adityaathalye

Snagged PDF from the Interwebs, posted obligatory Wikipedia to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49106609

Weekend reading is going to be good :)

Siri: brb, asking my agents... Hold my beer.

Friend!

Alas, having died on that hill one too many times, I can be with you in solidarity, but not on the hill. No, not again.

Plot twist: Newly-hired head honcho of software was going to fix it all with Kubernetes. Peak transaction volumes of about ten per minute.

Once the project ended, I never looked back and wiped all but the essential lessons from memory.

I can't name them because my brain legit refuses to look up the name. I know it's there somewhere in the periphery. And even if it did pop back, it shall remain nameless, for harm could come to many innocents.

Some are dumpster fires inside oil spill fires on top of a lethally radioactive surface. Once I had such a client from the depths of hell. Handling lower/middle-income people's wealth. Doing money math with floating point arithmetic. In Javascript. Minimum "function" line size of one hundred lines, with several four hundred line "functions". With "functional" idioms like map/filter etc. inside said functions, except hang on why is the mapping function making network calls? To a workflow orchestrator? Which is then calling out into... mongodb. To... do the money math based on a flag in the `meta` field of a user object. A flag that is being set and reset at least twice, directly in the four hundred line function I'm staring at with bleeding eyes, and, but I can't bear to jump to definitions and see where else it might be toggled from the calling code? Please don't make me do it.

Um, and this was just one aspect of their software organisation.

Four hundred line floating point dumpster fires, inside a gawdawful dog-slow software system, because, nearly a hundred "microservices" (about two per engineer, I counted), being somehow managed via an elaborate AI of calendar tetris, because everyone in the company was somehow fine with it, because they were mostly young and it was their first or second job and they probably didn't know any different, the poor sods.

Post author here. Guilty as charged re: rambling. Brevity is not my strong suit.

To the second point, I'd say I'm in violent agreement with you. In fact, my whole thesis is that because software mutates all the time, it is observed that successful software mutates successfully.

Obnoxiously quoting self:

> Unlike all other machines, it is pure concept, and as such it is infinitely malleable and mutable. And mutate it does, all the time.

and several paragraphs below that...

> Not only does all software mutate, we also end up performing all kinds of deep surgery on the organisation that produces it. The whole thing—product and org—is simultaneously flexed, reconfigured, and even totally redesigned in-place with rapidity that is very uncommon in other industries. Why? Because software fundamentally is peoples' thoughts being played on repeat.

Hat-tip to HNer ex-aws-dude. Who else is going to be today's "Lucky 10,000"?

Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101448#49103323

PDFs freely available for public download, from archives across the interwebs. Except, of course, from Springer. Don't feed the beast.

Both of you, thanks for the referral and the endorsement. The PDF is easily available for free download from several public sources.

Of course, Springer won't let you download it unless you spring some cash.

nb. Don't feed the beast, I'm just citing it here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-70911-1_...

One would hope that a "public benefit corporation", such as OpenAI, would be transparent about the stuff that is being ingested by sausage factory. The literal legal entity is about benefiting the public after all.

Since the leadership is obviously not going to say anything factually true or psychologically honest, I wonder if anyone has tried invoking some aspect of corporate or constitutional law, given their legal status (as nonprofit that controls a PBC) to force such disclosures.

You made my day, david :)

Ooh, are you using satellite views to explore? When google earth first came out, I was hooked on making the globe go round and round and zooming into strange and wonderful places. Incredible.

As for yours truly; I'm trying to do "ten year projects" as part of my "second life" (the first is before 40, the second is after).

Allen Center / Levin labs / TAME / Bioelectric networks as the software plane of morphology

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10346 and other work from that fecund lab is ever-fascinating. I have been following their work for five or six years. Much of that informed a giant essay I wrote prompted by an essay contest on Consciousness: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/consciousness-lives-in-a-ded...

How to write a Hard SciFi novel that does not have magic technology genius, and certainly not magic ET showing up to save the day?

