Hacker News: MrMorden

New comment by MrMorden in "Dallas Fed: 30% of housing cost increase driven by unauthorized immigration [pdf]"

MrMorden — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 21:43:17 +0000

Undocumented immigrants "raised local house prices and rents without expanding housing supply" — obviously, since local governments of both parties hate anyone who doesn't already own and make it illegal to build more housing. Not an immigration problem, although obviously the Trump administration is trying to make it more expensive to build by deporting anyone brown regardless of whether or not they're lawfully present (or even a citizen), tariffs, and pretty much the entire scope of Project 2025.

New comment by MrMorden in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

MrMorden — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:05:23 +0000

US lawyers keep filing LLM-generated pleadings and refuse to check citations. It's taken state discipline committees a long time to get there, but they're close to figuring out that any option other than prompt disbarment just increases the pain for people who are actually qualified to practice and doesn't noticeably increase the number of practitioners who see the error of their ways.

The ABA will eventually make sure that this behavior is identified in law school and people who don't want to take responsibility for what they file are expelled well before graduation, but in the meantime there are a ton of screwups in the profession and all you can do is kick them when they identify themselves.

New comment by MrMorden in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

MrMorden — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:55:16 +0000

It's been common knowledge for a long time. Just not in the population of people who set up agents and hand them personal credentials.

New comment by MrMorden in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

MrMorden — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:51:28 +0000

No; if you try to do this you don't launch in the first place because the amount of servers required to be useful can't be cooled within your payload budget.

New comment by MrMorden in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

MrMorden — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:09:58 +0000

That's the neat thing: you don't, or at least not in the megawatt range. A kilowatt can be done with radiative cooling but doesn't get you far with a hypothetical datacenter satellite.

New comment by MrMorden in "VoIP brings back old-fashioned pay phones to rural Vermont (2025)"

MrMorden — Sun, 17 May 2026 23:05:11 +0000

A few family, a few friends, some past work numbers, some of my phone numbers from a decade or two ago when I occasionally changed them, the Apple switchboard because I might have bled in six colors a long time ago, and of course Jenny because if not for her I'd have no clue whose phone number to give to the grocery store checkout system.

New comment by MrMorden in "Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone"

MrMorden — Sat, 16 May 2026 15:55:38 +0000

Lack of applications. They decided to fix that by adding an Android subsystem, and nobody wanted to publish their Android applications to the Amazon store even with Amazon throwing gobs of money at publishers and only some APIs having been moved into Google Play Services.

New comment by MrMorden in "Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?"

MrMorden — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:15:07 +0000

Getting an EE degree is always an option — but since CS isn’t an engineering degree getting a second bachelor’s will take four years part-time.

I’m doing that now at ASU and the total requirement for me is 71 semester credits. Maybe I could have found a program for which I only needed 60ish, but that’s the only program in the country with part-time remote classes that will cover what I need (antennas and RF). Someone who is interested in digital design will have more options. (And I haven’t really looked at other countries so YMMV considerably outside the US.)

New comment by MrMorden in "Rich Hickey: Thanks AI"

MrMorden — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:00:39 +0000

How did Microsoft and OpenAI force their hand? Google could just as easily not waste money on AI, use the corresponding lack of notice-me-sempai demands from their products that their users use AI everywhere as a powerful differentiator, and deliver the difference to shareholders.

New comment by MrMorden in "FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign UAS and UAS Critical Components [pdf]"

MrMorden — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:16:19 +0000

Your position assumes facts not in evidence. If the administration wanted to rebuild American manufacturing, the last thing they'd do is pile on additional taxes on manufacturing domestically—which is exactly what their tariffs do.

An administration that wants to rebuild American manufacturing would decrease tariffs, not increase them. They'd eliminate the chicken tax, the Buy America Act, the Jones Act, and every other regulatory instrument that encourages domestic manufacturers to milk captive customers for all they can rather than make products that customers want to buy.

They'd also finish metrication ASAP, increase investment in technical education, implement universal healthcare coverage, modernize payment systems, and so on. You'll note that the Trump administration wants none of the above.

New comment by MrMorden in "Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs"

MrMorden — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:02:54 +0000

Surely if the ATM were to taunt you it would use C, or maybe JavaScript.

New comment by MrMorden in "Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs"

MrMorden — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:01:38 +0000

Except American Express, which does have foreign currency fees (on some cards).

New comment by MrMorden in "FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign UAS and UAS Critical Components [pdf]"

MrMorden — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 06:29:19 +0000

The primary goal of the Trump administration is to destroy American manufacturing. They don't want factories, hence all the tariffs.

New comment by MrMorden in "Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon"

MrMorden — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 02:29:06 +0000

If he wants to be treated as a POW rather than a spy should he be captured.

New comment by MrMorden in "Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products"

MrMorden — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 18:30:40 +0000

And IBM could have been AWS a decade earlier had they so chose.

New comment by MrMorden in "A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure"

MrMorden — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 01:11:06 +0000

Fiber is cheaper, faster, and far more reliable. You've already constrained the problem such that fiber is the only possible solution, and there's nothing wrong with that.

New comment by MrMorden in "A Chinese firm bought an insurer for CIA agents"

MrMorden — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:45:14 +0000

Standard FEPLI but also any USG employee stationed overseas needs the usual set of insurance policies, and specialist providers are familiar with the applicable laws (e.g., their computers don't insist on a local driver's license when there's a treaty allowing the subscriber to use their home country's).

https://www.clements.com/personal/foreign-service-insurance/

New comment by MrMorden in "Netherlands returns control of Nexperia to Chinese owner"

MrMorden — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:40:54 +0000

The CPC leadership have plenty of personal assets stashed in the EU/UK. It would be easy enough to take them to the cleaners by prosecuting them for violating Chinese AML laws.

New comment by MrMorden in "I can build enterprise software but I can't charge for it"

MrMorden — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:34:21 +0000

ChatGPT isn't even a search engine, let alone a lawyer.

New comment by MrMorden in "Sam Altman got served with a subpoena onstage at a live event"

MrMorden — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:18:05 +0000

He's the one wasting his own time. If he didn't want that, he'd accept service like an adult instead of making servers jump through hoops.