Hacker News: mordechai9000

New comment by mordechai9000 in "IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet"

mordechai9000 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:30:17 +0000

I worked for a small, local ISP in the mid 2000s. I don't think I made any stupid mistakes on my part, but I had plenty of coworkers who did. To be fair, people were often actively hostile to security concerns back then. It's not much better now, but at least not everything gets a public IP by default.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

mordechai9000 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:07:01 +0000

It also had "weltschmerz" in the list, but I think I have only ever heard "ennui" used in English. They are both foreign words, but I would not have thought of weltschmerz as a loan word. Then again, maybe I am not reading the right texts.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "How Alberta Eradicated Rats"

mordechai9000 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:51:32 +0000

Depending on where you live, those probably aren't the problematic species known as the German cockroach that typically infests human living quarters.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "El Niño is coming. The last time ocean temp. looked like this, millions died"

mordechai9000 — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:41:20 +0000

My concern is that even if it would temporarily alleviate the local drought conditions for some areas, it wouldn't reverse the long term trends towards hotter, drier conditions.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "Learn Harness Engineering"

mordechai9000 — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:27:26 +0000

I wonder about failure modes and fault identification. I've heard stories of things like screws or brackets wearing through the insulation and causing an intermittent fault that defies diagnosis. One of those things I think about when I am procrastinating.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "At least 100 deaths reported in Ebola outbreak in DR Congo"

mordechai9000 — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:05:48 +0000

A handful get infected from direct exposure to animals. Then it spreads to family and others in the community. Sometimes people travel and bring it to a new location. Sadly, it is often the caregivers who get infected.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "Flock repeatedly flags 76-year old Grandmother for arrest, erroring zero for "O""

mordechai9000 — Sun, 03 May 2026 23:06:09 +0000

I believe, in my state, similar looking characters are considered identical for vanity plates. I assumed this applied to state issued plate IDs as well, but maybe not. It's hard enough trying to read a license plate on the road without throwing in confusion over B vs 8 and O vs 0.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "NetHack 5.0.0"

mordechai9000 — Sat, 02 May 2026 19:24:29 +0000

"Slow down. Think clearly." - Izchak

Solid advice, but not easy for me. I made it to the astral planes, once.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "Ti-84 Evo"

mordechai9000 — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:26:01 +0000

I programmed a Mandelbrot generator on my TI-81 (if I remember the model correctly) when I should have been paying attention in class. Entering the code was slow and painful - fortunately the algorithm is fairly simple. The batteries lasted forever, until one day I set the bailout to a ridiculously high value, given the limited resolution, and walked away.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

mordechai9000 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 02:14:35 +0000

> the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess

More like a FIFO buffer. But you probably don't strictly enforce the rotation - you might still pick a preferred garment over the one on the end, I am guessing. So kind of like a network queue that might prioritize some packets - er, garments - over others.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "A Primer on Long-Duration Life Support"

mordechai9000 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:00:35 +0000

My guess is they stock it in case someone needs it during the mission. Not that they are sending people who are already taking it.

Private equity turned vulnerable elderly people into human ATMs

mordechai9000 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:43:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/mar/28/the-great-care-home-cash-grab-how-private-equity-turned-vulnerable-elderly-people-into-human-atms

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558372

Points: 194

# Comments: 136

New comment by mordechai9000 in "Ask HN: Running legacy IE/ActiveX clients without local admin rights?"

mordechai9000 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:14:34 +0000

Could you maintain a VM or other environment dedicated to running the client through RDP or Guacamole or something like that? I think that would mitigate the security risk, somewhat, since there would be nothing else on the system to compromise. It might be practical to force the VM to restore a baseline snapshot after the user logs off, or during a scheduled daily downtime.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"

mordechai9000 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:02:33 +0000

Removing the case and putting it in mineral oil with a circulating pump and a heat exchanger would probably work better

New comment by mordechai9000 in "Starlink Mini as a failover"

mordechai9000 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:09:09 +0000

Are we back to this again? I have a friend who wants to know how to build a blue box.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product"

mordechai9000 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:55:50 +0000

Do you really need Turbotax? Just feed it the tax code, your financial data, and the relevant forms and it should be good to go. Now we have freed up the labor of accountants so they can go be productive in another segment of society. /s

New comment by mordechai9000 in "Bourdieu's theory of taste: a grumbling abrégé (2023)"

mordechai9000 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:43:34 +0000

Years ago I was surprised to read a critic that described Branagh's Hamlet as middlebrow. I mean, Henry V, sure - that only even qualifies as middlebrow because it's Shakespeare. I would assume it was lowbrow at the time it was written. I love the prologue, though.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

mordechai9000 — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:14:04 +0000

I would make them fairly small (personal pie-sized) and use a filling that doesn't need to be cooked in the oven to set. The main limiting factors, I think, would be structural integrity and heating the filling to the center. You could set it on a ring (like the rim of a spring-form pan) to support it better during cooking. Now, a four dimensional hyper pie, on the other hand...

New comment by mordechai9000 in "America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital"

mordechai9000 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:16:41 +0000

In the US, depositors are insured by the FDIC (Federal Depositors Insurance Fund) up to $250000 per institution. This doesn't apply to investment accounts, but would cover standard checking and savings accounts, even if they pay interest. The interest on those accounts is usually negligible at most banks, anyway - not even close to offsetting inflation.

Edited to add: not my area of expertise, but I did research it a couple years ago when I was acting as executor for the estate of a deceased person. So take what you will from that. I do notice banks usually have a sign up saying they are FDIC insured. I think it's required, but I don't know for sure. I suppose a shady investment firm could try to suggest they are an insured bank without actually saying so.

New comment by mordechai9000 in "Shingles Vaccine Linked to Slower Biological Aging in Older Adults"

mordechai9000 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 03:45:59 +0000

Just anecdotes, but I know two people who got it in their 40s, and one of them has some minor facial paralysis that he believes is probably permanent. I got the vaccine when I turned 50.