hn_throwaway_99

This is essentially Snyk's business model. Sure, they do upsells, but it seems fully sustainable to me.

With all due respect, that's bullshit. Here is the article in question: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes.... NYT is not "trying to convince their readers to call Elizabeth Holmes "Liz"". If anything, the author is quite clear that it is Elizabeth Holmes trying to convince you that she is just "Liz", and if anything I think the author does quite a good job outlining her serious crimes, and the fact that even people close to her find her to be duplicitous and that she shouldn't be trusted.

I think it's fair to ask whether Holmes would have been presented in such a soft light if she weren't a young, blonde, and still apparently rich by her husband, woman. But I think saying that the NYT is trying to convince their readers not to send her to jail is just a total mischaracterization of that article.

Actually, you make an excellent point. Account takeovers have been responsible for a number of recent high profile attacks. Even if there are 0 security researchers reviewing new releases, just having time for the real owner to announce that a release was fraudulent before it's downloaded by half the Internet is a huge boon.

This entire article seems to say that if it doesn't prevent 100% of all possible attacks that it's "security theater". That's nonsense. It's just one more tool in the tool belt, and a highly useful one at that.

Because I can always bump up the cooldown period. I'm not naive in thinking that I never have to worry about anything with a cooldown period, but having rolling releases is inherently what cooldowns give you. Companies have been doing rolling releases on their own products for years because it's a lot easier to handle when something falls over for a small percentage of users that when in nukes everyone all at once. That same concept still applies here.

How do posts like this make it to the top of HN? Nearly all the comments here are saying the same thing I thought:

1. Security researchers and companies are incentivized to install packages early.

2. Even without security patches, people and teams can still set the cooldown period that is appropriate to their risk tolerance. Even if someone in the wild does "get bit", it's better that a smaller number of people get bit than everyone getting bit at the same time. That's not "security theater", that's limiting the blast radius.

I'd also add that adding in cooldown periods lowers the incentives for bad guys to try to compromise a package in the first place because there is a much greater chance all their work will be for naught.

So I started reading this post with interest, thinking it would have some reason I hadn't thought of, but it just boils down to the faulty premise that "Godot is not coming". Bullshit, at the very least I now have agency over where I am in the download timeline. I just don't understand how such bad posts built on the flimsiest of assumptions make it to the top of HN.

100% agree. I hated this post because it's all based on this unfounded assumption as an axiom, which it presents using zero evidence.

Different groups have different risks tolerances, and it's absurd to think that nobody is going to pull releases before the default cool down period.

Because it's not an even split. Sure, I could buy that, on average, energy use grows in proportion to economic growth, but some activities (e.g. services) I'd expect to have much less energy use that others (e.g. manufacturing).

And, when you look at actual data, e.g. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33812, that is exactly what you see.

What's fascinating is that Google gets virtually zero recognition for this (Google services are largely taken for granted), and beyond that, Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.

I feel like this is some majorly false revisionist history. At least in my circles, Google was revered and lauded up until 2010-2012 or so, whenever enshittification started in earnest. And this isn't just some outsider opinion. Look at some of the original early Google communication where they highlighted how their ads were always separate and easily identifiable from organic results, and how that eroded over the years. Heck, there was a front page article today on NYTimes, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/technology/google-ai-open..., talking about how Google used to be an "open Internet champion" and is now an "AI gatekeeper". Google's corporate ethos from their early years is basically unrecognizable today, and that's why people hate them.

The hate towards Google only started picking up steam as they snowballed into deciding (like pretty much all corporate enterprises) that growth at all costs is the only purpose of corporations, and when they became the poster child (rightfully so IMO) for surveillance capitalism.

In this context, open source/self-host means do it yourself, closed source means you trust someone else to do it for you.

I don't think that's what it means in this context. Hardly any users are training their own models, after all. And I don't think Windows/Linux is a good analogy - OSes have inherent platform lockin that LLMs don't.

Really the only 3 things anyone cares about are capability, cost and data privacy. Sure, the cost axis for open weight models needs to include the cost for hosting things yourself, but I think the bigger reason that businesses have been throwing billions at Anthropic's and OpenAI's models is that they have had the best models, and they've had big releases every few months. Their biggest Achilles heel is that if/when their improvements start to plateau, open models may catch up and businesses will start to scrutinize their AI spend a lot more.

So all companies should just fully divide their profits, totally equally, among employees, so shareholders get nothing. So why would anyone ever invest in companies in the first place? Why would employees have an incentive to work hard if they all get an equal share of profits.

Look, I wholly agree that there are many things that need fixing in the American version of capitalism, but lord, this ain't it.

Yeah, I read TFA, and my eyes were rolling the whole time. Some people really have a bee in their bonnet that "cat" is named that way because it was originally for concatenating files. Nobody fucking cares. It's the standard way for writing a file to standard out, and the general pattern of "cat file.txt | somecommand | othercommand | anothercommand" is so useful because it follows the pipeline pattern so well - read from standard in, write to standard out - that is the cornerstone of Unix shell commands IMO.

"Oh no, it spawns another process!!" Again, nobody cares.

Not to mention text messages to existing Apple employees saying he could still access Apple servers after being term'ed and bragging about it "lol"!

I think the other thing folks underestimate is how important Jobs was as an editor for Ive's designs. Ive always leaned more to form over function IMO, and Jobs (or the Apple environment in general as it existed under Jobs) helped temper that. I don't think the butterfly keyboard would have seen the light of day under Jobs, and the released Ferrari interior doesn't seem like a stroke of genius to me. Easy to say from the peanut gallery I know, but I still think Jobs was best able to harness Ive's greatness.

