Hacker News: coredog64

New comment by coredog64 in "The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader"

coredog64 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:16:35 +0000

It was probably a decade ago, but I used to have this extremely cheap e-reader that ran off AA batteries, used a monochrome LCD screen (no lighting) and was based on a microcontroller. If you let the batteries die and waited too long to replace them, you had to reflash the software on it. I think it only handled mobi format, but it might have been epub.

New comment by coredog64 in "Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV"

coredog64 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:40:20 +0000

I think there's a finer point here: US consumers don't want to pay for local UAW labor. GM&Toyota did fine out of the NUMMI plant, and companies like Nissan and Mercedes are making cars in Alabama.

New comment by coredog64 in "Canyon HUD helmet for road riding"

coredog64 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:31:32 +0000

I didn't see anything in the press release about notifying riders that they're not a quantum superposition of vehicle and pedestrian that can collapse into whatever legal domain they feel is most convenient.

New comment by coredog64 in "How much do amd64 microarchitecture levels help in Go?"

coredog64 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:01:28 +0000

Isn't there a thermal cost to AVX instructions? Or, thinking of other reasons, if you're splitting up physical hardware into a "vCPU", it it possible that AVX doesn't map cleanly?

New comment by coredog64 in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

coredog64 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:14:42 +0000

Is it true that it was sold for $10? There’s a common phrase in Texas deed transfers similar to the below which just means “The sale price is none of your business”

Common Texas boilerplate: That for and in consideration of ten dollars ($10.00), cash in hand paid, and other good and valuable considerations, the receipt and sufficiency of which are hereby acknowledged, the Grantor has bargained and sold, and does hereby bargain, sell, convey, and confirm unto the Grantee the following described real estate.

New comment by coredog64 in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

coredog64 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:23:40 +0000

A "401(k)" is not a monolithic entity. In practice, most employers offer a choice of funds, with the most popular being a year-targeted fund that rebalances between equities and bonds as you get closer to retirement. Having said that, you can probably dump your entire portfolio into government bonds, small cap stocks, or euro futures.

New comment by coredog64 in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

coredog64 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:20:36 +0000

> Index funds are largely held by passive investors such as pension funds.

Pension operators are not typically passive. It's a different story to say that maybe they should be given that their returns don't always match up with index funds.

New comment by coredog64 in "Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term"

coredog64 — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:22:47 +0000

In the US, unless you have that much cash lying around, you have to borrow the money from a bail bondsman. They typically charge 10% for loaning you the money, and they're out the dough if you skip bail.

New comment by coredog64 in "IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry"

coredog64 — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:38:02 +0000

Finally, I can factor 21 at an industrial scale!

New comment by coredog64 in "IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry"

coredog64 — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:36:46 +0000

That's Kyndryl: They spun it off into it's own entity after "IBM Global Services" had such a (deservedly) poor reputation that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for clients and employees. Not that Kyndryl is any better, but it's enough of a rebrand that you might fool decision makers for the few minutes that it takes to get them to buy in.

New comment by coredog64 in "Constraint Decay: The Fragility of LLM Agents in Back End Code Generation"

coredog64 — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:05:49 +0000

I was recently using Copilot to implement a small feature within a very large codebase. About 75-80% of the time, the code that was added matched the current style (warts and all). Copilot would specifically go off and research "How X is already done in the codebase" all the time.

New comment by coredog64 in "The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100"

coredog64 — Sun, 24 May 2026 23:58:24 +0000

An employee-owned co-op results in extremely high risk concentration. If your co-op experiences a downturn, you are likely to lose your job and see the value of your share of the co-op decrease.

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell

New comment by coredog64 in "Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]"

coredog64 — Wed, 20 May 2026 02:26:36 +0000

Having done this for both Azure and AWS, there's a specific ticket that needs to be filed with each provider that documents the scope of your pen test, where you're coming from, and a time frame over which you're doing it (which ISTR was "not more than 24 hours")

New comment by coredog64 in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

coredog64 — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:04:20 +0000

Do grad students make enough to live and make payments against the principal of their student loans? If not, then that's robbing Peter to pay Paul.

New comment by coredog64 in "How can Apple deal with the memory shortage?"

coredog64 — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:05:16 +0000

Apple bought PA Semi as the starting point to getting off of Intel. Theoretically, memory seems like something Apple could figure out how to fab. And it's not like they don't have any capital reserves.

New comment by coredog64 in "Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors"

coredog64 — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:17:50 +0000

Ask the Canadian truckers how well government control of banking worked out ;)

Seriously though, I think the fix here is not who controls it but legislation that codifies when this type of payment deplatforming can (or cannot) be done. Make some carve-outs for smaller processors (e.g. if your church group wants to set up a pr0n-free version of Stripe, go to town)

New comment by coredog64 in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

coredog64 — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:23:38 +0000

When I was at Amazon, I suggested that promotion to L7 people manager should require that reverse tattooed on your forehead so that you saw it every day. Every time some mandate would come down from on high, it was clear that nobody had thought of the second order effects, malicious compliance, or just outright gaming.

New comment by coredog64 in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

coredog64 — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:21:13 +0000

Opus 4.7 has a 7.5x multiplier when it's used from Copilot. Falling back to 4.6 it's only 3.5x

New comment by coredog64 in "AWS North Virginia data center outage – resolved"

coredog64 — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:29:56 +0000

There’s all kinds of fun pitfalls with multi-AZ. Like you can create RDS subnets across multiple AZs but then you can’t remove an AZ. Which really sucks when your core database covers all 5 us-east-1 AZs and randomly can’t failover because you picked an instance type that use1-az4 can’t host.

New comment by coredog64 in "OpenAI’s WebRTC problem"

coredog64 — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:09:48 +0000

This is how Nova Sonic works. Having done some implementations it’s trickier than you might like (e.g. the Python library for Sonic had problems with echoes and we had to use the Java library)