner as Tailscale, I understand they are not identical technologies, but I expected the difficulty to be within spitting distance of each other.

Instead I fussed with Wireguard for a few days without it ever working for even the simplest case and had Tailscale up and running in 5 minutes.

I think I recognize the pattern; it's one that has plagued Linux networking in general for decades. The internet is full of "this guy's configuration file that worked once", and then people banging on that without understanding, and the entire internet is just people banging on things they don't understand, 80% of which are for obsolete versions of obsolete features in obsolete kernels, until the search engines are so flooded with these things that if there is a perfect and beautiful guide to understanding exactly how this all works together and gives the necessary understanding to fix the problems yourself it's too buried to ever find. It also doesn't help that these networking technologies are some of the worst when it comes to error messages and diagnosis. Was I one character away from functionality, or was my entire approach fundamentally flawed and I was miles from it working? Who's to say, it all equally silently fails to work in the end.

wadadadad · a month ago

Out of curiosity, what references were you looking at for the setup?

wadadadad commented on Celebrating 20 Years of MDN developer.mozilla.org/en-... · Posted by u/soheilpro

susam · a month ago

I could fulfil my childhood dream of creating a space-invaders-like game [1], much later as an adult [2], thanks to MDN!

The excellent documentation for the Canvas API [3] and OscillatorNode [4] on MDN made it quite easy to get started with developing the game.

[1] https://susam.net/invaders.html

[2] https://github.com/susam/invaders#why

[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API

[4] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/OscillatorN...

wadadadad · a month ago

I want to say that the game play was really well done, I really enjoyed the progression (speed of enemies, number of enemies, how quickly they descended) and mechanics (being able to shoot their bullets!)! I don't recall exactly how the original invaders worked, so I'm not sure how much was copied vs changed, but I very much enjoyed this as a brief break. Thank you!

wadadadad commented on Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte reuters.com/world/us/pent... · Posted by u/oldprogrammer2

CityOfThrowaway · 5 months ago

The data on hostile takeovers by "corporate raiders" very much does not support the characterization here.

The category of PE firms you're talking about buy companies that are deeply troubled. Generally due to the management's unwillingness to accept reality and make change, the company is heading towards oblivion one way or another.

Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of takeover targets wind up as net job creators on a 5-10 year time horizons. That's despite the fact that they do usually start by divesting assets that don't make sense and laying off non-productive employees. But divested assets aren't generally killed – they are usually sold to somebody else who often does something better with it.

Also, companies conduct massive downsizing and rationalization all the time when in distress, and not only when they are taken over by a "corporate raider".

In the private markets, these actors are definitely distasteful. They do cleanup work that feels bad, and they often get rich doing it. But they also serve a necessary role in the markets.

Companies that are egregiously misusing capital and resources are a drag on the economy. It's a bad thing for there to be a bunch of zombie companies holding onto assets that could be used in better ways.

A more generous framing would be something like a home flipper. They buy properties that are a mess, clean it up real good, throw out the old stuff for recycling, install some modern appliances, and sell it to somebody else.

One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission.

I'm not defending the specific actions of this administration (for which I simply don't know enough), but it is refreshing to see the government rummaging through its mess and cutting stuff that is irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission.

wadadadad · 5 months ago

This deviated from the original topic, and I'm not following your metaphor flows. How does your post relate to consultants specifically? Is there an implication that consultants not part of the 'mess'?

You say "No automatic force... whether (the agencies) are achieving any progress)". Don't we have oversight agencies and committees? I'm not following your 'grow and grow'; can you provide evidence that all agencies just 'grow and grow' without achieving progress? If not all agencies, then be specific.

Also, what evidence is there of "stuff" that is "irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission"? Which mission? What corruption? What evidence of this? Can you speak more specifically here?

Please provide evidence to claims so we can have an discussion around this.

wadadadad commented on FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies thelibre.news/foss-infras... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

mistrial9 · 5 months ago

it is an ecosystem of social roles, not just "people" .. casting the decision into individual choices is not the right filter to understand this situation..

wadadadad · 5 months ago

I'm not sure I'm following what you mean by 'social roles'. Which roles are you referring to here?

