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atherton94027

268 karma · joined September 23, 2016

Retired VC. Done with the game.
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atherton94027··on Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge
I've never heard of a colo looking into their customers servers. They're not in the business of monitoring their clients.

I don't understand the coordination problem – if you want to pull out you have to find someone else to buy your share?

atherton94027··on Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge
> You can get around this by hosting in a 3rd party data center, but now you have the same trust issue again, but with more steps

No this is not true — colos are very hands off.

You don't need to operate a mini AWS to self-host, and I don't know why people on HN want to make it sound like self-hosting if you don't have nation state security

atherton94027··on The AI Race Just Got Awkward
Given the amount of people complaining about crawlers in the past 2 years, I think it's the latter
atherton94027··on MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta
People do hate on it but MySQL is what I would reach for when needing tons of scale. Its correctness issues about type conversions are super well documented at this point and Innodb is really good at ingesting tons of data. There's also a lot of talent you can hire if you need exotic setup.
atherton94027··on As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'
They still need to proofread the doc and make sure it applies to their client though?
atherton94027··on Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"
There are lots of APIs where the order of argument isn't obvious, it doesn't mean they're bad designs
atherton94027··on The contagion of fear
If you've run an ssh server connected to the internet you've gotten used to the hundred of bots probing it every day. How is this AI threat different from humans writing scripts to pop linux servers?
atherton94027··on Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
It's another 50% joint venture?
atherton94027··on Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
This is incorrect, ArianeGroup is mostly french, it's a joint venture between Airbus and Safran.
atherton94027··on Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
The french always had Ariane??
atherton94027··on Fine, I'll build my own text editor
Honestly could you blame him for not liking Java in 2007? Between the many layers of abstractions the frameworks used, the exceptions and the sluggishness to compile it was not a compelling stack
atherton94027··on GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?
It makes you wonder if people review code there given how broken the experience is, it's a core part of the product!
atherton94027··on GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?
Please, read between the lines. Github actions has been a mess since 2019 at least. None of the instability is new, before this unprecedented growth (for a service that's supposed to scale horizontally) the excuse du jour was the azure migration, before that it was the high rate of shipping post acquisition.

Core parts of the product, like navigating to individual files in a code review, are broken

atherton94027··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
If fixing potholes and making the city run better is demagogy, I'd take than any day when the alternative is Cuomo or Adams. It's not like they were high-minded public servants looking at the long term
atherton94027··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
Why put Zohran in the same bag as trump? From what I can see NYC is running pretty well
atherton94027··on PostgreSQL for Everything
I looked it up because I'm interested in the subject but it seems it's only a proposal right now? At least according to this 5 month old blog post https://rhaas.blogspot.com/2026/03/pgplanadvice-plan-stabili...

Edit: Never mind, found it https://www.postgresql.org/docs/19/pgplanadvice.html

atherton94027··on PostgreSQL for Everything
At least you have access to USE INDEX on MySQL. On Postgres it's not rare to have a query suddenly perform awful in production because some switch flipped in the planner and now it's picking some random index
atherton94027··on LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
I think OP might be referring to synthetic data, which is now used to provide more data for training?
atherton94027··on Hetzner is working on LLM Inference
A t2 instance is virtualized, AWS keeps its servers for 5 years (see their 10k https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/0001... ), so your t2 does get moved around regularly to newer servers.

And no, ECC is relevant with less than 64 gigs of ram, there's a reason it's been a standard on servers since the 90s

atherton94027··on Hetzner is working on LLM Inference
I mean if you run serious stuff on a non-ECC CPU from 2015, you'll probably have a bad time.

They're great for hobbyists but people on here keep bringing them up as the flagbearer of euro hosting

atherton94027··on Hetzner is working on LLM Inference
We're not even talking cutting edge. If you browse hetzner's auction page you can see they're renting machines with almost decade old CPUs like the Xeon W-2145 or i7 6700. That's just a lot of old hardware..
atherton94027··on Hetzner is working on LLM Inference
Upcloud, Scaleway, Clever cloud, etc.
atherton94027··on Hetzner is working on LLM Inference
Never understood why hetzner gets brought up so positively here when there are dozens of EU competitors who are just as good and don't run 7 year old discounted servers
atherton94027··on What happened to TheNumbers.com
> I think what's really going on is that bots expose how underpowered web servers has gotten in recent years

More often than not they're running on a VPS, and cloud providers have been pushing the envelope of what a vCPU is. Amazon still bills hyperthreads as a single core!

Add to that their servers are often aging and you get a recipe for slow web services

atherton94027··on Thanks HN for 15 years of support and helping me find my life's work
Congrats! I'd be curious to hear what changed (and what didn't) with applicants over the last 15 years.

I feel like the programming community is very different than in the early 2010s – when's the last time you've seen a coworker brag about using vim – but I can't really put my finger on what changed exactly.

atherton94027··on Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model
For all intents and purposes you'll be able to move an open weight model wherever you want.

I really dislike this rhetoric, you sound like the FSF guys who are like "you're not free until you're running coreboot with zero binary blobs". Sure they have a point but also, most people are fine running regular linux.

atherton94027··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
Yeah and I was trying to explain that sum types don't work for pointers, without a significant performance hit.

No one here is saying C is a great design, but in the context of 60 years ago, it worked out pretty well, and all the language which had additional runtime complexity (Pascal of course, but also Ada and FORTH) struggled because they didn't dial the right level of complexity

atherton94027··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
Please check your tone down, I'm arguing politely with you but apparently you're so wrapped up in this that you're resorting to ad hominems.

Sum types aren't the be all end all to all issues, for example you can not representer pointer values efficiently with sum types. Even rust does not wrap up pointers with sum types. Now try to go back 37 years to C89 and ask yourself if they were going to require compilers to have stringent checks like the rust compiler does.

atherton94027··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
Pascal had pointers? They could be `nil` too https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refse15.html
atherton94027··on Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches
How are you going to build sum types in a way where you can interact with assembly or machine code? The CPU doesn't know about that stuff
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