<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: mrngld</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mrngld</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:07:11 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=mrngld" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't have experience directly with Anthropic, but I wouldn't assume anything with such high confidence without knowing the persons situation. No, an individual off the street or with an LLC and 5 employees isn't going to get a special deal from someone like Anthropic.<p>But if their employer is bringing millions of dollars of potential spend to the table, can tell you from years of experience that turns a lot of 'no's' to 'yes'.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:35:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344171</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344171</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344171</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Interesting. I've been wishing that old 'Stars!' game from the 90s would play easily on modern systems. I'd love it if we'd got to the point where I could point Codex at a folder with an ISO from my CD of the game and tell it to go reverse engineer it all for understanding of game mechanics, then go recreate it in a modern language capable of running cross-platform. Scarcely any need to improve on graphics, it could even be a PWA.<p>There's people that have tried to contact Jeff McBride and follow the IP trail but the IP is currently owned by a company that went defunct. Not sold, but no one is even bothering to register its LLC any more, it's simply dead.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:18:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344026</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344026</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344026</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>China's 50 Cent Party being a real and noticeable thing (and the two biggest things they like to shill is open weight Chinese models and the futility of resisting a Taiwan invasion), I have to take things like this with a healthy dose of skepticism without corroborating data, since independent evals didn't show the price per task lead you're showing.<p>If there's independent data showing this feel free to share a link, I haven't seen it. DeepSWE has been most closely matching what I see in my own use.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:13:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343983</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343983</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343983</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "People are worried about America's solvency"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sounds like a reheated version of MMT, modern monetary theory. The "just print money" approach exploded in a mushroom cloud of inflation during the COVID years, just as any economist even remotely aligned with the Austrian school of thought could've predicted. And you're still seeing the inflation, it's just partly hidden in and taking place in frothy equity markets.<p>MMT isn't inevitable. You're describing a path to where Argentina was before Milei. A path to amplifying all the social issues that started in the US with the creation of the welfare state. The alternative would simply be fiscal restraint.<p>The only real problem or question is if democracy is capable of restraint. The answer is unclear, seems like it may be 'no'.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:01:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330147</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330147</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330147</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "People are worried about America's solvency"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Absolutely no one serious thinks that, but when you feel like you need to diversify you don't have to find a like-for-like replacement. Any port in a storm.<p>Just consult Google. All a country has to do to find itself on the receiving end of punishing Chinese trade actions is being mildly critical of China in the wrong way, and next thing they know their exporters to China report being held up for months. The EU has taken offense at how China kicks around smaller EU members, Australia has been on the receiving end of it more than once.<p>If you'd said the EU might be seen as a relatively more stable trading partner, that may be true, the EU does seem to be fairly happy deindustrializing itself. Though it's fueling a rise in the fractured politics there too.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:47:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329972</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329972</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329972</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've been thinking for a while that all of this is just trying to grasp tighter the last bits of sand escaping between our fingers. The end game, perhaps, is trust. Do you trust or know the source? If you don't, assume it was AI generated. If you do, accept it as authentic based on whatever they disclose, but know that it's possible they aren't being totally honest or were themselves fooled in some way, depending on the context.<p>Then build our assumptions and how we operate around those trust levels in the digital realm.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:37:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329869</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329869</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329869</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "Self hosted email continues to steeply decline"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's competition, but no one is interested.<p>TBH, I blame IT leadership. The easy choice is Google or Microsoft. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" is now "No one ever got fired for subbing to Office." Someone needs to bite the bullet and stitch together an alternative array of services. They've cultivated their own monoculture by hitting the easy-button and forking over for Office365, etc.<p>Which if we're being honest, Microsoft and Google products are rarely best-in-class at any one thing that they do. Teams, SharePoint, Google Docs, someone somewhere is doing those things much better. Those competitors just don't necessarily have a whole ecosystem that makes it a big Easy Button for corporate IT to smash. And they sometimes charge as much by themselves as Office365 costs in whole. But I know one problem my own employers IT team struggles with a bit is putting out the constant fire of different teams deciding the Microsoft tool we pay for sucks and going rogue and trying to subscribe to something else. Dropbox was a big one, but Teams and Planner alternatives come up a lot too.<p>Not pretending to have all the answers but it doesn't seem to be a completely intractable problem.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:17:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329649</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329649</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329649</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, we do not in fact have the "power pipes". Those "pipes" have capacity limits. Those "pipes" and getting them approved and built in the US is a key limiting factor that throttles... pretty much everything. Yes, it holds up data centers, but also I've heard 'green' energy advocates complaining for decades about how difficult it is to get the permits and approvals to get wind and solar facilities hooked up, they're holding up nuclear plants, they're holding all kinds of things up.<p>There's also something to be said for distributed production and storage. We don't all live in ultra-compact cities. I agree apartment buildings don't need to be playing this game. But Australia (and the US) are extremely dispersed relative to Europe, for example. There should, in theory, be resilience in distributed production and storage that grid managers could call upon to help manage point failures.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:47:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300392</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300392</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49300392</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Temu built out some local distribution after it had already reached a pretty high level of popularity, but Temu was enabled by regulatory and political indifference that allowed China, with an enormous GDP, to get extremely subsidized postage rates. Also, lax enforcement of import duties (do you think the declared values were accurate?), and effectively zero enforcement of any safety standards, etc., on the products sold.<p>So, it was less of them following a path Amazon had trod and was maintaining, and more like sneaking in a back door and trying to sell you a counterfeit purse.<p>But if the US and EU had been on their game, it'd of either not happened or would've at least happened much more slowly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:42:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299369</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299369</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299369</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So, steal from everyone (taxation) whether they want to support or use government-run Facebook, give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government?