Hacker News: kibwen

New comment by kibwen in "Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops"

kibwen — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:24:24 +0000

Except for the inevitable and obvious fact that proof-of-work creates a self-sustaining primary incentive for energy waste more pernicious than has ever been seen in any other financial or commercial enterprise, obliterating any hope of having energy that is too cheap to meter.

New comment by kibwen in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

kibwen — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:58:15 +0000

I can't even imagine prioritizing resale value here over one's own comfort. The purpose of a tool is to be used, not to serve as an asset class.

New comment by kibwen in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

kibwen — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:56:17 +0000

Tim Cook here, we've heard you loud and clear, the next Macbook will have a perfectly circular screen with square windows.

New comment by kibwen in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

kibwen — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:10:05 +0000

Is unlimited email aliases (with or without custom domains) also on the roadmap?

New comment by kibwen in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

kibwen — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:23:23 +0000

Protip for readers: when people on HN say "democracy", what they mean is "plutocracy".

New comment by kibwen in "Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S."

kibwen — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:36:49 +0000

Last I checked there was no consensus on whether or not a Faraday cage needed to be grounded to function properly, which seemed surprising.

New comment by kibwen in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

kibwen — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:19:43 +0000

Yes, even if China can deny the US access to the region, that doesn't mean that taking Taiwan would be a trivial endeavor. It would still be the largest and most complicated aquatic invasion in human history, executed by a relatively inexperienced military apparatus. It's far from a given that China would succeed in a direct invasion. All that we're saying here is that China isn't so afraid of US cruise missiles that the US exhausting them in Iran has any real affect on their planning.

New comment by kibwen in "When legal sports betting surges, so do Americans' financial problems"

kibwen — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:38:54 +0000

This seems instructive for considering when a difference in degree makes for a difference in kind. Let's call this "whale potential": the amount of money that a power user can naturally funnel into a casino over a single visit is multiple orders of magnitude more than the amount of money that a power user can funnel into a ski resort over a single visit. For a casino, the act of a customer losing money is not merely a side effect of the activity, it is the primary effect of the activity.

New comment by kibwen in "A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses"

kibwen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:23:46 +0000

Agreed. The real bull case for SpaceX is that the US government will use it to aggressively militarize LEO.

New comment by kibwen in "A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses"

kibwen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:20:54 +0000

The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9. Once again, just because you have a jumbo jet that can fly 500 people from New York to London does not mean that everyone flying out of New York wants to go to London, and it doesn't mean that it's worth flying that jumbo jet from New York to Pierre, South Dakota with only one passenger on board.

New comment by kibwen in "A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses"

kibwen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:18:16 +0000

That's not how this works. The JWST was limited by the size of its faring, but increasing the size of the faring doesn't mean they'd ship a less complex telescope with the same functionality; they'd ship an equally-complex telescope with more functionality. Better for science, yes, but that doesn't translate to more expenditure that could be captured by the launch company. And that still relies on a government that gives a damn about funding science, which is not not the direction that the US is heading in.

New comment by kibwen in "A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses"

kibwen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:15:49 +0000

> There's already a large market for ride-sharing and it's only going to get bigger.

Except that at some point this stops being true. Induced demand is not infinite. There's no telling when we'll reach that point, or indeed if we've already reached it.

New comment by kibwen in "A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses"

kibwen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:45:48 +0000

The question is not even whether or not Starship works. Starship is, in theory, designed with the idea of getting many, many payloads to Mars. However, getting payloads to Mars is not currently something that anyone is paying for; even NASA isn't going to focus on Mars for at least another decade (likely more). And in the meantime, it's not like we don't have rockets capable of getting payloads to Mars (the Saturn V was fully capable of doing so in the 60s). Likewise in the meantime, the Artemis plans that look to require a dozen+ launches for a single moonshot aren't painting Starship in a favorable light.

So what is the near-to-medium-term economic prospect of Starship? That's the question. You can't just say "bigger rocket make more money", because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice. To use an analogy, we have jumbo jets, but most flights are not on jumbo jets.

New comment by kibwen in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

kibwen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:36:37 +0000

This is moving the goalposts. The commenter above is talking about the enthusiast-populated internet of the late 80s/early 90s, at which point it still wasn't even clear if it was legal to use the internet for commercial purposes. If all you mean to say is that the internet is currently commercialized, yes, that is obviously true, in much the same way that a disgusting ball of decomposing fungus may have once been an apple.

New comment by kibwen in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

kibwen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:25:01 +0000

China would have no need to wait for the US to exhaust its cruise missile supply before attacking Taiwan. The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring to bear in the region. All US ships and airbases closer than (and including) Guam are toast in a serious war.

New comment by kibwen in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

kibwen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:50:22 +0000

We can hypothesize that there may exist some for-profit companies that deserve the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft is not one of them.

New comment by kibwen in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

kibwen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:48:57 +0000

No. The internet was not a commercial enterprise, it was first and foremost a military enterprise, just like GPS.

New comment by kibwen in "Significant raise of reports"

kibwen — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:57:11 +0000

No, this is false. For Rust codebases that aren't doing high-peformance data structures, C interop, or bare-metal stuff, it's typical to write no unsafe code at all. I'm not sure who told you otherwise, but they have no idea what they're talking about.

New comment by kibwen in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

kibwen — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:49:57 +0000

Honest question, why would they care? The rancher does not care about the morale of the cattle as they're being led to slaughter.

New comment by kibwen in "Acceptance of entomophagy among Canadians at an insectarium"

kibwen — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:42:22 +0000

Lobster and crab are both just as much a bug as a tarantula is, so the same reason that the seafood industry pushed lobster and crab into mainstream acceptance: profit.