Hacker News: MrWiffles

New comment by MrWiffles in "Why remote roles are region specific and not 100% remote?"

MrWiffles — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:08:12 +0000

This is usually due to taxation and legal reasons. In the US for example, even a US based company out of, say, New York has to have paperwork set up with each state they want to hire in. So if this hypothetical company wanted to hire their first employee in, say, Texas, they’d have to do some kind of legal stuff with the state authorities in Texas to legally hire someone remotely there. Once that’s done they can hire more without much if any additional paperwork with the state, but that initial setup has to be done so they could pay employment taxes to the state. This goes for every state the company hires an employee in, based on where the employee does their work from. So if they later hired their first employee out of say California, more paperwork specifically for California.

Going internationally, particularly in today’s geopolitical climate, gets even more complicated.

It generally boils down to law, taxes, government issues when you get down to it.

New comment by MrWiffles in "Google's New reCAPTCHA Wants Your Camera Access and 21 Points of Your Hand"

MrWiffles — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:40:30 +0000

With high resolution cameras, indefinite data retention and third party data leaks being a matter of when, not if, this seems like a perfect way to get your fingerprints stolen by organized crime syndicates worldwide. If not next year, then in 5-10 years. And when they get used for “something”, what happens when you go on vacation somewhere and you’re detained at that country’s border for a crime that happened N years before your very first entry into that country ever happened?

With as many Ph.D.s as there are at Google, you’d think they’d be smarter than to come up with this. Which is how you know the PMs are in charge, not the smart people.

New comment by MrWiffles in "Amazon Says Its Data Centers Use 2.5B Gallons of Water"

MrWiffles — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:08:40 +0000

https://archive.ph/47ra0

Edit: seems even this is just the summary first two paragraphs.

New comment by MrWiffles in "I'm So Tired of Ads"

MrWiffles — Sun, 31 May 2026 16:54:34 +0000

“[…] moral argument […]”

I mean, that’s pretty rich coming from the folks willfully engaging in human rights violating surveillance to overwhelm you with obscure useless nonsense that is literally an assault on your time, attention and mental health all for the 0.00001% chance of a vague hope you’ll click or tap their lie of an ad for snake oil that doesn’t work and is designed to steal your credit card number anyway, all just to make them rich so they won’t have to get a real job in the first place.

Moral argument. Right.

New comment by MrWiffles in "The Ask"

MrWiffles — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:14:31 +0000

There’s a common phrase in English: “what’s the ask?” As in, “what is the other party requesting?” “What does this person want?”

I can see how that would sound/read a bit strange to one coming from another culture. It’s just another way of stating the concept of the purpose behind the reason for a person’s request, actions, statement, or in this case, why they requested a meeting.

Getting to “the ask” here meant, for the author, “what the hell does this fool REALLY want out of me?”

I prefer Walt’s approach. When I was 19, I worked for a small business up in Colorado. They had this contractor named Walt that did all their email, website, all that stuff (very early 2000s). Every time he answered the phone, it wasn’t a polite “Hello?”, no! Walt got straight to the point with one loud, gruff word that immediately set the tone for all his conversations:

“WHAT?!”

New comment by MrWiffles in "First public macOS kernel memory corruption exploit on Apple M5"

MrWiffles — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:11:15 +0000

Wait a minute - clearly I missed something here. Last I read, Mythos was only available to a handpicked list of megacorps under project glasswing. Did the hourly changing AI soap opera air yet another plot twist that I missed amidst my quest better known as “trying to find a job”?

If not, how’d a small time outfit get access to something the rest of us can’t have because we’re (apparently) not trustworthy enough?

No shade on these guys - I’m thinking it’s just another plot twist in “Hours of AI’s Lives”.

New comment by MrWiffles in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

MrWiffles — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:45:10 +0000

I was not aware of this loophole. Thank you. I’ve got some strong opinions but I’m just going to keep those to myself right now. And my dog. She’ll hear me as I scream profanities into the void…

New comment by MrWiffles in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

MrWiffles — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:30:19 +0000

What I’m not clear on - how many of these H1B hires are subject to the EO that jacked up the fee to $100k per person? Assuming even just 100 of them were, that’s still ten million USD (assuming I didn’t visualize the zeroes in my head wrong…), and a really large fee to justify to the board if you’re otherwise paying “roughly the same” in salary. Productivity is going to basically break even anyway after a few years.

This is why I’m wondering: did the EO get blocked, paused for judicial review or something? Is it even in effect?

No intention to make this political, I’m legitimately curious about the status of the law and its actual applicability here. Supposed to be such a steep fine they literally couldn’t afford to do this - not with them already going cash flow negative to build out AI datacenters. So either it’s not applying (why?) or somehow they’re justifying one HUGE fee and somebody is floating them one astronomical loan - which again, why? Where’s the profit in taking that big a risk? Seems absolutely unhinged!

