Hacker News: mastax

New comment by mastax in "What is a Demand Coop"

mastax — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:27:55 +0000

Pre-agricultural Hunter-gatherer bands aren’t a monolith. Many were radically egalitarian, yes, many others were strictly hierarchical including slavery and human sacrifice. A surprisingly large proportion of them were hierarchical for one part of the year and egalitarian for the rest (often coinciding with religious festivals and/or different means of sustenance depending on the season).

New comment by mastax in "Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets"

mastax — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:06:47 +0000

That isn’t how they were pitched to the FTC but it does appear to be their ultimate use case.

New comment by mastax in "Landmark L.A. jury verdict finds Instagram, YouTube were designed to addict kids"

mastax — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:38:17 +0000

That’s like saying the solution to cigarettes is that tobacco shops must be forced to sell clove cigarettes as a not-addictive alternative.

New comment by mastax in "Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC"

mastax — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:58:04 +0000

I was just looking at these funny parts: https://www.vicorpower.com/products?productType=cfg&productK...

130A, 48V -> 1.2V @ 94% efficiency! Except:

- $100 ea.

- Fixed 1/40 voltage ratio, regulation done by upstream regulator.

- Look at the minimum specs for efficiency…

New comment by mastax in "An incoherent Rust"

mastax — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:27:00 +0000

Language changes could help for sure. There’s a library implementation we can use right now though: https://facet.rs/ Basically a derive macro for reflection. Yeah it’s one (more) trait to derive on all your types but then users can use that to do reflection or pretty printing or diffing or whatever they want.

New comment by mastax in "The Ugliest Airplane: An Appreciation"

mastax — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 03:40:03 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZL_M-15_Belphegor

The M-15 is still uglier. Also intended as a cropduster, though unlike the AirTruk it was really bad at that job in every way.

New comment by mastax in "Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout"

mastax — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:52:57 +0000

Was the Nuscale cost estimate somehow worse than AP1000 or EPR(2)? That seems very unlikely to me given the history of those programs.

New comment by mastax in "Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service"

mastax — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:26:40 +0000

Out of all the SSO login flows Microsoft has to have the buggiest. It’s the only one I can remember routinely having issues with. Why are there so many redirects? And why doesn’t the “remember me” checkbox ever work?

New comment by mastax in "Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam"

mastax — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:48:08 +0000

The modern Atari has no relation to the original Atari. They’re essentially copyright trolls. I do not believe we owe them any moral obligation for the works they bought from the original Atari via a series of many intermediaries.

New comment by mastax in "3D-Knitting: The Ultimate Guide"

mastax — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:48:13 +0000

Uniqlo offers a few 3D knit items, I’ve been meaning to try them out. Pretty basic styles though.

New comment by mastax in "Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years"

mastax — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 02:43:53 +0000

Only 92 of the 842 peers are hereditary currently, so it’s not really necessary to convince them to agree; the deal only needs to be seen as fair enough by the other peers. Or really, it only needs to be seen as fair enough to the House of Commons.

New comment by mastax in "RISC-V Is Sloooow"

mastax — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 03:55:25 +0000

I assume the TensTorrent TT-Ascalon is one of the CPU designs.

New comment by mastax in "Judge finalizes order for Greenpeace to pay $345M in ND oil pipeline case"

mastax — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:26:06 +0000

Really? Could you point at one of these shell companies?

New comment by mastax in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

mastax — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:20 +0000

I don't think that is compatible with his ruling in Biden v. Nebraska, nor some others during Biden's term.

New comment by mastax in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

mastax — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:30:45 +0000

It seems likely to me the ruling took this long because John Roberts wanted to get a more unanimous ruling.

Additionally, the law in this case isn’t ill defined whatsoever. Alito, Thomas, and to a lesser extent Kavanaugh are just partisan hacks. For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided. However the past six years have destroyed that notion. They’re barely even trying to justify themselves in most of these rulings; and via the shadow docket frequently deny us even that barest explanation.

New comment by mastax in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

mastax — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:15:29 +0000

If the US really wanted to make a durable shift to manufacturing, presidential tariffs by fiat aren’t a good strategy anyway. Tariffs could be a small part of that strategy but they should be targeted, not broad, and enacted by congress so businesses have the kind of decades-long stability required to invest in factories that take years to pay off.

New comment by mastax in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

mastax — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:35:42 +0000

The tariffs have been absolute hell on small businesses and manufacturing businesses of any size.

New comment by mastax in "America's Cyber Defense Agency Is Burning Down and Nobody's Coming to Put It Out"

mastax — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:42:13 +0000

Then we must repeal the state laws criminalizing electors not voting in line with the states popular vote allocation, and directly elect electors to ensure they are people of sound morals and judgement rather than partisan hacks. Because at the moment the electoral college serves no function besides distorting the popular vote. Any other possible function has been removed by law.

New comment by mastax in "Intel will start making GPUs"

mastax — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 18:24:54 +0000

Intel has been using a fair bit of TSMC in their CPU manufacturing recently, yes. Most recently they’ve been assembling “tiles” of silicon from many process nodes into a single CPU package and IIRC they have been using TSMC for the GPU tiles.

New comment by mastax in "The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal"

mastax — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:06:18 +0000

The passage of the alien and sedition acts without constitutional amendment disproves that idea.