Hacker News: qzw

New comment by qzw in "Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers"

qzw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:47:15 +0000

I use it on iOS daily and there’s no ad blocker. The page you linked only mentions tracking blocking. If you actually have ad blocking enabled, I’m sure a lot of us would love to hear how you did it.

New comment by qzw in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

qzw — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:52:07 +0000

Almost all wealth tax proposal I’ve seen start at the level of 8-9 figures of wealth. Why are we now talking about it as if it’s going to apply to your average person’s savings account? If we’re just going to accept these billionaire-invented narratives around the wealth tax, then there’s really no point in discussing the actual pros and cons of these proposals.

New comment by qzw in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

qzw — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:41:57 +0000

Only in theory. In practice it’s not equivalent at all because once you reach a certain (very high) level of wealth, there’s the “buy, borrow, die” strategy that avoids realizing most of your capital gains. I’ve also heard of proposals to tax asset-backed loans above a certain threshold, which is aimed at the “borrow” part of the strategy. But the concern there is that the super wealthy may quickly find a different strategy for tax avoidance, so a blanket wealth tax should be harder to circumvent. But as with anything to do with the tax code, those with the best tax accountants and lawyers seldom end up losing.

New comment by qzw in "WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward"

qzw — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:35:56 +0000

Maybe “great” is going a bit far for some of those. “Not bad” vs “bad” seems more realistic.

New comment by qzw in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

qzw — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:39:35 +0000

Planned obsolescence really only works well if someone else is paying.

New comment by qzw in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

qzw — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:08:19 +0000

Just to well actually your well actually...

What you've described is how the base level mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) work. The tranches work because there actually exist mortgages that are at lower default risk (high home equity, well qualified borrowers, etc.), and the senior tranches are effective in capturing their underlying safety. What CDOs did was to take the lower, riskier tranches of MBSs from various sources and repackage them and divided them into tranches again. Then they got the ratings agencies to rate the top tranches of the CDOs as AAA as well. It's as if a teacher graded several classes and then took everyone that got a C or below from all the classes and then graded them on a curve again. And suddenly a lot of the C students became A students. It was outright financial insanity. Well, mixing a rocket/satellite company with a couple of also-ran AI outfits and the walking corpse of Twitter, and then calling the whole thing SpaceX and valued at $1.75T is a similarly level of financial insanity to me.

New comment by qzw in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

qzw — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:33:04 +0000

> The problem w this model is that it only works if assets are relatively uncorrelated (it was true in the past but ignored systematic risk and adverse selection in originations). What this has to do w musk or spacex I’m still not sure

What this has to do with with SpaceX is that there's the same blatant disregard for sound financial analysis by the very institutions that were/are supposed to know better. The NASDAQ 100 fast track decision is a similar level of financial malpractice as the ratings agencies slapping AAA on things that they knew were little better than junk. The abuses of the subprime mortgage originators were well known long before the actual meltdown. As were those systemic risks you spoke of. They were ignored by those whose entire job it was to not ignore them, and they sold out their credibility for a quick buck. If you can't see the similarities to the present situation then I can only wish you luck.

New comment by qzw in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

qzw — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:35:36 +0000

I just want to make the observation that this whole SpaceX IPO is turning out entirely unlike the CDOs that led to the 2008 financial crisis. There's no mixing of AAA level assets with a bunch of subprime stuff and then getting someone to buy it all as AAA. Not at all similar. Completely different. Will turn out just fine this time.

New comment by qzw in "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner"

qzw — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:23:42 +0000

On Monday a crane company announces it’s pivoting to AI, followed by a quick 600% boost to its stock price. I wouldn’t even be surprised at this point.

New comment by qzw in "The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs"

qzw — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:28:34 +0000

There really should be a special category for business books written by people who’ve gone bankrupt. I know at least two well known examples, but there’s got to be a whole lot more.

New comment by qzw in "Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It"

qzw — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:45:51 +0000

You know what's an even more acceptable casualty that would greatly reduce ransomware? Cryptocurrencies.

New comment by qzw in "Claude Opus 4.6"

qzw — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:22:05 +0000

Wow I had to hop over to check it out. It’s indeed still alive! But I didn’t see any stories on the first page with a comment count over 100, so it’s definitely a far cry from its heyday.

New comment by qzw in "Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back"

qzw — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:58:07 +0000

Did you miss the part where they generated tests too?! I mean what do you want, for him to actually review the code or something? That's what kills the love of coding, man.

New comment by qzw in "Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending"

qzw — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:01:26 +0000

While that’s definitely true, I think it’s maybe more fair to say that their actual strength has always been to take a personal computing technology that’s just about “ready-for-prime-time” and make it as accessible and fashionable as possible. Almost all of their failed products have been errors in judging how close a tech is to being ready for mass adoption.

New comment by qzw in "Code like a surgeon"

qzw — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 02:37:33 +0000

Wait, are you parodying Madonna or meta-parodying Weird Al?

New comment by qzw in "Servo v0.0.1"

qzw — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 18:19:52 +0000

But then we have the same complaint against Electron, namely large deployment sizes and no shared memory, no?

New comment by qzw in "Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot"

qzw — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 18:08:22 +0000

Doing a mindless chore in the background to satisfy a meaningless metric sounds like the perfect task to give to an AI agent…

New comment by qzw in "Cybersecurity training programs don't prevent phishing scams"

qzw — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 13:28:27 +0000

Definitely worse. This sort of thing still happening in 2025 is completely bonkers to me. Recently a financial institution sent me an email asking me to "re-validate my ownership" of a linked account by uploading a bank statement. The link was to a completely unrelated and unknown domain (not even a shortener). The message itself didn't address me by name but simply said "Dear Customer". It also didn't including any legitimate info like partial account numbers. And when I logged into my account, there was no notice or message mentioning any re-validation requirement. I was convinced it was a low/medium-effort phishing attempt and submitted it to their support channel so others could be warned. It turns out it was actually their legitimate email. I told the CS rep that they're basically training their customers to fall for the next real phishing attack. Won't do any good, I'm sure.

New comment by qzw in "Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs"

qzw — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 14:46:44 +0000

Well, one man's junk is another man's treasure.

In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to find. The software is probably already on github. The toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.

New comment by qzw in "Show HN: MARS – Personal AI robot for builders (< $2k)"

qzw — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 18:57:13 +0000

Doesn’t that name make it confusing for your users? A tribute maybe shouldn’t be identical?