Hacker News: MBCook

New comment by MBCook in "Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops"

MBCook — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:14:09 +0000

> The amount of work in mining is way higher than is required to prevent another party from being able to overwhelm the Blockchain.

Isn’t that exactly the point? Bitcoin incentivized wasting resources. It is, according to your own comment, unnecessary to use so much computing to keep bitcoin going. But it’s being used.

New comment by MBCook in "Investigating Split Locks on x86-64"

MBCook — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:18:33 +0000

They don’t have to match.

As an example, what about a divide instruction. A machine without an FPU can emulate a machine that has one. It will legitimately have to run hundreds/thousands of instructions to emulate a single divide instruction, it will certainly take longer.

Thats OK, just means the emulation is slower doing that than something like add that the host has a native instruction for. In ‘emulator time’ you still only ran one instruction. That world is still consistent.

New comment by MBCook in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

MBCook — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 03:43:20 +0000

Why does it take $17m to beat Git?

How will you ever get the network effects needed to get sustained users with a commercial tool?

Given Git was created because BitKeeper, a commercial tool, pulled their permission for kernel developers to use their tool aren’t we ignoring a lesson there?

New comment by MBCook in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

MBCook — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:48:53 +0000

At first I thought it might be a train. “Surely he’s not doing that on a plane“.

Once he showed he went to Hawaii my idea made slightly less sense.

New comment by MBCook in "Why do Macs ask you to press random keys when connecting a new keyboard?"

MBCook — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 23:28:10 +0000

There must be a way to tell them apart in the USB protocol because I’ve never gotten the keyboard prompt on my Mac when I plug one of those in.

New comment by MBCook in "Every GPU That Mattered"

MBCook — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:32:03 +0000

But it WAS ultra popular with OEMs. If you had embedded video there was a huge chance that was it.

New comment by MBCook in "Every GPU That Mattered"

MBCook — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:31:00 +0000

The big feature of the All-in-Wonder was TV in. You could record, in glorious analog detail that could quickly use up your entire hard drive.

New comment by MBCook in "We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code"

MBCook — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:52:39 +0000

Sure it does.

They used their AI tool to extract the rules for the Apollo guidance system based on the source code.

Then they used Claude to check if all paths followed those rules.

New comment by MBCook in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

MBCook — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:46:52 +0000

Who cares? It couldn’t hold a movie on one tape. Thats what the market ended up selecting for. As soon as renting movies took off Beta lost.

When they compromised quality to get there, they were just more expensive.

And later S-VHS improved quality anyway.

New comment by MBCook in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

MBCook — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:51:02 +0000

VHS was not worse is better. It’s better is better.

New comment by MBCook in "The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House"

MBCook — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 03:42:09 +0000

I know. And it’s what I learned from Jack Palace on the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not TV show, where I first heard about it. Because it makes a really good story.

“She was a woman so sexism meant couldn’t be an architect. The only way she could live out her dream was just to build her own house over and over.“ isn’t nearly as fun.

The fact she was afraid of ghosts from people killed by her husband‘s invention just slots in so well as “evidence“. Add a crazy looking house and there you go, perfect tourist trap.

New comment by MBCook in "Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs"

MBCook — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 03:39:37 +0000

The last Mac with good PCIe slots was the 2019-2023 Mac Pro. So that’s almost a decade ago, and sold poorly. It never got a real refresh.

Before that was the pre-trash can Mac Pro in 2006-2012. So that was canceled most of a decade before the 2019 model.

High bandwidth PCIe hasn’t been a thing in Apple world for most of 15 years.

New comment by MBCook in "AWS engineer reports PostgreSQL perf halved by Linux 7.0, fix may not be easy"

MBCook — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 03:28:00 +0000

So perhaps this is a regression specifically in the arm64 code, or said differently maybe it’s a performance bug that has been there for a long time but covered up by the scheduler part that was removed?

New comment by MBCook in "AWS engineer reports PostgreSQL perf halved by Linux 7.0, fix may not be easy"

MBCook — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 03:26:29 +0000

It wouldn’t be the first time one of the other maintainers ran afoul of “Linus’s law“.

He may simply be waiting until more is known on exactly what’s causing it.

New comment by MBCook in "Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs"

MBCook — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:38:12 +0000

The government doesn’t care? They’re a minority of the market? The vast majority of their computers didn’t have slots to put Nvidia GPUs in, and now none of them do?

New comment by MBCook in "The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House"

MBCook — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:15:30 +0000

I’d just like to thank the author for giving the correct t reason for the Winchester Mystery House instead of just blindly repeating the “she went crazy” line story as truth.

New comment by MBCook in "DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market"

MBCook — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:54:13 +0000

Mine were SATA too!

New comment by MBCook in "DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market"

MBCook — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:30:31 +0000

I’d bet a lot that the Neo has a better SSD in it too.

New comment by MBCook in "DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market"

MBCook — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:28:21 +0000

I bought a pair of 4 TB SSDs for like $300-350/ea two years ago. I don’t remember exactly.

Around Christmas I tried to order one more. They wanted to above MSRP, like $500. Given the price of everything else I decided to just bite the bullet and do it.

After about a month they canceled my order. Whether that’s because they didn’t actually have one and couldn’t get one, or because they just wanted to wait for the prices to go up further I don’t know.

I went looking again two weeks ago. The exact same drive is back in stock. MSRP is now $1000. Amazon has it “on sale” for $900. Other retailers that often have slightly higher prices are asking $1250.

That’s 3-4x price increase in 2 years.

Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project

MBCook — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:20:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00955-5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603769

Points: 6

# Comments: 2