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weakened_malloc

115 karma · joined March 14, 2026

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weakened_malloc··on Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?
Depends on the market. Crypto and prediction markets wont stop.
weakened_malloc··on Resetting Xbox
> What was Microsoft plan to increase profit?

IMO, at the time, it was to buy ABK and make CoD an Xbox exclusive. That clearly didn't play out when everyone screamed about it being (rightly!) anticompetitive, and so they had to resign themselves to accepting that day 1 gamepass exclusive was going to be their way to get people to switch over from PS. That also didn't work.

The 'K' part of ABK was also probably going to be their way to drive mobile into Xbox as well with their 'everything is an Xbox' push at the time.

weakened_malloc··on Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
I'm actually doing something similar, myself, and doing a MSc in CS right now. I'm somewhat jealous of how little group work you had to do! Almost every course I'm going through now has 1-3 group work assignments each.

Often the reason is something like _"that's how it is in the workplace"_ which is a blatant cop out, imo. It's clear the reason that Universities force group work is because it's a cost cutting exercise.

They need to pay the hours for people to mark assignments. Make groups of 2, and you've cut the number of hours that need to be paid by 50%. Make groups of 5, and you've cut the cost by 80%. Of course, this comes at the cost of some students unfairly carrying others.

weakened_malloc··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
> That's unfair that the US government gets to stick its grubby fingers into every TLD that isn't a country code.

You're right in a sense, but the US invented the internet, so they get to invent the rules, no?

weakened_malloc··on The case for physical media ownership
Definitely not the case with the PS5 version, which I can install and play offline to my heart 's content.
weakened_malloc··on 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York
Have a read here!

https://github.com/Leader-board/OA-and-Interviews/blob/main/...

Once they take in your job application, they're processing your data. You've then got a right, wherever you're from, to see what information they hold on you. That includes interview feedback, test scores and so on.

weakened_malloc··on 'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York
Or just allow what happens in the EU. Every time I've applied for a job and been rejected, I put through a GDPR request and find out the reasons I was rejected.
weakened_malloc··on Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless
Just a regular old username + password, kind of like HN allows?
weakened_malloc··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
> I would eat my hat if Mistral doesn’t go out of business in next 5 years

Hope you're hungry. The Mistral are going to what most great European companies are good at - regulatory arbitrage. They're going to insert themselves everywhere within EU (French govt, etc) and extract value that way whilst delivering subpar services to what open weight Chinese models can deliver. Honestly they'll probably be profitable before most other AI providers are simply because there's very little pressure to improve models.

weakened_malloc··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
It's a business that seems to have high operational leverage. Effectively, similar to airlines. Enormous capital outlays with low marginal costs, so once the current infra has been built at cost x, the additional data centre at cost 5x (or whatever multiple) might mean that it's not profitable to keep serving at the current prices.
weakened_malloc··on Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails
This is why I think in the long run, the Chinese models will probably end up winning where it matters. You can get a cluster of relatively affordable 30 or 4090s, load up DeepSeek v4 and let it rip. Your only ongoing cost is power. We're already seeing companies recoil at the sight of their API bills from the frontier labs, for the price of 1 years worth of tokens you can host your own decent model that's 75% of the way there.
weakened_malloc··on Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable
The "guardrails" are just Anthropic's attempt at building a moat. Guarantee they'll be seeking regulation around AI as well to ensure a form of regulatory capture. Guardrails, in this context, are useless. Anyone who's sufficiently motivated will either get around them, or will just run their own model on their home hardware. There's already tools that one can use to remove the guardrails present in open weight models.
weakened_malloc··on New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker
Look, I'm not from the US, I'm guessing maybe the pay for tradesmen isn't as high as in Australia. But what you're suggesting as a comparison involves a pretty high degree of variance and odds are stacked against you. You need to get into a good PhD program, get funding, compete against everyone else doing those things and so on.

