Hacker News: AlexB138

New comment by AlexB138 in "How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood"

AlexB138 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:27:20 +0000

The article repeatedly mentions how production moved to Atlanta due to tax incentives. Even that is a race to the bottom, as Disney moved production of Marvel movies out of Atlanta last year to the UK where they got better tax incentives. Even the undercutting cities are being undercut.

New comment by AlexB138 in "The Little Book of Reinforcement Learning"

AlexB138 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 05:41:22 +0000

There are several "Libellus de Miraculis" (Little Book of Miracles) of different saints from the 12th century!

New comment by AlexB138 in "Completing a computer science degree on Coursera"

AlexB138 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:45:39 +0000

I've hired probably 200+ people in my career and I totally share your opinion. It's just an unfortunate reality of how things currently work.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Elevated error rate across multiple models"

AlexB138 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:05:12 +0000

I would bet that they have inference setup for internal use on a separate system from the customer-facing production environment. The same way telemetry infrastructure needs to be run separate from normal production systems, so you aren't "blind" when you need it most.

New comment by AlexB138 in "UK to require ID or face scan before you can make social media accounts"

AlexB138 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:26:35 +0000

This is, of course, the entire goal of the social media control for "children". And you can safely bet that this will creep from social media to essentially all content. Governments have been looking for a means to destroy the anonymous internet for years, and they're making significant progress lately.

New comment by AlexB138 in "macOS Container Machines"

AlexB138 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 02:00:58 +0000

Isn't the Windows subsystem for Linux (the reference there) also a VM?

New comment by AlexB138 in "No Raise, No Promotion: 1 in 4 White-Collar Workers Are Stalling Out"

AlexB138 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:03:28 +0000

Yeah, the current reality of it isn't great at a lot of companies. I've been places where it was done well though. For instance, having a mandatory minimum number of days of vacation helps combat pressure to not take time off, and leaders who openly encourage people to take their time helps combat a culture of not taking time.

It started as a positive thing, intending to trust the employees and give flexibility. Unfortunately, like a lot of things, sleazy leaders turn flexibility into manipulation.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers"

AlexB138 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:43:46 +0000

Most companies use the term "discretionary PTO". That means that there is no set limit on PTO. The positive take on it is that this means employees can take time off within reason so long as they're getting their work done. The negative take is that it means you have no guaranteed days you can take, and cultural or managerial pressure will prevent you from taking even a normal amount of vacation.

It also means that employees don't accrue PTO days, and therefore don't have to be paid out for that time when they're fired.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers"

AlexB138 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:31:29 +0000

The youngest baby boomers are in their early 60s. I doubt it will make a difference in tech, but traditional industries, or what is left of them, should see a lot of senior roles open up as baby boomers begin to retire. Then, as they begin to pass away, a lot of their accumulated wealth will pass to their heirs as well.

The baby boomers have been a serious "clog" in the system at a lot of levels. It will be interesting to see how things play out once they're no longer actively involved.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Cisco workforce reductions"

AlexB138 — Thu, 14 May 2026 05:53:30 +0000

As I understand it, the fee doesn't apply in many situations and is fairly easy to work around. Apparently it was neutered immediately after being announced.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired"

AlexB138 — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:04:06 +0000

I had the same questions. Apparently discovery of the prior conviction is what lead to them being fired:

> When the company discovered Sohaib Akhter’s felony conviction, it terminated both brothers’ employment during an online remote meeting on Feb. 18, 2025

from https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-jury-convicts-virgina... which is a better source on this.

That prompts the question of why background checks are so lax that they were hired before this was discovered.

New comment by AlexB138 in "DeepSeek V4 Pro at 75% off until 31 May"

AlexB138 — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:34:53 +0000

There isn't too little demand. There is massive demand and many competing companies trying to capture that demand, so they are attempting to make better offers than their competition. Hence subsidy.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved"

AlexB138 — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:49:48 +0000

Their COO has talked about it extensively on X. A sibling comment in this thread posted a link here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011075

New comment by AlexB138 in "Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved"

AlexB138 — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:36:58 +0000

> I think you need to broaden your focus here - I can't really remember any significant downtime before the Microsoft acquisition and the data supports my memories.

This is the opposite of my recollection, actually. I distinctly remember having conversations about Github struggling to scale well before MS was involved, and people claiming that MS had somehow saved Github because it had stabilized and begun adding features again.

> The query performance was fine before they started serving from Azure.

This may be correct though. The Azure migration seems more aligned with the timeline of struggling to scale.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved"

AlexB138 — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:29:49 +0000

I think there's a very good chance you're right. Their reputation is obviously severely harmed, and high profile projects like Ghostty leaving may be a canary in the coalmine.

Something creative like separating their free and paid tiers may help them. I suspect the fact that all of this is happening to them along with their migration to Azure is probably complicating their ability to adapt their infrastructure.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved"

AlexB138 — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:12:58 +0000

Github has published some incredible usage rate increase numbers, which they ascribe to the rise of agentic coding. At some point, they are going to have to change rate limits, cut free-tier usage, or find some other path to reducing load. It's clear that their infrastructure can't keep up with this significant increase, and it's unlikely that they're going to just absorb the increased costs themselves.

Very curious to see what the future holds for Github.

New comment by AlexB138 in "AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights"

AlexB138 — Sat, 02 May 2026 15:59:53 +0000

This may lead to some interesting gamesmanship. For instance, if I am applying to a company, and I know they use a certain applicant tracking system, and I know that ATS uses a certain model provider for its filter, I should then use that model to write the version of my resume I send to the company.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Brands got worse on purpose"

AlexB138 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:45:07 +0000

This is such an important point. So much of inflation is not $THING used to cost $X and now costs $Y, but that $THING is significantly lower quality than it used to be. Quality is famously difficult to quantify (Pirsig), so it is much easier to manipulate it without people noticing. A product that looks the same, but is slightly worse, at purchase time is a lot harder to identify than the same product that costs 20% more, so businesses prefer it.

That happens incrementally over years, until the product is a shadow of its former self.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Brands got worse on purpose"

AlexB138 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:57:56 +0000

I have found basically no way to buy books online where they don't arrive damaged at this point. I've gone through multiple return/rebuy cycles with Amazon trying to get an undamaged copy and have just given up. I don't know if it's my local distribution center, but it's something like 90% damaged on arrival at this point.

Amazon has had massive quality reduction over the years in their service, but this one and the poor-quality knock-off books are the ones that bother me most.

New comment by AlexB138 in "Brands got worse on purpose"

AlexB138 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:34:29 +0000

Very curious to see what you do with it. I like the premise very much and will be checking back to see how it develops.

Just as feedback, the reason I got the feeling that it was largely focused on "the bad" is that the "approved" entries seem much lower signal. For instance, I opened Leatherman to get a sense of why it was approved, but there was essentially no information there other than ownership. Maybe that's your focus, but it's a little difficult to get a sense of why I should be confident in it as a buyer.

Best luck with the project, it seems like meaningful work.