We’re missing something here. Or, at least, I am.

New comment by MrWiffles in "Ask HN: When do you start considering to 'separate' service designed with DDD"

MrWiffles — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:31:28 +0000

I can’t answer this directly, but it may be helpful to others if they have an example (be it real or fabricated based on what you’re working with) to work from.

New comment by MrWiffles in "UMD Scientists Create 'Smart Underwear' to Measure Human Flatulence"

MrWiffles — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:17:07 +0000

Please, for the good of humanity, and of HN, report back.

New comment by MrWiffles in "UMD Scientists Create 'Smart Underwear' to Measure Human Flatulence"

MrWiffles — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:21:51 +0000

I’ll remind us all that the subject of human flatulence has been one of interest for some of history’s greatest minds - and humorists - for several centuries at the very least:

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-32-02-02...

New comment by MrWiffles in "Your phone is an entire computer"

MrWiffles — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:24:11 +0000

This. The more locked down, the less in control we are, the higher margins they command. This is why app stores exist - it has nothing to do with safety or security, and everything to do with monopolizing the distribution supply chain from soup to nuts. Don’t like it? Too bad, it’s fully locked down and cracking it is a (potentially) criminal offense, so whaddayagonnadoaboutit?!

New comment by MrWiffles in "YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they'll be unskippable"

MrWiffles — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:05:42 +0000

Zero. Email & calendars replaced with totally separate paid provider that doesn’t run ads at all. Search through Kagi. No domains or hosting. No docs/presentations, and only use meet when forced to.

New comment by MrWiffles in "Returning to Rails in 2026"

MrWiffles — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:00:11 +0000

Something I never quite understood: differentiate between BEAM process and operating system process. The OS has launched one (in theory) BEAM Erlang VM runtime process with N threads; are we saying “process” here to try to emulate the OS process model internally within the BEAM OS process, when really we’re talking about threads? Or a mix of threads and other processes? I’m imagining the latter even cross network, but am I at least on the right track here?

New comment by MrWiffles in "YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they'll be unskippable"

MrWiffles — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:57:05 +0000

Privacy rights. Google’s ad surveillance eventually feeds ICE and its ilk, so I’ll not willingly reward this behavior.

New comment by MrWiffles in "Ask HN: Can we stop talking about Elon Musk for a while please?"

MrWiffles — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 18:58:54 +0000

The first rule of Elon club is: YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT ELON CLUB!

;-)

New comment by MrWiffles in "LLC legal challenge what do we do?"

MrWiffles — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 19:34:05 +0000

I’m having trouble understanding how that second amendment passed. The first one didn’t so the total number of shares didn’t change, right? So how did he get the second one through, legally speaking?

Not at all trying to argue here, I’m trying to understand how this all works. It sounds like he just spoofed his way into diluting your shares which will fall apart in 5 minutes before a judge, should be an open and shut case but given the other comments here, it’s clearly not, which means I’m missing something.

New comment by MrWiffles in "Ask HN: How do you handle 2FA during development?"

MrWiffles — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 19:14:55 +0000

Good question. I’d expand on this and ask a bonus question of, how do you write tests for your 2fa implementation code? Same thing for third party auth (sign in via GitHub/Google, etc); you can’t spam them every time you run your test suite, but is mocking responses from them really a wise move when testing authentication?

New comment by MrWiffles in "I found a bug in SQLite"

MrWiffles — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 19:14:05 +0000

Props to the author, this was well written. Clear and concise, it was easy to follow. Not like my ratings and ravings! ;-)

New comment by MrWiffles in "Ask HN: Why doesn't archive.today get shut down?"

MrWiffles — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:39:30 +0000

To the best of my admittedly limited knowledge on the subject, they're relatively new so most news sites aren't terribly aware of them yet, and most people aren't technology-savvy enough to be aware of their existence and ability to make use of them outside circles like ours here on HN and related occupations/sites/etc. That said, they're also not doing anything shady to get by the paywall either. The version they're presenting you is the exact same version the news sites are presenting search engines in order to grab search engine traffic. The news sites are literally participating in an intentional bait-and-switch scheme to bait people with relevant search results that are NOT paywalled, then when a human browser gets there, they throw up a paywalled version in your face via user agent detection, mandatory javascript, etc. (various means are used). archive.ph simply mimics a search engine indexer to get an un-paywalled version, same as Google or any other search engine, in order to retrieve the cleaned up version of the article without a paywall there, and serves that content to the end user. It's not stealing content not already offered in other forms anyway, it's just removing an artificial dark pattern that's literally intended to bait and switch people in the first place. Kind of makes for a weak argument if they do bring it to court in the first place; glass houses, throwing stones and all that.