Hacker News: subtextminer

New comment by subtextminer in "Craig Venter has died"

subtextminer — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:17:13 +0000

You can definitely say that ego was the fountainhead of progress for him!

New comment by subtextminer in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

subtextminer — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:54:32 +0000

I live in Austin. In the 1980s, there was a building boom that collapsed.

Austin had 23%(!) apartment vacancy in 1990 after a collapse that started in 1985.

It wasn't until about 1993 that prices returned to 1985 nominal values.

At the time it wasn't code changes that caused this but excessive lending by Savings and Loan banks. You can research the S&L crisis that required a federal bail out. This cause massive bankruptcy and the creation of an entity all the Resolution Trust Corporation to sell all this near worthless property for pennies on the dollar. This affected all of Texas and also Louisiana and Arizona.

For Austin this was great as a whole as rents were ridiculously cheap for 10-15 years and it was an economic and cultural catalyst, drawing in hordes of young people from around the country.

New comment by subtextminer in "Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)"

subtextminer — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 21:57:03 +0000

The Proton CEO is not "backing Trump and Vance." He wrote something positive about a narrow policy Trump supported that's favorable to little tech over big tech. That's it. It's certainly possible that someone you detest can still occasionally support a particular policy you think is good.

New comment by subtextminer in "Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)"

subtextminer — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 21:03:45 +0000

Related: when UT Austin computer science dropped Haskell for Java for it's first course in 2001.

Dijkstra on Haskell and Java https://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java/ "A fundamental reason for the preference is that functional programs are much more readily appreciated as mathematical objects than imperative ones, so that you can teach what rigorous reasoning about programs amounts to."

New comment by subtextminer in "Are rainy days ahead for cloud computing?"

subtextminer — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 18:05:05 +0000

Enterprise Linux was getting going for real in the late 1990s but in my view it was more 2005-ish that it became "mainstream" in these sphere. Sun Computer for example started to support Linux in 2006 and was a Hail Mary to try to save itself as SunOS was being eaten away by Linux.

Redhat Inc became part of the Nasdaq-100 in 2005.

I make this comparison as the question is whether OpenStack still has the potential to become a full go-to alternative in the way that clients consider closed cloud systems from AWS/GCP/Azure as substantial equivalents.

New comment by subtextminer in "Are rainy days ahead for cloud computing?"

subtextminer — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 16:54:29 +0000

Any views or experiences evaluating OpenStack instead of one of the big ones AWS/Azure/GCP? OpenStack has a bad rep due to added complexity and limited developer tools that may lead to ultimately higher TCO but I wonder if this similar to what Linux was like roughly pre-2005 before becoming commercially robust and refined enough to replace many corporate-level server operating systems.

New comment by subtextminer in "Dutch Students Delay Graduation Due to Housing Shortages"

subtextminer — Thu, 02 May 2024 17:58:28 +0000

The biggest problem with housing the USA is largely local zoning that artificially limits what can be built. Cities that have minimal zoning such as Houston, Texas have rents that have closely followed inflation only. In Houston there is literally no zoning. While this has some bad side effects in terms of ugliness it is highly affordable. Some progressive US cities, such as Minneapolis and Austin, are now liberalizing zoning to allow much more dense housing to be built in central areas long mass transit.

New comment by subtextminer in "SUSE to go private"

subtextminer — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 20:46:32 +0000

Yet another reason to move to Debian.

While in many ways not comparable to what's happened with Redhat, with Suse turning to the dark side one wonders how much longer Canonical will last before doing something similar.

Make no doubt about it, private equity is all about short term shareholder returns. That's not a bad things in principle but if you don't want to wake up yet again with your distro having the rug pulled out from under it, switch to Debian.

New comment by subtextminer in "Tech vendors have been hiking prices by up to 24% amid inflation"

subtextminer — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 17:40:03 +0000

Yo, Larry needs a new yacht.

New comment by subtextminer in "Unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models"

subtextminer — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 19:03:00 +0000

They (1-3) do not exist but they are psychically real- they are genuine illusions, as instantiated in the dynamic, split-second successive whiffs emerging from the processing of neurons. To think that they (1-3) "exist" in a classical sense is a reification error.

The first three self-constrain impulses to the contrary on morality behaviors.