A spec fic author friend is on my case about it, because he said "why the hell haven't you written your novel yet?" and I foolishly said "yeah why not? okay let me do it", and now I'm stuck in an honour pact. Write or die trying.

How the hell does the weather even work (metrology)?

This is because of my current work project, helping an applied sciences team run weather forecasting models, like WRF (pronounced "Worf", which I absolutely love :D). My day-to-day is packer and FreeBSD and shell scripts, but I have to also understand enough about the domain to be somewhat dangerous.

And also... why the hell isn't everybody using FreeBSD for server workloads?

Oh, that will be neat! I am a frequent reader of, and (very) infrequent contributor to that Ask HN :) Thanks for keeping it going. It always surfaces cool projects.

Speaking for myself, I have far many more active topics I'm curious about, than I can possibly do anything about. Curiosity just because is fulfilling in its own way.

No expectations of course. If you later decide this angle will add noise and/or too many tangents to your Ask HN, please drop it forthwith.

Thanks for the offer... cheers!

All I see is an anonymous account posting wholly unsubstantiated opinions. Not worth engaging with.

I'm sorry what, Hindu is not an identity?

There was no unified political entity prior to 1947---technically, 26 January 1950---because it took that long for Sardal Patel's program of political unification of sovereign princely states to conclude, so that the now-unified political entity would govern itself under common constitutional, and common law, with democratic universal franchise.

The East India Company, and then the British Raj, held power because they were able to broker deals with opposing (and warring) princely states and kingdoms. They used contractual leverage to make those sub-sub-regions keep each other in check.

The British Raj was a kingdom of kingdoms, in addition to being a protectorate. These are literal legal facts [0].

The word Hindu is literally an exonym. A name given to a people by foreigners. Our very collective identity was conferred upon us by outsiders.

[0] Obligatory Wikipedia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#British_India_and_...

In its Interpretation Act 1889, the British Parliament adopted the following definitions in Section 18:

    (4.) The expression "British India" shall mean all territories and places within Her Majesty's dominions which are for the time being governed by Her Majesty through the Governor-General of India or through any governor or other officer subordinates to the Governor-General of India.

    (5.) The expression "India" shall mean British India together with any territories of any native prince or chief under the suzerainty of Her Majesty exercised through the Governor-General of India, or through any governor or other officer subordinates to the Governor-General of India.[1]

Who agreed to the legal terms? The rulers of the sovereign princely states and kingdoms.

What you describe, and the way you describe it, reads to me like a progressive application of the Saam, Daam, Dand, Bheda principle, attributed to the late great diplomat Chanakya.

Saam: First, they tried reason.

Daam: Then they demanded a price (Salt Satyagraha to initiate the Civil Disobedience Movement).

Danda: Then they moved to reject the regime entirely (Quit India). At a time when the colonial power was literally fighting on multiple fronts, in World War Two.

Bhed: Then they helped to throw them out, and attempt to build a whole new political identity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saam_Daam_Dand_Bheda

I upvoted that comment because it's obvious tin foil hat "oooh look at the boogeyman" speech. That fact along with its critique contributes to the discourse on HN.

You would have also observed how every single politician wanting to become PM had showed up around the Taj while the act was in progress to leech off the media feeding frenzy.

To broadcast that they are there to "stand in person with the heroes", literally making it all about themselves. How they showed up. But unfortunately they could only come the day after, because the then home minister beseeched them to not come on site. But now they are there, surrounded by their Z-plus security, in an ongoing urban conflict zone.

What kind of a state leader shows up in another state, compounding the security nightmare with their own entourage at the site of an ongoing security debacle and literal national emergency,with people being murdered as they spoke?

That's wild. TIL; thanks for sharing. That appears to be an epic failure of all kinds of intelligence on both sides of the war.

And, it's a miracle the gaffe was not explained away as a "strategic master stroke" psyop engineered by the British to fool the other side and lull them into complacency.

> Side 1: Henlo world, look our people are here, about to surprise-attack Side 2, at this surprise location, at this time.

> Side 2: Lol. Not falling for that.

> Narrator: This is all totally absurd, and totally real of course.

