Top all-time · #5940
BattlePenguin
Personal blog · battlepenguin.com · on HN as djsumdoghardwarepolitics
BattlePenguin is a personal blog at battlepenguin.com about hardware and politics. Since 2018, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 195 times, most often “Secondary Effects”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link BattlePenguin for its tech posts, such as upgrading an SSD and a self-hosted PeerTube video, and for politics pieces on Wikipedia bias and reading downvoted comments.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
BattlePenguin Dot Com
Most-linked posts?
- Secondary Effects2 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-07-09
- Voat: What Went Wrong?2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-10-07
- RSS: The Original Federated Social Network Protocol2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-03-20
- Matrix: One Chat Protocol to Rule Them All2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-12-16
- Microservices and Biological Systems2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-01-03
- Wikipedia Is a Source of Political Propaganda2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-15
What Hacker News says?
He does touch children very inappropriately. And YouTube actively pushes those videos to the very back of search. They're more difficult to find and they're creepy. They don't prove anything, but they're not good. There is plenty of real hard evidence than Hunter was used to peddle influence and spread corruption, and the media completed censored all of that information, from one of the oldest newspapers in the coun…
Comment linking /tech/the-solution-to-big-tech-isnt-legislation-its-technology/
on “Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.”Submitted Moving from YouTube to PeerTube as a story · 738 points
HN discussionI was. I knew none of the other issues mattered. The only thing I cared about was war, and Trump was the first anti-war president. Even then, he didn't reduce drone strikes, but he greatly lowered America's war footprint. I wrote about it here: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/who-will-lead-us-from-war...
Comment linking /politics/who-will-lead-us-from-war/
on “Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.”Submitted Wikipedia Is a Source of Political Propaganda as a story · 88 points
HN discussionIn American politics, voting really doesn't make a difference as much as just having opinions alighted with those of the top 10% of income earners[0]. Making noise and protests are more effective in some ways, but the sad reality is that most of senate/congress is not beholden to the selectorate of all voters, but rather the smaller selectorate of influences that control the advertising and narrative that allows the…
Comment linking /politics/video/does-voting-make-a-difference/
on “Oppose the Earn IT Act”Submitted Facebook and the Silent Bob Effect (2019) as a story · 81 points
HN discussionYea and once you start digging through the papers, it can get all over the place. I mean, trying to measure happiness is pretty subjective anyway. It's almost always a self-reported score and there are so many other variables it's difficult to lock down solid correlation. I'm not sure if it's possible to tell if kids make people happier or not. There are simply too many other factors. If you want kids have them and…
Comment linking /philosophy/science/time/
on “Having Kids”Submitted Microservices and Biological Systems as a story · 44 points
HN discussionI agree with many of your points. What has happened in this country is tragic. Our media hasn't helped by constantly pouring gasoline on the flames and the pandemic has kept us from even being able to really talk to and address one another, ESPECIALLY people who live in cities. This is utter madness and it has to stop. We have to start to see each other and people and not adversaries. You might like something I wrot…
Comment linking /philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-human-mind/
on “U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests”Submitted Mindful Meditation Is Not for Everyone as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI just wrote a full post on this: https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-h...
Comment linking /philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-human-mind/
on “U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests”Submitted Voat: What Went Wrong? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThey do in fact control Android. The open headset alliance means Android is open source in name only. Only tinkerers/hackers use ASOP derivatives by itself (or some foreign manufactures that cannot to offer Google Play services .. or Amazon Fire makers). They dominate the software ecosystem. Although it's not difficult to load 3rd party applications, it's certainly not common. Their removal of the Podcast Addicts ap…
Comment linking /tech/android-fragmentation/
on “Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube”Submitted Alpine Linux with Full Disk Encryption as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe Apple/Play stores are essentially a totally broken implementation of something that had existed for over a decade before: package repositories. It's embraced and extended Linux/BSD package/ports trees, except without things like the ability to add a 3rd party repository with other authors signing keys, pin certain versions, etc. https://battlepenguin.com/tech/android-fragmentation/#packag... We could go on about…
Comment linking /tech/android-fragmentation/
on “Open-source apps removed from Google Play Store due to donation links”Submitted Reddit Banned Ideas as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI've done this twice: https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/perspective/a-tale-of-t... Once was backpacking for 11 months with only two bags. The second was 5 months in a car. I did learn a lot both times, but I never got fully independent and it may have set me back some. Still in retrospect, it was a great journey and I'm still glad I made the attempt.
Comment linking /philosophy/perspective/a-tale-of-two-journeys/
on “I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35”Submitted Matrix: One Chat Protocol to Rule Them All as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMeditation isn't always for everyone: https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/mindful-meditation-is-n...
Comment linking /philosophy/mindful-meditation-is-not-for-everyone/
on “Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time”Submitted I No Longer Hate America as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI've run Linux (i3 window manager) on UHD screen since around 2015 when I bought this laptop: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/msi-ws60-running-linux/ It isn't simple? no. You have different env variables for QT, GTK and xrander can set its own DPI as well. It is kinda a mess, but I use i3 so I figure I'm in for whatever pain I put myself into. I've been running Linux on HiDPI devices for a couple of years now and I'v…
Comment linking /tech/msi-ws60-running-linux/
on “Broken”Submitted Voat: What Went Wrong as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> while deliberately hyperbolic It's not hyperbolic at all, or have you not seen the "Silence is Violence" rhetoric everywhere? It could literally come from Orwell's world of "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" The book, The Coddling of the American Mind, does a great job of showing how the goalposts for what is and isn't violent have been moved considerably in the past few years in academic ci…
Comment linking /politics/war-is-hell/
on “Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store”Submitted Matrix: One Chat Protocol to Rule Them All as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMicroservices are really about engineering around things. It's to make your team's stuff resistant to everyone else deploying things that breaks stuff. It's turning developing into a wired biological system-hybrid than I've written about before: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/microservices-and-biological-... I agree with the author on a lot of points. You shouldn't start out with bricks. You should build the house f…
Comment linking /tech/microservices-and-biological-systems/
on “Monoliths Are the Future”Submitted The Solution to Big Tech Isn't Legislation, It's Technology as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI setup my own Matrix homeserver recently with several bridges to all my current chat services: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/matrix-one-chat-protocol-to-r... It works fairly well.
Comment linking /tech/matrix-one-chat-protocol-to-rule-them-all/
on “Slack is down”Submitted Plants and Soil Sensors as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you know how, or are a serious youtuber and have the money to pay for IT people, setup a PeerTube instance. There are scripts that will copy your YouTube or Vimeo library to a PeerTube instance: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/moving-from-youtube-to-peertu...
Comment linking /tech/moving-from-youtube-to-peertube/
on “They're deleting my channel, but they don't know why? [video]”Submitted Not a Time of Honor as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