The path I outlined in my OP is a _very_ common path that people take in Australia and not at all unrealistic. The barrier to entry is drastically lower, and the access to funding/capital is far easier.

weakened_malloc··on Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?
I love this - it seems so obvious but I had never thought about it that way!
weakened_malloc··on New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker
Unironically the most simple (note; not easy) way to become a multi-millionaire. Do a trade in your 20s, leverage that into running your own trades business in your 30s, and have a >10m valuation business by your 40s.

Really regret not doing that myself.

weakened_malloc··on More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
Is it really any surprise with how expensive psychologists and therapy are?
weakened_malloc··on US healthcare still stupidly expensive, with pathetic outcomes, study finds
They also only earn $50-80 per month
weakened_malloc··on The dead economy theory
I think they're more referring to the scalable service economy. Haircuts, which are a service, don't scale (unless we're talking about robotics or something).
weakened_malloc··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
Someone (can't remember who) said it best. US is the best at going from 0 to 1, China is the best at going from 1 to 100.
weakened_malloc··on SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought
The idea is broadly similar, but I guess here's another example with a company this time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_Bubble_of_1769

The point is that I don't think irrational exuberance in stocks is a recent thing.

weakened_malloc··on SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought
It's been that way for a loooooong time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
weakened_malloc··on European AI. A playbook to own it
In Australia one of the most common paths to wealth outside of owning property is literally taking up a trade as an apprentice, then after a couple of years beginning your own plumbing/electrician/brick laying/etc business.

That's still very highly celebrated. Interestingly enough, people with Mediterranean backgrounds also feel this way (there's lots of crossover here btw).

Owning your own business is one of the best things one can do in that culture. There's a story in a Taleb book about a Lebanese (I think?) man who went on to become one of the execs at Mobil or some other oil company, and his mother was still disappointed that he didn't own his own company.

weakened_malloc··on European AI. A playbook to own it
This is something you talk to people about that are in the western world but outside of the US (which includes me) but whenever I have the conversation people just can't grasp it.

The US, by having bad worker protections and privacy abusing tech companies, etc. have been able to pave the way for extreme amounts of innovation that just wouldn't happen anywhere else. The rest of the world then effectively has innovation subsidized since they import the finished product.

weakened_malloc··on Bitcoin and quantum computing
> Anyone know if there's a way out that doesn't require this?

Honestly, I see this as a way for the powers that be to force explicit KYC. You want those coins? You prove they're yours, you stick your name on that wallet and all the liability that comes along with it. Otherwise the government (some government) holds onto them until you can definitively prove they're yours. I dont think this scenario is likely, but I can see it being something that is proposed or tried.

weakened_malloc··on Bitcoin and quantum computing
This time you'll have hundreds of billions of BTC that will be hacked by someone who will probably instantly unload it. In that scenario it's hard to see the price of it not dropping >90%, so you'd have to think people would prefer a roll back.

That said, I don't know how you could even do a roll back, you're not rolling back to a 'safe' state since the keys aren't safe at that point.

weakened_malloc··on Bitcoin and quantum computing
Yes and no. I'm no expert, but there's two things that don't make it nearly as dangerous as it is for BTC.

The first is the fact that many things are centralized. Things like Signal already have quantum-resistant encryption, and if they don't, they're able to implement it relatively quickly because it's centralized. BTC is not centralized and needs to jump through a bunch of hoops to get anything done.

The second is that because those things are centralized or close to, you can roll back changes with ease. For instance, if you hack a bank and steal a bunch of money from an account you're far more likely to be able to freeze those funds and get other banks to help stop everything before they're gone forever. You can't do that with BTC.

weakened_malloc··on Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept
What I find funny about this is that stories have been floating around for *years* about HFT/quant firms specifically hiring quants to work out what the lowest they can pay people in the firm is, and still keep them.
weakened_malloc··on CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font
> Ctrl + F > "Google Sans Mono" > 0 results

I'm disappointed in you today, HN

weakened_malloc··on 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
Economists have predicted 15 out of the last 5 recessions after all.
weakened_malloc··on 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
I definitely don't think it's a case of more market resiliency but rather a case of central banks willing to act much more aggressively to respond to these things. This is often what Ben Bernanke argues, given he wrote his thesis on the '29 crash, and how he handled the '08 crisis.
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