Hacker News: patmorgan23

New comment by patmorgan23 in "sshole"

patmorgan23 — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 20:56:28 +0000

This sounds like a program problem not a library problem. Why did the library try to solve it?

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now"

patmorgan23 — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 15:54:24 +0000

If you reduce the amount of code/code paths you reduce the surface area that vulnerabilities can appear on. A code base with 10 million lines can have a lot more bugs than one with 100k.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half"

patmorgan23 — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 14:58:55 +0000

German has made some absolutely brain dead energy policy decisions over the last 30 years. Choosing to decommission their fleet of nuclear reactors, not investing in developing enough wind and solar generation, building a bunch of oil pipelines to Russia.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Electrification Could Cut Global Energy Use in Half"

patmorgan23 — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 14:54:26 +0000

A couple responses.

1) heat pump appliances are much more energy efficient (they move heat rather than convert it from electronics or molecules, and modern heat pumps work well in most cold climates (and you can also utilize resistive heating for the short period your outside of their optimal operating range)

2) time of use charges can be managed by smart applications and/or a whole home battery (and the battery gives you extra resiliency in case of an outage)

3) this is probably a problem with how your local electricity market is structured. ERCOT (Texas) developed and energy-only and has the cheapest electric rates in the nation (granted lots of this is due to abundant natural gas and renewables in the state) while other markets (say PJM in the north east) have energy + capacity markets and have seen huge (11x) increase in prices on the capacity market side.

Electric utilities are trying to manage not use resource adequacy (having enough generation) but transmission adequacy as well (having enough head room on transmission line to move power around without the lines burning up). But many utilities have been slow to adopt new technologies that would allow the to squeeze more capacity out of their existing infrastructure (things like dynamic line ratings, or distributed energy resources)

We need to do the work to align the economic/market incentives so that using more efficient technologies is actually cheaper.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech"

patmorgan23 — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 22:50:48 +0000

The banks should require sufficient collateral for those loans, so if the loans are bad they can clawback some capital.

If the bank didn't properly collateralize the loan, then the banks shareholders should take the hit.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "For the first time ever, Google Search is less than 50% of Alphabet's revenue"

patmorgan23 — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 17:12:09 +0000

I mean that's been the case for like a decade (maybe not 2/3rds but AWS eclipses amazon.com long ago)

New comment by patmorgan23 in "We should be more ambitious with the software we build"

patmorgan23 — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 16:43:51 +0000

That's when it's accessed, if you just have the data structure you can't tell.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Anthropic S-1"

patmorgan23 — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:48:06 +0000

Not just is the the man there? Will anthropic be able to capitalize on that demand? Or are we going to build so much excess capacity that tokens are going to be dirt cheap (like what happened with the fiber build out in the 90s).

Will anthropics models continue to be significantly better than openweight models? Even if their latest model is, Will the open weights gobble up all of the demand for lower models? (I.e. will anthropic be able to recoup training cost while their model is the best, will they make enough revenue on the long tail or will it get crushed by the open weights)

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers"

patmorgan23 — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 15:06:09 +0000

> A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructure costs and other barriers to entry give a market's largest supplier an overwhelming advantage over competitors. An industry is a natural monopoly if a single firm can supply the entire market at a lower long-run average cost than if multiple firms were to operate within it.

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

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Bleached corals thrive within days when touching healthy neighbour"

patmorgan23 — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 20:56:08 +0000

No that's ridiculous woo woo. It's just that some of the symbiotic algae from the healthy coral transfer over to feed and revive the sick coral.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades"

patmorgan23 — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:53:28 +0000

Why not ping 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 or time.windows.com? Things that are actually designed to be highly available services

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Qualcomm licenses patents on Huawei’s LogicFolding chip tech"

patmorgan23 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:10:38 +0000

Huawei can enforce its patents on any device manufactured in China, regardless of if it's for a US customer or not. Which is what the parent comment is saying.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake"

patmorgan23 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 23:43:54 +0000

Social engineering?

New comment by patmorgan23 in "I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records"

patmorgan23 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:23:00 +0000

I mean when you're sixteen, you can sign a legally binding contract (might depend on the jurisdiction). Usually you have to be above the age of majority (18) or be emancipated before you can enter into a binding contract.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

patmorgan23 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:38:53 +0000

Yep, flatten the peak means you can spread the cost of the transmission grid over more electrons, lower the cost per unit of energy.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "SAML: A fractal of bad design"

patmorgan23 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:16:47 +0000

Yeah, the standard should have just specified like a sha256 HMAC, when that becomes broken in 20 years we can just do a JWT2 (or invent some new successor standard)

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Hackers had a live feed of every ID verification company scanned for over a year"

patmorgan23 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 17:35:11 +0000

Taxes on guns are completely constitutional. The 24th amendment explicitly outlaws poll taxes.

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to lay pill tax or other tax" - 24th amendment to the United States Constitution

New comment by patmorgan23 in "METR Report on OpenAI / Hugging Face Hacking Incident"

patmorgan23 — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:09:51 +0000

The word "Computer" used to refer to a person whose job it was to Compute things.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Everyone Should Build Their Own Network Stack"

patmorgan23 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:59:16 +0000

Yes, everyone should explore the details of the technology they build on top of, and also should explore questions about what it means to be a person or how the world works.

New comment by patmorgan23 in "Everyone Should Build Their Own Network Stack"

patmorgan23 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:47:20 +0000

If you're doing formal verification, why are you JIT generating Code? Is the formal verification also being JITd? How do you know the agent wrote a good spec?