Hacker News: mplewis9z

New comment by mplewis9z in "Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure"

mplewis9z — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:16:59 +0000

Federal elections are all run by the individual states, so a state ID would be all you need.

New comment by mplewis9z in "Product and design are the new bottlenecks"

mplewis9z — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:00:46 +0000

I think a corollary to this is that any pizza is a personal pizza if you believe hard enough.

New comment by mplewis9z in "If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?"

mplewis9z — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:29:23 +0000

The problem is when things like this happens: https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...

When AI behaves sycohphantically towards someone, it can encourage and exacerbate any mental health problems they may already be having, especially related to social isolation.

New comment by mplewis9z in "Canadian military will rely on public servants to boost its ranks by 300k"

mplewis9z — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:14:06 +0000

You very conveniently omitted the middle part of that quote: “... and end the world as they struck targets on either side”. That very clearly implies that nukes would not be targeted at Canada, which is laughably wrong. There are multiple significant military sites that are part of NORAD that would be primary targets, let alone major population centers that would be obliterated if it came to full-on Mutually-Assured-Destruction time.

New comment by mplewis9z in "NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission"

mplewis9z — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 07:28:26 +0000

You made a big leap there from “robotic missions” to “autonomous robotic missions”, which I think very few think is realistic in the near-term. Some limited autonomy exists as a force-multiplier, sure, but pretty much all robotic space missions are still basically controlled remotely by a human.

New comment by mplewis9z in "Rules by which a great empire may be reduced to a small one (1773)"

mplewis9z — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 14:52:45 +0000

They're talking about the Benjamin Franklin House, which is in fact in London.

New comment by mplewis9z in "UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US"

mplewis9z — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 02:36:41 +0000

Probably not on the standard itself, but practically a guarantee they have attacks on the major implementations, especially OpenSSL.

New comment by mplewis9z in "Arizona resident dies from the plague"

mplewis9z — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 17:31:00 +0000

You do know that both pneumonic and bubonic are caused by the same bacterium, right? They’re just different transmission methods.

New comment by mplewis9z in "Discover is now part of Capital One"

mplewis9z — Mon, 19 May 2025 16:45:35 +0000

Capital One’s personal lending is also notorious for targeting the mid-to-low end of credit card customers. They routinely deny people for credit cards if it looks like the applicant pays off their cards in full every month - they love a customer with a credit profile that has no negative marks but with a moderate debt-to-income ratio that means they’ll get those sweet interest payments.

New comment by mplewis9z in "Coinbase 8K SEC filing for breach"

mplewis9z — Fri, 16 May 2025 09:52:13 +0000

The costs will likely be covered by insurance, which is hilariously cheap and also covers events you could never feasibly prepare for.

New comment by mplewis9z in "High time to tackle drug-resistant fungal infections"

mplewis9z — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 07:28:09 +0000

I’m an outsider to that field, but I don’t see a reason why mRNA can’t be the “mRNA moment” - fungal vaccines are possible, and if you can find the right target protein you can make an mRNA vaccine against a particular infection.

I think it’s just a matter of priorities and funding, which fungal infections as a whole don’t get enough of in general.

New comment by mplewis9z in "France's new high-speed train has Americans asking: Why can't we have that?"

mplewis9z — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 07:19:49 +0000

And the average EU country is quite a bit smaller than the average US state, along with the EU being more densely populated - public transit certainly has some artificial/political roadblocks in the US, but it’s also fundamentally more challenging and expensive here.

New comment by mplewis9z in "Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?"

mplewis9z — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 17:48:48 +0000

Yes.

New comment by mplewis9z in "Gravitational Effects of Small Primordial Black Hole Passing Through Human Body"

mplewis9z — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 17:50:24 +0000

Primordial Hack Bloles?

New comment by mplewis9z in "Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo completes first ever sub-57 minute half marathon"

mplewis9z — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 08:17:21 +0000

I’m in fairly good shape from biking pretty much every day and my average _cycling_ speed on my hybrid bike is below that, my goodness. If I’m on a completely flat trail, carrying nothing else with me, and I’m really pushing it I can average about 16 mph for an hour but to know that there’s someone out there running as fast as I bike is absurd.

New comment by mplewis9z in "U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts"

mplewis9z — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 11:13:10 +0000

I think this is an extreme take - they only had those mass surveillance tools since the start of the internet, and any other method of communication (phone calls, physical mail) all required warrants individualized to specific people to tap. But somehow the internet is excluded from all those privacy protections, and now that there’s technology available to ratchet us back to where we used to be, law enforcement agencies are throwing a tantrum about not being able to constantly violate our privacy.

In my mind, it’s pretty simple: if you want to surveil someone, get an individualized warrant to access their devices and data. If they refuse or wipe their data, treat it like destroying evidence in a case and throw the book at them. There’s zero excuse for what law enforcement and intelligence agencies have done to our privacy rights since 9/11.

New comment by mplewis9z in "Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel"

mplewis9z — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 13:34:24 +0000

Marcan certainly can be abrasive (I mean lol, so can Linus), but all the things he points out in the message below are 100% valid - I highly recommend for anyone here to try to contribute something even very small and logical to the Linux kernel or git (which use similar processes), it’s an eye-opening experience that’s incredibly unapproachable, frustrating, and demoralizing.

https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/208e1fc3-cfc3-4a26-98...

New comment by mplewis9z in "I'm Done with Ubuntu"

mplewis9z — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 15:22:10 +0000

`apt` (the program) is a relatively recent addition to the APT (Advanced Package Tool) ecosystem - until not that long ago, `apt-get` was the way to install packages, and `apt` is now a "cleaner" way of interacting with APT.

New comment by mplewis9z in "Thunderbolt 5 vs. Thunderbolt 4: Everything you need to know"

mplewis9z — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 09:57:42 +0000

You’ve been able to do that with Thunderbolt 4 for a while (with Display Stream Compression) - I currently drive an 8k ultrawide (7680x2160, or two 4K side-by-side) at 120 Hz off a single Thunderbolt 4 port.

New comment by mplewis9z in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"

mplewis9z — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 23:44:46 +0000

> how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?

It’s not, other than Google has a way larger market share (especially if you count Edge/Opera/Brave/etc.) and has been (ab)using that position to push web standards in a direction that favors their business and that other browser vendors have to follow to keep up.

If Safari had Chrome’s market share and was throwing their weight around like Google does and Microsoft did with IE, it’d be the same argument and I’d also personally support forcing them to divest it.