The entire thing was cringeworthy to the core. I kind of enjoyed it though because it perfectly epitomized "AI slop" in the first 30 seconds so wonderfully. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" - show a blonde woman in a gold sequined top! "Livin' it up in the city" - show a shot of a big city!

If anything, the absurd literalism of the video contrasted so perfectly with the (IMO) brilliant clever originality of the lyrics. E.g. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" is actually a not-so-subtle reference to cocaine. Imagine if the lyrics were as stupidly unoriginal as the video ("Now we're all snorting cocaine!!").

Do you have examples? Because besides the other reasons mentioned about huge earning potential and being part of an important moment in history, the not-so-hidden secret is that any management position below C-level and above small team manager is usually extremely shitty. You are responsible for cat herding but rarely get to make the decisions in the first place. There are very few people IMO who desire or excel at "mid-high level" management positions (again, levels from director to anything below CTO) - I've seen people who enjoy and are good at leading small teams, but people at the director level are either there because it's lucrative or with the hope to get to CTO level ASAP, but otherwise it's one of the worst jobs in the "stress to moments of enjoyment" ratio.

So I could imagine tons of people in those roles who would love to be ICs again if there was also a chance at outsized wealth.

I understand that. But saying "they had a control" in any case implies an "intervention" group of some sort, whether synthetic or natural, and this is very different from saying "they controlled for other factors", which is what they did in this study.

The study authors aren't even purporting to show a casual relationship (i.e. that improving sleep would necessarily reduce mortality), just that irregular sleep predicts mortality.

This is just dumb clickbait. "Needs" in the title is not correct - some guy just took a picture of the bios screen that says that the computer has a Core i5 and 8G ram. Your average IPad has higher specs than that, and for these "fancy" elevator touch screens it seems like the cheapest option would just to use an existing reasonably spec'ed device. An 8G ram stick is still on the order of 50 bucks - does the author really think that's where the elevator company should be optimizing their spend?

No they didn't. A control group inherently implies the researchers made an intervention in the first place (or else there was a "natural experiment" where people were randomly placed in group or another). That didn't happen here, as this was purely an observational study.

Yeah, this type of observational data often falls over when you dig into the details. And yes, they say they adjusted for a number of variables, but even if hypothetically they perfectly adjusted for all possible confounding variables (highly unlikely IMO), it's possible that the causation simply runs in the other direction: poorer quality sleep and variable sleep cycles could just be a symptom of illness or being generally unhealthy, not the root underlying cause.

Nobody doubts all this. What the bond market is saying is that even with all of that, there are plenty of viable scenarios where bond holders aren't paid back.

After all, if you truly believe what you say with conviction, the sensible thing to do would be to buy up as many SpaceX bonds as you can if you think they're so undervalued.

Assuming emissions are roughly proportional to spending

But without more info, that seems like a pretty awful assumption. A lot of the stuff we export are services and high value goods that I would think have a relatively low "emissions to value" ratio compared to the lower value manufactured goods we import.

How much of that is just outsourcing much of our industry to Asia/etc.?

Seems like quite the stretch just to blame it on zoning. Gurugram was particularly bad but the other places around New Delhi I visited weren't much better.

This is kind of fascinating to me because the few times I visited India I was completely gobsmacked by the insane levels of trash and pollution such that I never wanted to return. Like Gurugram reminded me of some type of ecological disaster dystopia out of Blade Runner. So I was particularly glad to see this story was about an Indian village and not one of the usual "amazingly clean Asian city" suspects, e.g. Singapore or somewhere in Japan.

Thanks very much for linking that substack, very informative.

But in your summary:

People who were born in the "can get the vaccine" group have markedly lower rates of dementia. People in the "too old" group have higher rates.

I would change "people" to "women". I thought it was very interesting that the benefit of the Shingles vaccine eligibility for Alzheimer's was largely confined to women - men showed no such benefit per the graph in that substack article.

Do you have a link to these studies? I ask because, as another commenter mentioned, I think it would be very difficult to tease out cause and effect and I think the "healthy vaccinee" hypothesis could easily explain why so often you see the association between any vaccine (just here we have shingles, influenza and pneumococcal) and Alzheimer's risk reduction.

To be clear, I would get those vaccines regardless for their stated effectiveness, it just feels like so many observational conclusions ("moderate red wine is good for you!") have been proven to be non-causitive correlations when examined more closely.

Edit: Actually, the youtube link posted above talks about tons of vaccines where observational studies show reduced Alzheimer's risk: https://youtu.be/qlTnnQytOJ0?t=340

This comment reads like one of those posts from an LLM that was only trained on pre-1900 data.

To be clear, I think a plan like that makes a ton of sense, because the only costs you have are the ongoing storage and admin costs, and in the grand scheme of things a big warehouse to store a 6 month rotating supply of PPE would have huge potential benefit and would also be a rounding error compared to things like the Iran war. I was just objecting to the idea that you buy "a billion dollars" worth of gloves because that's not a sensible or sane solution.

No, that's not my point, as a commented elsewhere. Even restricting it to "outside investor returns generated by billionaires", this list is only looking at outside investor returns since the IPO and in excess of T-bill returns.

Drew Houston generated tons of wealth for outside investors, but only for pre-IPO investors, hence he's on the list with a -3B number, because post-IPO investors have done so poorly.

showing how much they created for others

Except it's not even that, even if you still only look at outside investor returns.