> Side 1: Goes ahead with globally broadcasted secret plan anyway.

> Side 2: FML.

> Side 1: After the dust settles. "Psych! Master-Stroke!".

Also, pray tell why is everything (supposedly) "done" by those in positions of power framed as "strategic master stroke"s these days? I suppose only hyperbole makes sense, in a zeitgeist where "leadership" behaviour is jerk, knee-jerk, reactionary-by-default... epileptic.

The terrorists were only able to do so because mass-media news was live broadcasting everything on the air, and the terrorists holed up with hostages in the hotel were able to follow the blow-by-blow live.

(edit: i.e. SatCom alone can't do much, if there is no verifiable on-ground intel. And in 2008, our mass-media supplied it in liberal quantities, through multiple camera angles and replays and blow-by-blow commentaries.)

cf. Westpoint's Urban Warfare Project Case Study #16: Mumbai Terrorist Attacks: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/urban-warfare-project-case-study-1...

> Maintaining communications with their handlers in Pakistan was critical for several reasons. First, the handlers were monitoring live Indian news broadcasts and social media feeds, so they could provide real-time instructions throughout the operation and thus afford the attackers the ability to react to developments outside their targets.

> The communication also provided the attackers psychological support.

> The handlers were able to encourage the young, inexperienced militants to maintain their resolve and continue killing civilians and security forces by reinforcing their religious and financial motivations.

> During the operation, the handlers actively coached some of the attackers to continue shooting civilians and to hold positions against Indian security force responders.

Hilariously (darkly), during the pandemic, the very same reason is why the very same administrators were hell-bent on forcing Bluetooth-always-on contact tracing on the whole country's smartphone-carrying population.

(edit: viz. that forcible peer-to-peer bluetooth networking works. One man's unrestricted mass-surveillance is another person's "terrorist activity". Oh how the turntables turn and turn.)

Excellent work, glinscott. Thank you for sharing! I am about to send this to all my pals who are parents to schoolkids (um, and also pals who are still, like me, basically a schoolkid :p XD).

Building things up from first principles, and ideally also tactile / visceral examples, is my absolute favourite genre of explanations. Alas, a rarefied genre, because it is so much harder to do well (without doing disservice to the learner's intellect and ability) than expert talking to (presumed) expert. So thanks for contributing to it.

People like George Polya [0], Richard Feynman [1], Grace Hopper [2] are exemplars of this tradition.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0gbw-Ur_do

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ

(And I too try in my own meagre way through my blog and source code, albeit it's all plain text because visual explainers, animated ones that too are ridiculously difficult. So I have some idea of how much of a labour of love your piece is. <Claps hands, Whistles, Doffs hat>.)

I am rooting for literally this... Blogged here: After "AI": Anticipating a post-LLM science & technology revolution https://www.evalapply.org/posts/after-ai/

TL;DR.

> I, for one, welcome the coming age of the post-LLM-datacenter-overinvestment-bust-fueled backyard GPU supercomputer revolution.

> The Big Question is…

> Who is cultivating the option to snap up and repurpose vapourised datacenter investments at fire sale prices, soon as the "datacenter debt" cometh calling?

Form HR-1099-RAT · Exit Interview · economic status: locked in Permanent Underclass

> Places I feel Inspired

> I am happiest when walking in snow. Being enveloped in fog and cold mountains allow me a chance to become invisible. Iceland, Alaska, Tuscany and California are my current inspirations.

Man I hope you are there now, happiest this way, in the "Big Later".

A sad day for us who learn of his passing. I hope it was painless and peaceful, as befits a person who gave so freely of himself. His collected body of work is a trustworthy chronicle of the Internet and the WWW's glow up era. It will inform generations to come. They will know Om too.

And through the same work, he remains alive to us; we who sought his dogged, prodigious, plain speaking influence, insight, and direct access to the beating heart of the place where it was all being invented and grown and scaled and blown up and resurrected.

Om's writing brought the excitement and possibility of the world to me, circa 2004. A 25-something B-school student, in faraway Pune, India, viscerally experiencing and studying the telecom boom at home, while also looking towards The Valley to see what might come to be, next.

