Hacker News: jmpman

New comment by jmpman in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

jmpman — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:29:53 +0000

You can mine from the air.

New comment by jmpman in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

jmpman — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 05:58:02 +0000

I don't understand why Trump doesn't simply mine the strait of Hormuz, and make a simple statement - "no ships get through unless all ships get through". Sure, it would disrupt the world oil supply, but seems hard for Iran to counter.

New comment by jmpman in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

jmpman — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:07:30 +0000

Seems like Epic won the battle against Apple, but lost the war. My kids haven't played Fortnite since it was dropped from the Apple Store.

New comment by jmpman in "Starlink militarization and its impact on global strategic stability (2023)"

jmpman — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 05:16:23 +0000

Seems like these South African tech bros have some affinity towards Russia. I don't understand it.

New comment by jmpman in "Starlink militarization and its impact on global strategic stability (2023)"

jmpman — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 01:12:54 +0000

“Just left Ukraine. What I saw proved to me we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people. Everyone wants this war to end, but any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin. Let me tell you about my trip and why it’s important we stand with Ukraine.” - Mark Kelly

Musk replied directly to that post: “You are a traitor.”

Kelly fired back the next day: “Traitor? Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do.”

Musk later doubled down in media appearances, stating that putting “the interests of another country above America” makes someone a traitor.

I don't see Musk making those statement about US helping the interest of other countries.

It seems like stopping Russia from being an aggressor is in the direct interest of the US. Why would Musk think otherwise?

New comment by jmpman in "Wired headphone sales are exploding. What's with the Bluetooth backlash?"

jmpman — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 01:28:38 +0000

I may have had the same. Wasn't impressed. But I'm rough on my electronics and it lasted less than 6 months.

New comment by jmpman in "Datacenters are becoming a target in warfare"

jmpman — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 01:27:30 +0000

Let's say that you knew the data center was only used for commercial reasons, but your goal was to crippled the enemy's economy. Would that be a war crime?

But interesting point about the LLM's perspective.

New comment by jmpman in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

jmpman — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:07:10 +0000

I love my IEMs but I actually want a Bluetooth version. Heck a dongle that made them act just like AirPod Pros would be my dream gadget.

New comment by jmpman in "Datacenters are becoming a target in warfare"

jmpman — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 23:59:43 +0000

I was asking some of the LLMs about this a few months ago, and they told me that it was a war crime, violating the Geneva convention. Wondering why that hasn't been brought up, or are the LLMs wrong about this?

New comment by jmpman in "Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat"

jmpman — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:57:40 +0000

When there was an over buildout of fiber back in the dotcom boom, how did that turn out? Who were the winners and losers? At what timeline did new winners emerge from that bubble?

New comment by jmpman in "Microsoft announces new "mini PCs" for Windows 365"

jmpman — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:28:52 +0000

I want this for two reasons - Solidworks - the non cloud version, doesn't run on my MacBook. I don't want to have two full sized computers. Steam - again, too many games don't run on Macs.

I'd also go for a single click launch of a GPU powered virtual machine I can remote onto from my Mac. You'd think the various cloud providers would offer a single click solution. I haven't found it.

New comment by jmpman in "$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents"

jmpman — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 02:05:55 +0000

I doubt it's the laptops. The problem is they removed the physical books. I have a hard time teaching my kids using their laptops. Before, you could just crack open their textbooks and follow along.

New comment by jmpman in "IBM down 13% after Anthropic launches an AI tool that converts old COBOL code"

jmpman — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:46:28 +0000

This is IBMs moat. The entire reason corporations don't move off the mainframe is due to the cost and complexity of migrating the old code, oh, and the reliability of the mainframe. There are many architectures which can be made more reliable than the mainframe. 13% is just the beginning.

New comment by jmpman in "Red Robin Died by Spreadsheet. Don't Make the Same Mistake"

jmpman — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 07:04:44 +0000

I'd like to see more companies have clawback compensation for these "bold" decisions - stuff goes wrong, we are clawing back all your stock, even the tranche which vested during the first quarter pump and dump scam.

And I'd like to see it implemented further down in the hierarchy. In the companies which just implemented layoffs for AI efficiency, and then asked their more senior employees to dig in and help on the now overflowing work - I suspect a mid level manager or VP made that decision and was wildly rewarded for the initial cost savings, and now, with the resource disaster - was their bonus clawed back? I suspect not.

New comment by jmpman in "Microsoft team creates data-storage system that lasts for millennia"

jmpman — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 06:51:06 +0000

I believe the helium in the hard drives allows the heads to fly closer to the platter due to the different Reynolds number, not dust.

New comment by jmpman in "4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin"

jmpman — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:17:09 +0000

I’ve wondered if something like this would drive down inflation in the US food supply.

New comment by jmpman in "Tesla moving Full Self-Driving to a monthly subscription"

jmpman — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:15:36 +0000

I paid for FSD the first month it was offered monthly. Was so bad I wanted my money back but couldn’t figure out how to get Tesla to refund. Feel worse for those who paid the full $8k

New comment by jmpman in "HPV vaccination reduces oncogenic HPV16/18 prevalence from 16% to <1% in Denmark"

jmpman — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 14:20:41 +0000

You sound like my fellow citizens who have decided to use their theocratic power to push this view across my city and school. It impacts my children and their future mates. Sure, there’s an ideal world in which every person finds their ideal partner on the first time, falls madly in love and remains forever faithful. I don’t live in a Disney fantasy world, and would prefer public health policies are based on pragmatic principles.

New comment by jmpman in "Clock synchronization is a nightmare"

jmpman — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 13:50:51 +0000

Back in the early 2000s I was programming on an IBM AIX server. Multicore, maybe multiprocessor and within the same machine, the clocks were skewed between the processors. If you’d dispatch a process, and then check its outstanding running time, it would differ depending upon which processor you’d check from, and of course it was a signed type, and then we would get negative values, which sent our code down the wrong path.

New comment by jmpman in "Venezuela's Navy Begins Escorting Ships as U.S. Threatens Blockade"

jmpman — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:53:57 +0000

Once the US has air superiority, they don’t need their aircraft carriers anywhere close to Venezuela territory. The submarine fleet alone can enforce a blockade.