<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: pmb</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pmb</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:59:05 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=pmb" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>At this point, when you are doing big AI you basically have to buy it from NVidia or rent it from Google.  And Google can design their chips and engine and systems in a whole-datacenter context, centralizing some aspects that are impossible for chip vendors to centralize, so I suspect that when things get really big, Google's systems will always be more cost-efficient.<p>(disclosure: I am long GOOG, for this and a few other reasons)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:06:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47863024</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47863024</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47863024</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "I added a Bluesky comment section to my blog"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's nice, right?  I did it a while ago and I highly recommend it. <a href="https://triplepat.com/blog/2024/10/17/how-the-website-works" rel="nofollow">https://triplepat.com/blog/2024/10/17/how-the-website-works</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 24 Jan 2026 20:55:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747566</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747566</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747566</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Why Busy Beaver hunters fear the Antihydra"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Any computable function f on one variable x has a program. That function is a program of size p. The input x also has a data size d. BB(p+d) >= f(x), by definition, for all f and x. If you think you might have a (function, input) pair (and corresponding (program, data) pair) for which this is not true, see the previous sentence.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 22:04:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726879</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726879</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726879</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Why Bell Labs Worked"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It was forcibly funded as part of a consent decree from the US government that allowed AT&T to continue as a monopoly as long as they invested a percent of their yearly revenue (or profit? I forget) in research.  AT&T, having no interest in changing their incredibly profitable phone network, then proceeded to do fundamental research, as required as a condition of their monopoly.<p>Decades later, AT&T was broken up into the baby bells and the consent decree was removed at that time. Bell Labs' fate was then sealed - it no longer had a required legal minimum funding level, and the baby bells were MBA-run monstrosities that were only interested in "research" that paid dividends in the next 6 months in a predictable fashion.<p>The funding model is an integral part of the story.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 May 2025 07:27:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43960452</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43960452</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43960452</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Tailscale has raised $160M"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They are a zero-trust networking solution that also traverses IPv4 NATs.  Zero-trust networking is a layer above the IP layer.  In an IPv6 Internet their capital costs go down, and their product remains valuable for their paying customers.  (Free accounts mostly use it for NAT traversal, businesses for the zero-trust encryption.)<p>Their CEO has been working with (and supporting) v6 for decades both at the executive level (now) and also as an extremely capable software engineer that I personally met with a few times while we were both engineers at Google doing network measurement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2025 07:33:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43629733</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43629733</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43629733</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Google Maps in the US Will Change to Gulf of America and Mount McKinley"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>plonk</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2025 08:53:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42862931</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42862931</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42862931</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Google Maps in the US Will Change to Gulf of America and Mount McKinley"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Countries can tell companies what the maps of their countries should look like and what things should be called.<p>For example, Google shows different info about the Kashmir region depending on whether you are in Pakistan or India or external to both, because of how the Indian and Pakistani governments define the borders and names of the region. If the US government changes a thing's name, then Google will change that thing's name within the US.  Google mostly doesn't choose names, it uses externally-supplied mostly-governmental name databases.  Governments have the power to name their own regions.<p>I don't want Google to choose what things are called, so I think they are doing the right thing here, and the USG is doing the dumb thing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:33:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42850506</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42850506</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42850506</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "The Evolution of SRE at Google"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>NB: The Treynor Curve is named after Ben Treynor and his ideas. Ben Treynor's name changed to Ben Sloss a few years back, and Ben Sloss is one of the authors of this article.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jan 2025 14:48:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42594975</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42594975</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42594975</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Tell HN: John Friel my father, internet pioneer and creator of QModem, has died"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The Qmodem program, brought home on some random 3.5 inch floppy, allowed me to connect to local BBSes and started my journey into networking computers. Now I have a PhD in CS and I spent more than a decade deeply caring about the Internet, networks, and network research.  Without the start given by those BBSes, my path could have been very different!  I am very sorry for your loss, and I hope the fact that he made a random teen's life better is some comfort.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Dec 2024 18:34:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42552136</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42552136</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42552136</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They said it was currently worse than it used to be before the EU. That is not true.<p>Netflix engaging in complicated IP rights negotiations does not mean the existence of the European Union is pointless.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Dec 2024 13:23:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327980</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327980</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327980</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The EU single market is largely a myth from the perspective of wanting to start a successful company that can compete internationally. It's not any easier now than it was before the EU existed.<p>[citation needed] because I think this is extremely false.<p>It is easy to underestimate the pain caused by having all the pre-euro currencies and pre-EU tax laws (yes there was the Schengen zone and EEC, but the EU uniformity helps a lot) and pre-EU borders.<p>Source: me, who is a middle-aged American founding a tech startup in the EU and visited Europe many times before the EU existed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Dec 2024 09:39:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42326530</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42326530</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42326530</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Sixteen U.S. states still ban community-owned broadband networks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No. Satellite (except when they use lasers, but nobody is proposing space lasers) is a broadcast medium and wire is point to point.  Wires will almost always be cheaper and more reliable and faster on a per-customer basis and have less interference.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 Nov 2024 15:12:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077321</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077321</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077321</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "2.7-meters Telescope mirror shot 7 times (1970)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The state motto of Texas is "Friendship".<p>(this is true)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 09 Sep 2024 09:10:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41486706</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41486706</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41486706</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>People who have never had it have no concept of how much they are missing.  It's so frustrating.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Jun 2024 14:12:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40830741</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40830741</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40830741</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "[dead]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Compared to cars and motorcycles? More e-bike usage means more e-bike accidents - that's just arithmetic. And e-bike usage soared.<p>This is scaremongering without those comparisons. The tell here is that somehow e-bike usage in NYC is being blamed on "Democrat" lawmakers. Historically and in most style guides, they are called "Democratic" lawmakers - dropping the "ic" is a right-wing media thing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 21 Jan 2024 22:46:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39083870</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39083870</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39083870</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Wehe – Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is almost precisely what "network neutrality" means in the EU.  The US definition is different.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 Jan 2021 21:34:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25876602</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25876602</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25876602</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "The Myth of Code Coverage"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>100% is the way to be. Once you get there, then you can start having useful conversations about how to make the coverage more meaningful. But first, you have to make sure that every line is run at least once without crashing (except for the lines that are supposed to crash things - those you need to verify DO crash things).<p>Interestingly, once something is designed for testability it is more likely to not have bugs. But saying that therefore you don't need the tests is silly, because without the tests you wouldn't have designed for testability.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 04 Dec 2020 21:18:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308146</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308146</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308146</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They tried to make a better C++ and accidentally made a better Java and a better Python.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Oct 2020 16:51:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24887668</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24887668</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24887668</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And HN said "Yup, he basically deserved it."
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2802917" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2802917</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 Oct 2020 15:32:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24679746</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24679746</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24679746</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by pmb in "Americans are getting more nervous about what they say in public"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And (truth value unknown by Snopes because proving a negative is impossible, but it corresponds with the videos) failed to wear identification or do or say anything that would allow the person being taken by unknown people into an unmarked car to distinguish those people from one of the paramilitary alt-right militias that populates Oregon.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2020 17:22:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24000717</link><dc:creator>pmb</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24000717</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24000717</guid></item></channel></rss>