Hacker News: philwelch

New comment by philwelch in "SpaceX catches the Starship to end Flight 15"

philwelch — Sun, 15 Nov 2026 06:26:38 +0000

And because the government said the shuttle was “safe”, six astronauts and a schoolteacher got blown up in front of millions of schoolchildren five years later. The Shuttle never should have been a human-rated system.

New comment by philwelch in "SpaceX catches the Starship to end Flight 15"

philwelch — Sun, 15 Nov 2026 06:21:48 +0000

No, it’s not like that at all because airplanes improved significantly between the 1920’s and 1960’s whereas spacecraft improved marginally in some respects and regressed significantly in other respects between the 1970’s and 2000’s.

New comment by philwelch in "Jensen Huang resigns"

philwelch — Fri, 13 Nov 2026 01:45:51 +0000

There's a big difference between fucking your coworkers and fucking your subordinates.

New comment by philwelch in "Show HN: Get your coding agent off ~2019 JavaScript, onto modern web primitives"

philwelch — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 02:05:25 +0000

That's true, but in that case just say "Firefox and Chrome", Edge isn't contributing anything.

New comment by philwelch in "Show HN: Get your coding agent off ~2019 JavaScript, onto modern web primitives"

philwelch — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 10:08:16 +0000

Edge is just a rebranded Chrome. “Cross browser” except it’s different skins of Chrome, what a joke.

New comment by philwelch in "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair"

philwelch — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 16:53:08 +0000

There are a lot of scams that prey on vices like greed and lust and envy. The scammers are still evil scammers, and they people they scam are still victims, though at the same time the victims would not have become victims if they hadn't indulged a vice. Both things can be true at once.

Spies are basically just state-sponsored scammers who are after information and/or influence rather than money.

New comment by philwelch in "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair"

philwelch — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 10:32:18 +0000

As I said, I’m not commenting on personal vices. I’m commenting on foreign intelligence operations because that’s the only question of legitimate public interest here, as opposed to prurient gossip.

New comment by philwelch in "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair"

philwelch — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 09:46:00 +0000

I was agreeing that he was a victim of the foreign spy operation, if there was one.

I’m not commenting on the adultery because that’s a separate, private matter.

New comment by philwelch in "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair"

philwelch — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 09:03:33 +0000

He’s absolutely the victim in one sense. On the other hand, the honeypot is the oldest trick in the book and he really should have known better.

New comment by philwelch in "An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them"

philwelch — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 17:37:31 +0000

> But it is processed food, which means it has indeed lost some nutritional value.

This seems like a trivially false assumption.

If processing grains into bread represented a loss of nutritional value, why would every civilization have invested their extraordinarily scarce time and resources into milling and baking instead of just eating the raw grains?

New comment by philwelch in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

philwelch — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 03:12:33 +0000

The user could have bought an Android phone instead.

However, if Apple allowed different browser engines, eventually no one would be able to choose anything but Chrome regardless of what phone they bought.

New comment by philwelch in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

philwelch — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:29:53 +0000

The only reason nuclear power facilities get decommissioned is because anti-nuclear politicians panic and force them to shut down. Sure, there's an ongoing cost of maintenance and replacement, but once you have a nuclear power facility, there's no reason for it not to continue generating power indefinitely. We're not going to stop needing or wanting more energy.

New comment by philwelch in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

philwelch — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:23:50 +0000

You throw the radioactive waste in a breeder reactor and make more fuel out of it. It's really not that hard.

New comment by philwelch in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

philwelch — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:20:22 +0000

None of that is true.

New comment by philwelch in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

philwelch — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:28:44 +0000

No, it's not a suicide pact. If it was just a suicide pact, they'd get it over with and leave the rest of us alone. It's a homicide pact, a genocide pact for the entire human race.

New comment by philwelch in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

philwelch — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:11:49 +0000

> If you're an ecologist, it's a bad investment because it takes us in the wrong direction (more energy consumption) instead of going the way of degrowth.

What a horrible, nihilistic philosophy. Disgusting that anybody takes it seriously.

New comment by philwelch in "The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities"

philwelch — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:32:31 +0000

Or conversely, if you have cash income you need to launder…

New comment by philwelch in "Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft"

philwelch — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:45:44 +0000

Outlook and Teams are both web apps, or at least they were when I last used them. Even if you download the "native" app it's just Electron. I haven't had trouble using either of them on Linux.

New comment by philwelch in "Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)"

philwelch — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 04:37:45 +0000

Those are an order of magnitude higher doses than recommended.

New comment by philwelch in "Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's"

philwelch — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:39:28 +0000

It seems common for taxi drivers to form a government-sanctioned cartel in order to limit the amount of competition. In the US this traditionally took the form of local taxi medallion systems, where there was a hard quota on how many taxis could be in the city. London's barrier to entry, unlike ours, at least guarantees a level of competence, even if it's excessive.

At least in the US, Uber and Lyft basically went around the taxi cartels. I'd assume that it wasn't easy for that to happen in Sweden though.