Hacker News: pedrocr

New comment by pedrocr in "The treasury bond mess: is this the demise of the US as a safe haven?"

pedrocr — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:15:54 +0000

Infinite growth is possible as long as your economy trades things that are not physically constrained. Art can grow in value over time without hitting any constraints. And even if your economy doesn't grow in real terms, to service debt all you need is for the economy to grow in nominal terms, to have inflation. And even if your economy stagnates completely and has zero inflation you just need to bring your deficit to zero to maintain the debt level. Every year you can just pay the interest on the debt from taxes and your debt as percentage of the economy stays stable without ever paying down the debt.

New comment by pedrocr in "The treasury bond mess: is this the demise of the US as a safe haven?"

pedrocr — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:47:55 +0000

You can deficit spend indefinitely as long as your deficit percentage is below your economic growth percentage. That keeps the total debt as percentage of the economy stable and the amount of tax you need to service the debt a stable percentage of your total tax.

If you do that it can be a good idea. It's a way to accelerate investment. It can also be a good idea to modulate your deficit in a cycle counter to the economy so that it acts as a stabilizer.

The US has been failing on all these. The deficits are too large and are high both in good and bad times. Eventually that breaks things.

New comment by pedrocr in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

pedrocr — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:30:25 +0000

That gave me something to play with with these models and this came out as a claimed disproof of the Dixmier Conjecture:

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/pedrocr/51157b9b2eed8152e...

It seems mathematics has at least gotten a powerful new tool to automate the work to cascade results after breakthroughs are made.

New comment by pedrocr in "SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading"

pedrocr — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:42:17 +0000

What you are describing is what's called free float market cap and is generally what market indices use to weigh stocks. That way you're only trying to replicate the market of stocks that are actually available to trade. There's nothing new about SpaceX in that respect, plenty of companies have float much lower than their total.

New comment by pedrocr in "TS-2026-009: Insecure argument handling in Tailscale SSH permitted root access"

pedrocr — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:55:55 +0000

> If I was an APT, compromising Tailscale would be priority number 1!

Crowdstrike would be at a much higher priority. They already have a cloud connected root console to all the machines in entire corporations. Compromising your network is small potatoes compared to that.

New comment by pedrocr in "Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip"

pedrocr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:56:42 +0000

> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.

Over that time CPUs have also increased their instructions per clock by 3 to 4 times, so the comparison is a bit closer than that. 5Ghz in CPUs is also common these days which would make it even closer. RAM has also improved in more than just total size though.

New comment by pedrocr in "Since Linux 6.9, LUKS suspend stopped wiping disk-encryption keys from memory"

pedrocr — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:18:40 +0000

It was still more secure than the default if I understand this correctly. On resume from suspend the laptop would still be locked by the encryption key and without access to the disk even if you can somehow circumvent the lock. The only insecurity was that somewhere in the kernel memory the key still exists so if you can somehow extract that from the live system you can unlock it.

New comment by pedrocr in "Nvidia RTX Spark"

pedrocr — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:06:30 +0000

+ battery too. I've wondered if a mini pc with battery would make for a good form factor. I often move between places where I have a desk with a screen but still use a laptop because I want to just suspend and resume. If a mini pc had a small battery just to hold its RAM while suspended I could move between places and just plug in a single USB-C cable and have my full workstation up and running. The thermals could be better than in a laptop and having a built-in UPS better than with a desktop. But last time I checked no one packaged things like that.

New comment by pedrocr in "Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)"

pedrocr — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:21:10 +0000

In the AMA you link they say the tulip mania was probably a bubble just not a major one that impacted the economy meaningfully.

New comment by pedrocr in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

pedrocr — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:51:36 +0000

That seems wrong. If you have a way to maintain enough propulsion for long enough you can escape the gravity well at any arbitrarily low speed. You "just" need to maintain that speed long enough for the escape velocity from the gravity well to go below it as it diminishes with distance from the mass.

