Hacker News: plorkyeran

New comment by plorkyeran in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

plorkyeran — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 02:54:33 +0000

Yes. Apple's not going to come after you for running too many VMs on your personal machine, but if you're running a commercial enterprise involving macOS VMs they do care.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

plorkyeran — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:30:10 +0000

AI company marketing is pretty overwhelmingly "we're going to take away your job and leave to you starve on the streets". People concluding that the public face of this is their enemy who must be stopped is just a really unsurprising outcome.

New comment by plorkyeran in "A macOS bug that causes TCP networking to stop working after 49.7 days"

plorkyeran — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:58:28 +0000

> Apple Community #250867747: macOS Catalina — "New TCP connections can not establish." New connections enter SYN_SENT then immediately close. Existing connections unaffected. Only a reboot fixes it.

This is a weird thing to cite if it's a macOS 26 bug. I quite regularly go over 50 days of uptime without issues so it makes sense for it to be a new bug, and maybe they had different bugs in the past with similar symptoms.

New comment by plorkyeran in "The underrated benefits of always having oatmeal at lunch"

plorkyeran — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:20:22 +0000

Oats are 1/8 protein. Dismissing "extra nutrients" as just more carbs is how you get scurvy.

New comment by plorkyeran in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

plorkyeran — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:11:16 +0000

If you can’t get volunteers for a defensive war then that says a lot about how much the people living in your country value its continued existence.

New comment by plorkyeran in "We sped up bun by 100x"

plorkyeran — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 21:04:35 +0000

Anthropic owns Bun, so they presumably did not directly pay for anything.

New comment by plorkyeran in "The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'"

plorkyeran — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 05:21:42 +0000

As is noted in the article, selling band shirts was not yet common practice when the Ramones starting doing it. Until Napster came along tours were marketing for albums, which were the primary revenue source.

New comment by plorkyeran in "I bought the MacBook Neo and it sucks"

plorkyeran — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:58:57 +0000

That specific Macbook Pro model is famously bad to the extent that people have tried to suggest Apple made that generation intentionally bad to make the m1 look more revolutionary. The Neo's still not going to be better performance when plugged in, but it's a more reasonable comparison than the stats suggests.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Fyn: An uv fork with new features, bug fixes, stripped telemetry"

plorkyeran — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:20:27 +0000

Are you saying that when you tell uv to install a package you aren't asking it to make outbound connections to download the package from PyPI? The telemetry in question is just setting an appropriate User-Agent header with only slightly more data than what browsers traditionally put there. It does not make extra network requests purely for the sake of reporting information.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords"

plorkyeran — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:07:33 +0000

Bad security UX that results in users bypassing security mechanisms entirely is probably the single biggest source of real-world security problems.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Death to Scroll Fade"

plorkyeran — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:22:16 +0000

It's not as bad because it's a much faster fade in, but I still find it incredibly obnoxious.

New comment by plorkyeran in "ATMs didn't kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

plorkyeran — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:45:24 +0000

I also notice that in the very first graph bank teller jobs were growing rapidly until ATMs started to be deployed, and then switched to growing very slowly. That sure suggests to me that if ATMs didn't exist bank teller growth would have continued at a faster pace than it actually did.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

plorkyeran — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 03:41:03 +0000

He is not getting options. ISOs have some interesting tax properties that are completely irrelevant to this.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

plorkyeran — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:56:15 +0000

Google invented the basis of LLMs, but under Pai failed to come up with the idea of ChatGPT. Getting Gemini into a workable state required the return of Page and Brin. It seems to be working out for Google, but how they got here is a very big mark against Pichai's leadership.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

plorkyeran — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:51:40 +0000

Getting a lump-sum payment at the end of three years is worse than getting paid incrementally, and is sort of the opposite of how insurance companies make money (which is taking frontloaded payments for long-term liabilities and investing the float).

New comment by plorkyeran in "10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips"

plorkyeran — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:05:33 +0000

Everyone who has put serious effort into analyzing crash reports en mass has made similar discoveries that some portion of their crashes are best explained by faulty hardware. What percent that is mostly comes down to how stable your software is. The more bugs you have, the lower the portion that come from hardware. Firefox being at 10% from bad RAM just means that crashes due to FF bugs are somewhat uncommon but not nonexistent, which lines up with my experience with using FF.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Good software knows when to stop"

plorkyeran — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:22:52 +0000

Other than a brief huge burst of interest at the launch of WoW classic, retail WoW has consistently been significantly larger than Classic. Classic WoW has been a success, but killing the modern game in favor of something more like Classic would have been an astoundingly bad idea.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?"

plorkyeran — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:43:41 +0000

That lawsuit happened in response to Window 2.0, and the fact that they adopted overlapping windows in 2.0 strongly suggests that Microsoft did not think that the change would lead to legal action and was taken by surprise.

New comment by plorkyeran in "Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config"

plorkyeran — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:52:22 +0000

That one's been there since the very early days of Netscape Navigator. It's been a few decades since I last clicked on it, but that's mostly because I haven't set my desktop wallpaper in a few decades and I suspect using that isn't too rare for the people who do set wallpaper?

New comment by plorkyeran in "Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config"

plorkyeran — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:58:35 +0000

Link "cleaning" will sometimes just break a link entirely since it's a heuristic-based thing that removes query parameters that appear to be nonfunctional tracking parameters. Doing it by default would be setting up users for the occasional very bad experience.