I read him on GigaOm, and his various other later avatars / manifestations, but he is always going to be "Om Malik on Broadband" for me. As he will be for many of my cohort.

GigaOm is dead, long live GigaOm.com.

  (´˘-˘人)

Came here to say the same thing... A "building-sized financial product that incentivises extend and pretend" is fertile ground for an organised player like wework to "lease and sublet, except on a subscription basis".

viz. wework could apply the "single-use low-priced shampoo sachet" model [0] to SaaS-style rent-seeking of long-lived infrastructure. Infra. that is guaranteed to be always under-utilised... even in boom markets, because nothing functions at 100% capacity.

Adobe, as another example of (software) infrastructure --- i.e. traditionally, lifetime licence and ownership desktop software --- figured out their own "shampoo sachet" pricing. viz. how to make and ship desktop software product but kill-switch them with metered SaaS subscriptions.

The monthly price is just high enough to make gobs of cash for Adobe, while causing the typically-feast-and-famine freelancer to take the capitalist shellacking because it's just convenient enough. They can align software spends with active projects, and avoid the anxiety of cracked software doing nefarious things to their computers and data.

But over a long enough time, they pay Adobe a (presumably) huge premium over up-front priced software. And they stay locked into a planned obsolescence cycle controlled by Adobe... "The new version of your beloved editing software will only work with the latest Windoze which means hardware upgrade and oh, you have to do it because well we are soon kill-switching the current version you are dependent on."

Wework like operators can do exactly similar shenanigans with access to commercial infrastructure. Crowd out competition by aggressive long-term leasing on their buy-side, and on their sell-side build daily-subscription-dependency (buying ease, google-ish facilities which feeds into cult-and-status-signalling games), and convert a percentage of that into routine-subscription-dependency. Meanwhile also run rent-seeking games inside the main rent-seeking game... now you have a captive wallets who will buy the add-ons and extras because it's easier than walking two blocks for some cheaper and better alternative (e.g. food, coffee, lovely meeting space etc.).

edit: add reference for "daily sachet pricing".

[0] Buying less, more often: An evaluation of sachet marketing strategy in an emerging market

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233676293_Buying_le...

PSA: glojure maintenance has moved here: https://github.com/gloathub/glojure

Worth changing the submit URL to this one?

Edit: never mind. Spoke too soon. Ingy is keeping gloathub/glojure fork and glojurelang/glojure source at parity.

Jank, a Clojure dialect, is playing in the same field:

> Where jank differs from Clojure JVM is that its host is C++ on top of an LLVM-based JIT. This allows jank to offer the same benefits of REPL-based development while being able to seamlessly reach into the native world and compete seriously with JVM's performance.

https://jank-lang.org/

Work is being furthered by Ingy döt Net [0] (Creator of Gloat, YAML, YAMLScript, and other stuff), supported by a Clojurists Together grant [1].

[0] https://gloathub.org/blog/2026/06/16/gloat-q2-grant-halfway-...

> We are halfway through the Q2 2026 Clojurists Together funding cycle, so this is a good time to report what has been done for Gloat and Glojure.

...

> Since the start of the grant period, Gloat and Glojure have had over 20 releases, with Gloat moving from v0.1.26 to v0.1.50. The Glojure work was all being done on the long running fork gloathub/glojure, but I'm thrilled to announce that as of today, the work has been fully moved back to the upstream glojurelang/glojure and will continue to be maintained and released from there.

> My overall ambition for Gloat is to have Clojure be as full featured and prominent to Go programming as it is to Java. The industry is crazy about Go. Let's get it crazy about Clojure.

[1] https://www.clojuriststogether.org/projects/#Gloat:~:text=Ma...

> Make Gloat/Glojure binaries smaller and faster. Pass more of the Clojure Compatibility Test Suite. Create tutorial docs on: How to use Gloat to integrate Clojure into Go projects and How to use Gloat instead of GraalVM to (cross-)compile Clojure.