Hacker News: TheJoeMan

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

TheJoeMan — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:44:57 +0000

Cash on the order of a hundred billion dollars. Plenty to weather this storm if they so chose so I agree with your assessment.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

TheJoeMan — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:00:08 +0000

The ridiculous thing about profit margin, is that if RAM increases Apple's cost by $100, they have to increase the selling price by a multiple of that to maintain the same %. Same exact factory line, labor cost, shipping cost, but have to 1.5x everything at the shrine of the bean counters.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

TheJoeMan — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:07:59 +0000

I'd suggest a "toast" would suffice for the correct answers. Proceed to the next question when correct, with a "next" button when incorrect.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests"

TheJoeMan — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:00:24 +0000

Respectfully, I believe you have confused "new" with "state of the art". China is likely using batteries because their battery production is subsidized, Australia's trading partner is China so basically equivalent.

Perhaps a bad analogy, but it seems these battery systems attempt to stabilize by "pushing", whereas spinning mass can also work through "dragging" the phase. So eventually, you will have just a few rotating masses setting the freq and phase, with more and more systems tracking that and pushing, which seems like a recipe for chaotic equilibrium.

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

TheJoeMan — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:53:38 +0000

I’m more confused what they’re going to do with all the infra? What could all those GPU’s be doing? Just inference?

New comment by TheJoeMan in "The desperation of NYTimes"

TheJoeMan — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:13:07 +0000

I have something similar from AT&T about my fiber internet, they kept sending me "transactional emails" with the last 3/4 of the message body being marketing copy for their phone service etc. I submitted a complaint at the FCC (consumercomplaints.fcc.gov) and got a very fast followup from the "Office of the President of AT&T" putting me on an internal do-not-solicit list and the emails have generally gone away. They even had to write a case resolution letter to the FCC. This "loophole" in the CAN-SPAM seems to be spreading across different industries not just the NYT.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Commission fines Temu €200M for breaching the Digital Services Act"

TheJoeMan — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:04:51 +0000

Yes, I know this is an EU article, but I suppose we have similar Temu garbage here in the USA to deal with. I wish for more reasonable restrictions but more severe enforcement, as these "bad" product examples I mentioned seem to make people lose interest as they seem silly.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Commission fines Temu €200M for breaching the Digital Services Act"

TheJoeMan — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:01:16 +0000

That is unfortunate, thank you for sharing.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "EU fines Temu €200M for allowing sale of illegal products"

TheJoeMan — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:23:08 +0000

I'd be curious to see a breakdown between the "toxic chemicals" and "suffocation hazards" categories, as my intuition says it's mostly the latter and often bunk. The other day I was watching the TV above the Walmart customer service desk that displays product recalls, and multiple recalled products were a motorized bassinet, but the wireless remote control has a battery compartment that could be opened and then the battery swallowed. To a layman or (I assume) Chinese inventor, that seems overly burdensome as I am certain that same household would have other wireless remotes.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "That Methyl Methacrylate Tank"

TheJoeMan — Wed, 27 May 2026 02:48:29 +0000

I think Polyolefin Primer (Permabond POP) is magical in what it can superglue. Beautiful chemistry allowing something like Teflon or steel to be glued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9yz8OqThJk

New comment by TheJoeMan in "How do you build a semiconductor company on something that's free?"

TheJoeMan — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:12:54 +0000

Regarding hardware, it's not entirely true that it doesn't need maintenance/development. See "stepping" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepping_level. There are sometimes ways to tweak the masks to fix a "silicon bug".

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day"

TheJoeMan — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:38:25 +0000

The discharge was described as black. Unless I’m missing something regarding the allowable discharges, it would reason they are also discharging something else which isn’t being looked for.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

TheJoeMan — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:55:26 +0000

I like the friction to decide against frivolous spending...

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

TheJoeMan — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:53:50 +0000

I caution PayPal would only work if you trusted the original shopping site, and perhaps your "credentials" got breached and used illicitly elsewhere. I got banned from PayPal after I tried to buy an electrical switch, was on an (apparently scam) website, never received the item, and opened a PayPal dispute. The scammer somehow convinced PayPal the item I tried to buy was illegal/against PayPal ToS, which resulted in them banning *me* instead of the scammer.

On the other hand, I see an unknown charge on my credit-card, dispute with my bank, and it's handled.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "How an oil refinery works"

TheJoeMan — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:23:06 +0000

And RP-1 Rocket Fuel and Jet-A Jet Fuel are both Kerosene!

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Networking changes coming in macOS 27"

TheJoeMan — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:07:42 +0000

There's somewhere in the ballpark of 166,000 employees at Apple, just unfathomable scale [1]. It is not unreasonable to ask that someone specific is responsible for each particular small feature and ensuring it keeps working. Trying to apply an economic analysis to such a "free as in beer" operating system does not seem to work well. Consider the question of "how many small holes can you have in your wooden sailing ship"?

[1] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/employees/

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead"

TheJoeMan — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:17:25 +0000

Retrieval is $0.03 / GB, so more on the order of 10’s of dollars. This use case is offsite location of the 3-2-1 storage backup rule. I think this is an underserved market with current consumer-facing backup providers.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "How to get better at guitar"

TheJoeMan — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:09:29 +0000

I think another aspect is regarding fundamentals. In order to stay engaged in the early years, you will skip over the minutia. But to achieve the next level, you must go back and drill the fundamentals, unlearning any bad habits in the process. Only then, once you’ve “learned the rules”, can you then surpass/break them.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead"

TheJoeMan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:12:29 +0000

A family member has uploaded a backup of all of the family photos to Amazon Glacial Storage, on the order of a few hundred GB, and gleefully sends me screenshots of the <$1/mo charges.

New comment by TheJoeMan in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

TheJoeMan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:08:41 +0000

Even structural items can be made quite thin! There is a college design competition to make concrete canoes which can be 3/8" to 7/16" thick: https://www.concretecanoe.org/2008Triva/Florida2008DesignPap...