Hacker News: lizknope

New comment by lizknope in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

lizknope — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:26:35 +0000

I don't live in California but the article mentioned Proposition 13 which capped property tax rates and the reassessment is only when the property changes ownership?

Is that right?

That seems unfair to people who recently moved compared to the people that stay in their house for decades.

Reading more it looks like California created alternative types of property taxes like Mello-Roos.

In my state we used to have property tax values reassessed every 8 years, then they changed it to every 4 years. But my bill goes up every year. I started off paying about $2000 25 years ago and now it is about $5000 but my property value has also increased about 3X

It seems like if you just taxed an ordinary house at a percentage and you taxed a billionaire's huge house at the same percentage that you would get more money from the billionaire without needing to create special laws and special taxes.

New comment by lizknope in "What Sun got wrong"

lizknope — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 02:25:12 +0000

Same here. I've been in the chip design industry since 1997. Everything was Sun and I was right out of college and convinced my manager to let me use a Linux/x86 machine and I used the savings to buy a large 21" monitor that would run at 2048x1536 resolution and use it as an X terminal to the Suns. Everyone else loved it and did the same.

Around 2000 we started getting some EDA software released on Linux. I remember getting some Linux kernel patches and recompiling the kernel to change the user / kernel split from 2GB / 2GB to 3.5GB user / 0.5GB kernel. But we still needed the 64-bit Suns for some jobs that needed over 4GB RAM. Itanium was really expensive and slow and then AMD released the 64-bit Opteron in 2003. We bought them immediately and never bought another Sun.

My high school in 1992 got a bunch of old Sun3 and first gen Sun4 systems. I absolutely loved them. My dream then was to have my own Sun workstation but they were way too expensive. My other dream was to go to college and then get a job at Sun. I heard about Linux in 1993 and got my Unix system at home. I did work on some Sun UltraSPARC III companion chipsets but Sun couldn't compete on the price to performance ratio with Linux/x86

New comment by lizknope in "Micron announces $10B research hub in Boise"

lizknope — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:00:24 +0000

Idaho has a ton of incredible outdoor activities. You list some negatives but my biggest negative is all of the white supremacist groups. I felt uncomfortable just stopping for gas and going into a grocery store with everyone staring at me.

New comment by lizknope in "New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study"

lizknope — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:18:40 +0000

I was 16 when Magic Johnson announced he had AIDS. That was the first time it felt real to me. I remember a couple of friends crying because we all thought he would be dead in 1-2 years. And here he is and seems to be living a normal life.

New comment by lizknope in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

lizknope — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 10:52:55 +0000

I don't think this is a good idea but I do think colleges should be required to list the average salaries that people with those degrees have. Include the career and salary progression over the next 30 years.

I'm generally against banning things like smoking and gambling but I am absolutely for putting giant warning labels on those things.

Adults which means anyone over 18 should know the risks and what they are signing up for.

New comment by lizknope in "Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip"

lizknope — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:05:02 +0000

30 years ago I remember cards like this to convert 4 30-pin SIMM modules to fit in a 72-pin SIMM slot.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/383521792853

New comment by lizknope in "Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip"

lizknope — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:50:24 +0000

There are standard product CXL memory expander chips if you don't want to design a custom chip.

https://www.marvell.com/products/cxl.html

New comment by lizknope in "A Summer of Solar Cooking (2023)"

lizknope — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:23:13 +0000

I loved Mr Wizard's World when I was a kid in the 1980's

Here's a segment where he demonstrates solar cooking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoRR_6cjmkA

New comment by lizknope in "Great Salt Lake Tracker"

lizknope — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 03:12:42 +0000

To replenish it. I know it was made by accident but agricultural runoff kept it from drying out. Now it is full of fertilizer and pesticide residue and the farms have gotten better at using water so less flows into the Salton Sea. As it dries up toxic dust clouds are blown over the cities nearby. California is trying to stop the dust. One idea is to fill it with sea water from the Gulf of California from Mexico.

I am not saying this is a good idea, only that it is an idea.

New comment by lizknope in "Great Salt Lake Tracker – Grow the Flow"

lizknope — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 23:08:54 +0000

There have been some ideas to do this from the Salton Sea to the Gulf of California in Mexico but that is about 125 miles and would still cost billions.

New comment by lizknope in "A retrospective of my time on the internet"

lizknope — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:49:00 +0000

It looks like it starts with:

>I was born in the late 1990s

>2001: The Family Computer

I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name.

Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now.

Then the author says:

> 2012: When Everything Started Changing

I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

New comment by lizknope in "Space Shuttle Endeavour's 20-story vertical display"

lizknope — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:34:14 +0000

On the ground or suspended about 20 feet up? I saw Endeavour in 2017 and it was like this and you could walk under the wings. I've seen Discovery about 10 times because I live much closer to DC but you can't only walk around it, not under it.

https://imgur.com/a/eUR7TU1

New comment by lizknope in "IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology"

lizknope — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:11:55 +0000

Remember that IBM paid Global Foundries $1.5 billion to take their fabs and design services group.

GF did not pay IBM. IBM paid GF to take the fabs away.

https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/ibm-to-pay-global...

New comment by lizknope in "IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology"

lizknope — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:10:19 +0000

No, their mainframes use the zArch which goes back to the System/360 from 1964.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture

IBM sells huge servers with POWER architecture CPUs but they are not what people are referring to when they talk about IBM mainframes.

New comment by lizknope in "IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology"

lizknope — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:08:00 +0000

https://www.eejournal.com/article/no-more-nanometers/

Sometime around 2011 when Intel named their process node 22nm which the gate length was 26nm

New comment by lizknope in "CSSQuake"

lizknope — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 19:02:34 +0000

Ran fine on my Pentium 90 with 16MB RAM

New comment by lizknope in "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle"

lizknope — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:37:15 +0000

I clicked on the post expecting it to be something from T2 and wondered why I was reading something about emulation.

New comment by lizknope in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

lizknope — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 23:41:43 +0000

AI has a lot of uses and can save people time.

But AI bots are filling online forums with garbage posts. I get so annoyed when reading a question and then see clues that it is not a real person but an AI asking so it can get training data for itself. If nothing is done then Dead Internet Theory will become a reality in 2 years.

New comment by lizknope in "New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker"

lizknope — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 23:23:03 +0000

Everywhere I look in my area we are building new housing. But more people keep moving to the desirable locations with jobs etc.

EDIT: I live in one of the 10 fastest growing metro areas of the US. In the last 4 years my county added over 60,000 homes but about 130,000 new people moved here. I drive around and see new development after new development. But more people move here because of the good jobs, schools, etc.

I can drive 2 hours away to some economically depressed areas. Houses are a lot cheaper because the population moves away to the bigger cities for jobs, education, etc. So sure you can have a cheap house in an undesirable location.

New comment by lizknope in "Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)"

lizknope — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:24:19 +0000

This seems to work if everyone is peaceful with each other.

What happens when two neighboring countries have a conflict but one of them decides to work less and is comfortable with less economic growth. The other keeps pushing harder and ends up with excess money that they put into their military. Now they can invade their neighbor.

Economic power generally leads to military power. Maybe the world shouldn't be this way but it is.