New comment by pedrocr in "I built a pint-sized Macintosh"

pedrocr — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:57:50 +0000

There seem to be some 15 inch all-in-ones but these days if what you want is a small form factor the answer is surely a laptop. Even if you're just going to keep it on the same desk forever that's what you'd get if you want 15 inch or smaller.

New comment by pedrocr in "Minnesota judge holds federal attorney in civil contempt"

pedrocr — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:17:37 +0000

I once made a criminal complaint because of a sewer line that was frequently allowed to overflow into a creek. The prosecutor refused to prosecute the case with the argument that the root cause was "real estate pressure" and so the county (that licenses and taxes any new construction) and the sewage operator (that coercively charges anyone that can physically connect) couldn't possibly be blamed.

New comment by pedrocr in "The next steps for Airbus' big bet on open rotor engines"

pedrocr — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 20:21:33 +0000

Another advantage is you can place the fans all along the wing getting you better stall resistance as the flow doesn't detach as easily. There's already a prototype of a hybrid plane that does this:

https://www.electra.aero/

New comment by pedrocr in "LED lighting undermines visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra"

pedrocr — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:12:33 +0000

One of the authors of this paper did a pretty long podcast with Huberman about this topic:

https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/red-light-to-improve-met...

The show notes have links to quite a few more papers. I have no idea if this is good science but this is not just a one off paper.

New comment by pedrocr in "Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025"

pedrocr — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:25:57 +0000

That's great if you're compiling for use on the same machine or those exactly like it. If you're compiling binaries for wider distribution it will generate code that some machines can't run and won't take advantage of features in others.

To be able to support multiple arch levels in the same binary I think you still need to do manual work of annotating specific functions where several versions should be generated and dispatched at runtime.

New comment by pedrocr in "Addressing the adding situation"

pedrocr — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:48:29 +0000

I'm curious if that's still the case generally after things like musttail attributes to help the compiler emit good assembly for well structured interpreter loops:

https://blog.reverberate.org/2025/02/10/tail-call-updates.ht...

New comment by pedrocr in "Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates"

pedrocr — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 21:53:15 +0000

This seems to be the Ubuntu bug report:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rust-coreutils/+bu...

New comment by pedrocr in "95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend"

pedrocr — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:43:59 +0000

> agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls

Why were they doing this at all? It may not be what is happening in this specific case but a lot of the AI business cases I've seen are good automations of useless things. Which makes sense because if you're automating a report that no one reads the quality of the output is not a problem and it doesn't matter if the AI gets things wrong.

In operations optimization there's a saying to not go about automating waste, cut it out instead. A lot of AI I suspect is being used to paper over wasteful organization of labor. Which is fine if it turns out we just aren't able to do those optimizations anyway.

New comment by pedrocr in "Debian 13 arrives with major updates for Linux users – what's new in 'Trixie'"

pedrocr — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 07:26:21 +0000

> They are perfectly good machines as servers and desktop terminals.

On the power usage alone surely an upgrade to a still extremely old 64bit machine would be a significant upgrade. For a server that you run continuously a 20+ year old machine will consume quite a bit.

New comment by pedrocr in "Ancient X11 scaling technology"

pedrocr — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 21:53:55 +0000

Thanks! By retrofitting I mean having to have a new protocol with this new opt-in method where some apps will be getting integer scales and go through a transform and some apps will be getting a fractional scale and rendering directly to the output resolution. If this had worked "correctly" from the start the compositors wouldn't even need to know anything about scaling. As far as they knew the scaling metadata could have been an opaque value that they passed from the user config to the clients to figure out. I assume we're stuck forever with all compositors having to understand all this instead of just punting the problem completely to clients.

When you say you supported this for quite some years was there a custom protocol in KWin to allow clients to render directly to the fractionally scaled resolution? ~4 years ago I was frustrated by this when I benchmarked a 2x slowdown from RAW file to the same number of pixels on screen when using fractional scaling and at least in sway there wasn't a way to fix it or much appetite to implement it. It's great to see it is mostly in place now and just needs to be enabled by all the stack.