<p>What incentive does that mechanism have to spur innovation for government-run Facebook? Does the government fund two Facebooks and scale funding based on market share? Or, like what virtually always happens in government, does it metastasize, realize it's actual "customer" isn't its "users" but is actually the government itself, and act accordingly to protect and grow its own budget?<p>Everything about a subscription model is better. If it sucks, don't pay for it, and if no one thinks its a worthwhile bargain then they run out of money and it dies. Efficient. If people do like it, then great.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:39:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49284502</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49284502</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49284502</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Lets be fair, here. Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads. I still remember televised holiday movies "presented with limited commercial breaks by Folgers, where the best part of waking up..." or whoever was sponsoring it. Radio stations had to power their transmitters and pay their staff, so they had ads. Newspapers use ads to keep themselves affordable. This has always been a business model.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:24:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49284370</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49284370</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49284370</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If it's simply pay to win then the value of a degree from an institution falls to absolutely zero. If the product a student is buying is a credential that's supposed to say "I know and can do things, pay me money please" then in order for that credential to fulfill its objective then low performing and mediocre students ("weeds") need to be filtered out. Otherwise, employers and the wider world will quickly realize the credential is meaningless.<p>See the problem here?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:19:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271248</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271248</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271248</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But it's not true. Cute to say that, but I wouldn't believe it. Just like most students, given the opportunity to use AI to essentially cheat will often do so (look at the stunning percentages professors are detecting when they bother to try to figure it out), the same applies here; given the option to study these things more deeply or fire up Tinder, Facebook, Minecraft or whatever, they're going to do the latter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:17:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271223</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271223</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271223</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, same here, for me high school was easy and I failed (or effectively failed, a D counted the same as an F) a couple classes right out of the gate. It was a lesson to myself that I never learned to study in high school and had to learn that skill ASAP.<p>Michigan and its apologists here would rob these kids of real-world experience, reducing them to infants. And then we're all disappointed when these adults act like infants.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:13:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271183</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271183</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271183</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't get all this existential talk about college acceptance. Yes, elite schools should expect elite applicants.<p>Meanwhile, the state school down the road is a fraction the cost, teaches a lot of the same content, and will accept anyone with a pulse. In my state, at least. State universities are somewhat competitive to get into, but state colleges... wide open.<p>All of which is very real-world. Certain top firms recruit only top candidates. Everyone else works somewhere further along the spectrum.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:10:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271160</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271160</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271160</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "Panic of 1873"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think the risk is a little different. It's not that data centers are being built and then unused -- the fact that OpenAI, Anthropic and pretty much everyone has to put a lot of effort into getting enough compute tells you the demand is there for inference. And it's useful, increasingly so outside of coding.<p>The risk is in the financial world. The worlds central banks printed money because they thought inflation was tamed, but it wasn't, we just don't measure stratospheric stock and bond valuations as "inflation". I mean, euro-zone bond yields went negative -- but no, that's not inflation-like price mania at all! A big correction in financial markets towards some semblance of reality could amount to a psychological shock on consumers, a big negative wealth effect.<p>And a hit at the ballot box, hence no major political parties calling for raising rates (or sound money). They rather juice the markets for as much of their careers as possible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:05:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256940</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256940</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256940</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I used to fly in Florida in the 2005-2015ish timeframe, NOTAMs for GPS interference (it didn't say that exactly but that's what it meant) were an everyday occurrence along my path, it became boilerplate. I experienced it a few times. One moment the GPS thinks you're plodding along next to Ocala, next moment it thinks I've teleported a thousand miles away, and then it'd just quit.<p>But that's what we train for. That's why aircraft and pilots have redundancy to work around any single possible point of failure and why you practice it until it becomes natural. Because of the NOTAM I'd already have a VOR tuned in, and once the GPS went inop I just fine tuned it to get a radial fix on the VOR. Also tried to never lose my bearings with my MK I Eyeballs either. No big deal.<p>I feel bad for everyone that lost their lives here, but this is why competence is critical. There's a litany of errors the pilots made. And the article tries to pin a bit on the controller, but no, ultimate responsibility is on the pilot in command, FAR/AIM is clear on that.<p>If these allegedly instrument rated pilots had been properly drilled by their CFI's and properly grilled during reviews and such this should've been an easy flight.<p>Also, "just ask Kennedy". Wired bringing that into the conversation is perhaps relevant but not in the way I think they intended. JFK Jr lacked basic airmanship skills. His aircraft was 100% functional until the moment it impacted the ocean.<p>Some professions simply can't be go-along-to-get-along social clubs. Safety culture centered on competence and performance is key.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:53:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181565</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181565</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181565</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "I regret migrating to Codeberg"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But do people look at installing a formulae in brew and wonder "what's their position on Uyghur oppression in Western China?" Like, wow, jxl is pretty neat, but they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?<p>Insanity. IMO. Keep that stuff at home.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:54:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034291</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034291</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034291</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And meanwhile, I gave up trying to connect to my offices printer months ago. Paper free environment over here, planned or not.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:17:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019760</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019760</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019760</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mrngld in "Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have some degree of sympathy for data centers, and anyone else that needs power, only because of how broken our regulatory state is on approving new transmission.<p>To be clear, it's not just data centers that have this problem. Journalists have been spilling digital ink on this topic as it relates to solar and wind farms as well. It's also part of the thing that'd hold back rapid deployment of nuclear.<p>If there's a strong enough economic incentive then yeah people are going to try to optimize around broken government.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:41:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010525</link><dc:creator>mrngld</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010525</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010525</guid></item></channel></rss>