Hacker News: graymatters

New comment by graymatters in "Intel sells 51% stake in Altera to private equity firm on a $8.75B valuation"

graymatters — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 04:40:00 +0000

The business geniuses of intel bought Altera for nearly $17B in 2015. Now sold control at valuation barely half of that. After official inflation of over 30% during that time. Which means it lost over 2/3 of its value, (take into account also the lost interest on that money). Given that they gave up control for half the money, it’s effectively as if it was relinquished for 1/3 of what Intel paid for it. So far - no one of the responsible Intel execs paid any price for such atrocious loss of stakeholders’ value. They need to be in jail and lose their personal wealth to repay the stockholders.

The SEC should investigate them, see whether there was any inside trading to benefit from this horrible value loss.

This criminal lack of performance needs to be brought up during the upcoming shareholders meeting. Responsible must pay the price.

Would you hire again the Intel CEOs, head of Intel Capital, any members of Intel’s board of directors after such abysmal performance?

New comment by graymatters in "Z-Wave is remaking itself into an open source protocol"

graymatters — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 18:45:09 +0000

Making Z-Wave closed source in the beginning sealed its fate. All competing protocols were open source. Z-Wave failed and won’t recover.

New comment by graymatters in "US tax return filings drop by nearly 1M, extension requests rise"

graymatters — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 18:35:35 +0000

Yes. It is IRS is deliberately dragging its feet to make it a real option for millions and millions of Americans. So that the near monopoly Intuit can rake in billions in sales each year.

New comment by graymatters in "I'm manually transcribing the AltairBASIC source, ten lines a day starting today"

graymatters — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 18:22:05 +0000

Why?..

New comment by graymatters in "Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines"

graymatters — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 21:50:53 +0000

2053 is too far away indeed.

“It’s probably not hard…” - how many such wishful thinking statements were uttered by humanity.

New comment by graymatters in "Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week"

graymatters — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:07:34 +0000

Well, I hope that if they do so, the FSF and all copyright holders of the Open Source software used to make Android Great In-the-First-Place will sue their a$$e$ off.

New comment by graymatters in "How one of the world’s major money laundering networks operates"

graymatters — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 02:31:42 +0000

Very simple. 1. Orders of magnitude. Digital transactions can be billions in single transaction. While making large cash transactions in cumbersome and unrealistic. 2. Because they can. Regulating digital transactions is simple. Regulating cash - next to impossible.

New comment by graymatters in "Make Ubuntu packages 90% faster by rebuilding them"

graymatters — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 05:01:59 +0000

You are confusing randomization, a legitimate security mechanism, with security by obscurity. ASLR is not security by obscurity. Please spend the time on understanding the terminology rather than regurgitating buzz words.

New comment by graymatters in "McDonald's gives its restaurants an AI makeover"

graymatters — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:37:42 +0000

https://archive.ph/2025.03.11-045359/https://www.wsj.com/art...

New comment by graymatters in "Why cryptography is not based on NP-complete problems"

graymatters — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 08:23:34 +0000

The author should’ve stayed in the NP class and not drop out.

New comment by graymatters in "Residential Networking over Telephone"

graymatters — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 08:11:25 +0000

55-60Mbps is a reasonable expectation. Don’t get fooled by exuberant speeds advertised by the powerline equipment manufacturers. Lag can jump by ~25msec

New comment by graymatters in "Urban legend: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers"

graymatters — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 01:30:05 +0000

The premise of the article (if it can be called that) is incorrect. He made the statement about the 5 computers in a TV interview (and it was not related to business trip referred in the article). I saw the recording of the interview some 10-15 years ago. Don’t remember which network. Perhaps NBC?

New comment by graymatters in "Immorality Begins at 40 (2016)"

graymatters — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:31:57 +0000

Umm… the one good thing about the author - the author is soon to be 40+.

New comment by graymatters in "Mellanox magic: The secret behind Nvidia's meteoric trillion-dollar rise (2023)"

graymatters — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:26:24 +0000

Outside the techies and gamers circles, for the general public - it was fairly unknown. Today it’s known primarily due to its high stock valuation. Thus, don’t project your own bubble on everyone out there.

New comment by graymatters in "QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there's an RPi image"

graymatters — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 06:15:49 +0000

QNX is squeezed from above by Linux, especially as real time patches have finally been fully accepted. And from below by FreeRTOS and Zephyr. Current attempt to open source is a desperate move by QNX as their market share is disappearing. Why would anyone in their right mind step on the same landmine, called QNX, which already pulled a rug from under the developers feet once? Absolutely no trust in QNX ecosystem. Save yourself pain and aggregation. Don’t use QNX.

New comment by graymatters in "In Defense of LeetCode Interviews"

graymatters — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 03:57:55 +0000

Actually - “how many golf balls fit into a VW Beatle” is a better proxy.

New comment by graymatters in "Intel Honesty"

graymatters — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 20:33:46 +0000

Spoken like a true Marxist. The purpose of Marxism is to literally kill hundreds of millions of people who oppose the Marxist way. Like they did during the 20th century in the countries where Marxism prevailed (even briefly).

New comment by graymatters in "So you want to build an embedded Linux system?"

graymatters — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 21:01:28 +0000

Avoid nvidia if you can. Their attitude towards anything Open Source has been extremely unsupportive if not outright shitty. Part of company philosophy.

New comment by graymatters in "Linux Memory Overcommit (2007)"

graymatters — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 01:08:38 +0000

Doubt - based on what?

New comment by graymatters in "Evidence of price-fixing in the oil industry?"

graymatters — Fri, 03 May 2024 19:46:58 +0000

What to do about it - hit these oil companies, including the Saudi ones, with a huge class action law suit. Additionally US government must fine heavily instances of collusion and oligopoly so that others thinking of following path will be deterred.