Hacker News: fmobus

New comment by fmobus in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

fmobus — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 20:58:06 +0000

A popular solution in my country, at least for less formal restaurants and bars (and even nightclubs) is for each customer to have their own tab, which gets marked by waiters and stays with the customer. In those places, it's also the norm that you pay your tab at the cashier prior to leaving, and waiters don't have to handle with money.

New comment by fmobus in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

fmobus — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:56:47 +0000

Cool story bro. But this shouldn't require a notary.

A sane country would handle this with a handful standardized forms of incorporation with clear rules, so that the majority of use cases that a normie might need is covered. All of this should be a few clicks on a gov webpage at most. Maybe some fee/deposit/whatever.

Lawyers and notaries should only start showing up when people want complicated setups.

(Yes I'm bitter with German notaries because so far they only took my money for some very mid service and couldn't even take two seconds of their time to answer an email with normal German words or clear instructions.)

New comment by fmobus in "Job application asked for my SAT scores"

fmobus — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:35:33 +0000

In my country, we have public exams to get into Uni, with the ones for high demand majors being very competitive, but performance in that exam is not a good predictor of academic performance.

The guy who got into my uni class as #2 in that exam dropped out after a few semesters because he couldn't beat calculus. The #4 took several extra semesters to graduate despite not working/not interning. Several others in the top third struggled through. We had _maybe_ 2 or 3 guys who straight-A'd the entire major.

I myself got in as #17 and still failed a few courses. Thankfully no one cared throughout my professional career.

New comment by fmobus in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

fmobus — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:13:30 +0000

Unlike the oil dependency system, where there's actual scarcity of the thing you need (oil), there's nothing special about building solar panels that locks you to China. Basically any country could build it, but they need to figure out how to build stuff in general (as opposed to outsourcing like the last three decades)

New comment by fmobus in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

fmobus — Sat, 30 May 2026 09:58:23 +0000

4 Earth Quadrants simultaneously rotate inside 4 Time Cube Quarters to create 4 - 24 hour days within one Earth rotation.

New comment by fmobus in "'Fuck you, Bambu': How one private message could change the face of 3D printing"

fmobus — Sun, 24 May 2026 11:11:15 +0000

Western cloud alternatives might stumble upon other issue: western governments forcing said cloud providers to add filters to their pipelines. It might start as just a filter to prevent gun parts, but there's no reason it can't evolve into a filter that blocks you from making replacement parts for commercial products in general.

Offline/LAN mode is, truly, the only solution.

New comment by fmobus in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

fmobus — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:55:17 +0000

I keep hearing those marvels about how lightning network solves everything and gives everyone a pony, but it is currently estimated to perform about 200k transactions per day.

Pix achieves literally a thousand times that.

New comment by fmobus in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

fmobus — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:38:37 +0000

How many transactions can you ran per second on major coins like BTC?

New comment by fmobus in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

fmobus — Thu, 07 May 2026 21:37:04 +0000

Whenever people start arguing about inefficient government they should be reminded that pix costs like 10M USD a year to run. An absolute bargain for what it delivers.

New comment by fmobus in "'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level"

fmobus — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:58:29 +0000

You talk about "blame". Were they the ones that made the decisions causing the current ecological disaster?

Society fucked up, and that fuck up is gonna affect a lot of people who are not able to move out. Some sort of bailout will be needed.

New comment by fmobus in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

fmobus — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:00:12 +0000

LLMs are modeled with Internet content so that they have a good model of human languages. When you use them via most UIs currently offered right now, however, they will first come up with a few search queries and use the result of those queries to augment their answer.

New comment by fmobus in "Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service"

fmobus — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:47:12 +0000

Now do the same calculations for the DOD

New comment by fmobus in "NIMBY Rails"

fmobus — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:10:29 +0000

This game is awesome, but I wish it had a "expand this already existing in real life network" mode. Like, I know I can simply trace over existing rails, but doing that manually is tedious and costs in-game dollars.

New comment by fmobus in "U.S. stocks are set to deliver their worst quarter in nearly four years"

fmobus — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:00:22 +0000

If only this recession would make some pedos be punished...

New comment by fmobus in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

fmobus — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:48:55 +0000

"One bit away"

New comment by fmobus in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

fmobus — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:44:06 +0000

You're saying they'd have to work without pay lest they loose their livelihoods? That's like one bit away from slavery.

New comment by fmobus in "What if the Hormuz closure will not be brief?"

fmobus — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:36:43 +0000

JCPOA was working, Trump cancelled it simply because it was Obama's.

New comment by fmobus in "US businesses and consumers pay 90% of tariff costs, New York Fed says"

fmobus — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:55:27 +0000

If the supplier is forced to leave the business, that is a form of paying. They are losing a source of income and will have to pick a different activity that they are not efficient at. In the case of tariffs on international trade, the supplier loses a chunk of market - in the case of the US, one that was wealthy - and that always means a loss for the business.

The burden of ALL taxes falls on both sides of the transaction. The proportion of the burden varies with market conditions, the most important being elasticity.

That's why studies like the OP are necessary, to determine how much the proportions are. Honestly I am not surprised with the result, tariffs are objectively bad. Curbing trade is bad by default.

New comment by fmobus in "Bitcoin gets a zero price target in wake of Burry warning"

fmobus — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:38:42 +0000

I hate having to defend Visa and MC, but at least they using that energy to enable day-to-day transactions that real people actually use.

Also, and a bit harder to overlook... Visa/MC are able to work thousands of transactions per second in the US alone. Bitcoin can do like 7. Not seven thousand, just seven. Worldwide.

It's not even a competition, really. BTC has no future without some radical changes.

New comment by fmobus in "Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections"

fmobus — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:53:31 +0000

As the other reply noted, there were audits by multiple entities and parties, although I agree that it would be preferable for the code to be open sourced.

I do disagree with your other points. Paper confirmation is not necessarily the only way to audit, and may in fact introduce risks of voter reidentification and coercion (voto de cabresto). The other way of auditing the machines is the parallel voting procedure, which already takes place at every election and is honestly a brilliant piece of security engineering.

For those not aware, the parallel voting procedure works as follows:

1) the day before the election (when the software has already been loaded and locked into the machines for several days), a random sample of machines is selected for the procedure

2) those machines are then removed from the polling place they would ordinarily be assigned to, and replaced with a backup machine

3) the removed machine is then installed in a different room, and booted up normally on electionday. Since it is fully offline, the machine doesn't "know" it is being used in this mode

4) this room is setup so that there are cameras pointed to the machine, and people from all observing parties (and common citizens as well) are invited to "mock vote" in this room.

5) at the end of the day, the machine is closes, its report printed, and the result is checked against the known mock votes

Pretty solid method if you ask me, and much cheaper than upgrading the entire fleet to enable printing.