I'll disagree that it's not at least individual malicious choice, though. Someone decided that they needed to fake/change user agents (as one example), and implemented it. Most likely it was more than one person- some manager(s)/teams probably also either suggested or agreed to this choice.

I would like to think at some point in this decision making process, someone would have considered 'is it ethical to change user agents to get around bans? Is it ethical to ignore robots.txt?' and decided not to proceed, but apparently that's not happening here...

wadadadad commented on NIH.gov DNS servers down, making PubMed, BLAST, etc. unreachable [fixed] nslookup.io/domains/www.n... · Posted by u/raphman

raphman · 6 months ago

According to a comment on Reddit, search problems have been existing for some time - they did not just appear after the DNS issue [1].

Also, I just searched for "transgender" on nih.gov, and got lots of hits [2], the first one being a publication on PubMed [3].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NIH/comments/1j28ytk/comment/mfs14d...

[2] https://search.nih.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nih&q...

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34993517/

wadadadad · 6 months ago

I appreciate your attempt to clarify here, but your citation link above in 2) is for 'trangender', a misspelling (but it does search successfully).

This isn't a 'search problem'; searching for 'gender' and 'transgender' always and immediately redirects back to the main page. I also tested several unrelated searches without any issues (HIV, genome, public, potato).

wadadadad commented on We Kind of Suck at That Right Now cutlefish.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/wapasta

01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 6 months ago

> Talk less

Oh

wadadadad · 6 months ago

On this topic, the problem I have with "talk less" as advice is that although simply by 'talking less' you make room for silence and other people to fill it in, it doesn't actively instigate other people to talk. I want other people to pro-actively give their opinions and thoughts.

wadadadad commented on Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021) jacobbuckman.com/2021-05-... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

psychoslave · 6 months ago

In theory $SYSTEM is the most excellent thing that humanity could ever hope and everyone knows they that by acting in accordance with the stated expected behaviors, they will act in the best way they can think of to achieve the best result for everybody.

In practice people see that $SYSTEM is rotten and most likely to doom everyone on the long span, with increasingly absurd actions accepted silently on the road. But they also have the firm conviction that not bending the knee, be brave and say out loud what’s in everyone mind, will only put them on the fast track to play the scapegoat and change nothing else on the overall.

Think about it: over-reporting of grain production was a major factor of the great Chinese Famine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

wadadadad · 6 months ago

Thank you for providing the link for this- it's greatly interesting to see how such a failure could occur through human means and the significant impact it had, and how it can directly relate to academia (really, many topics, anywhere there is a '$SYSTEM').

The cover ups in the article were also interesting- a deliberate staging to Mao to prevent uncovering the truth. I'm not sure how this compares directly (is there a centralized authority with power to fix the issue that is being lied to, compared to the decentralized "rotten" system, where the status quo is understood and 'accepted').

wadadadad commented on I am rich and have no idea what to do vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-ha... · Posted by u/vhiremath4

finnthehuman · 8 months ago

> Hey author if you are reading this, try doing something positive like help people. Volunteer. Everything you have tried so far has been self-centered.

It's a common enough idea to tell someone rudderless to volunteer, but I feel like it's never tempered with the perspective of having volunteered and reflected on how the donated time has effected one's own life. Shaming someone rudderless into volunteering doesn't help them for exactly the obvious reasons it won't. At least no more than anything else you can lean hard into in life to avoid something else. Suggesting it as a fix to ennui is bad advice, the virtuousness of volunteering just masks how terrible it is.

wadadadad · 8 months ago

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. To share my experience as someone who volunteers, I find it to be one of the most gratifying (humbling, helpful, makes me see the value of life) things, and I think it's worthwhile to share the idea that it could help someone who is searching for meaning. I wholeheartedly recommend volunteering for everyone who can afford it (which I recognize not everyone can). I'm not sure GP here needs to necessarily state "I volunteer and found it worthwhile" every time they recommend it.

What are these "obvious reasons" that volunteering won't help someone seeking direction?

I also don't follow why you haven't stated whether you've personally tried volunteering and whether it's "worked" for you, particularly when you seem dismissive of it and seem to looking for personal reasoning from others.