Hacker News: Anon1096

New comment by Anon1096 in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

Anon1096 — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:20:13 +0000

It's one part technical, one part a product decision. The technical part is that billing is not actually instant. As a most basic example, a VM reports its billing units every X period of time it is active. If there is some network blip but it's still running, then that billing data could be delayed.

The product level decision is that "shut down everything" is something the customers you want to target don't actually want. Are we including deleting RDS data? S3? Glacier storage? If so then the headline will just change from "Hobbyist got charged XXXXXX on AWS" to "Business literally had all their data deleted because a hacker took over their VM and mined bitcoin". The only people who really want this are hobbyists and it's not a market segment that's worth chasing. Easier to do the status quo of forgive afterwards then even open the can of worms of deleting all of a business's data and all their backups just because they had a 100k overrun.

New comment by Anon1096 in "What Meta got right with Muse"

Anon1096 — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:12:51 +0000

This is the Dropbox comment of the AI assistant era. At least it's not quite as out of touch.

New comment by Anon1096 in "What Meta got right with Muse"

Anon1096 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 23:41:32 +0000

Google Search and Google Maps are utilities, not consumer apps that vie for leisure time, so I don't think they are really comparable. The next frontier for AI apps like Muse and Dots is competing with the social media giants.

We should look to see how Shorts vs IG Reels have adapted to the short form video landscape for product chops in this area. IMO IG has adapted far better to the new era, and I very often get people sending me Reels (they used to send TikToks). I very rarely see anyone send Shorts but it still happens. I expect this trend to continue and IG to extend their lead here. And Muse certainly has first mover advantage in personalized AI apps, who knows when Google will finally release one.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Dots: Always-on agents"

Anon1096 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:40:54 +0000

Absolutely ridiculous comment can't believe anyone would actually post this seriously.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Dots: Always-on agents"

Anon1096 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:34:05 +0000

You can consider the cute & fuzzy presentation of the new consumer AI agents an admission that the doom and gloom so far has been a marketing mistep. It's good that companies are trying to rectify the image of AI.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock"

Anon1096 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:37:36 +0000

No that only applies for options in public stock, Nvidia was private in 1996.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Tells of a Slop UI"

Anon1096 — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 15:44:32 +0000

This appears to be pretty close to the "brutalist" aesthetic mentioned in the article. Things like drop shadows on boxes are the opposite of the "fingernail" boxes and you very rarely saw them pre-AI. However I think your site looks fine and well crafted, nice work. (the article also said that this kind of design language is less grating)

New comment by Anon1096 in "I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8GB"

Anon1096 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:40:57 +0000

Things like Voice to Text and biometric unlocks (fingerprint scanners, face ID) have worse success rates and they're used every day by billions of people.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Can we stop with the uptime percentages?"

Anon1096 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:49:42 +0000

Big systems worth their salt already do this as weighted uptime, considering request successes / total requests rather than wall clock uptime as internal SLOs. But these numbers aren't really ever published because it gives away information about your customer base.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/available-or-not-...

New comment by Anon1096 in "Salesforce Global Outage"

Anon1096 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:54:42 +0000

Hacker News is much easier to read when you realize that 95% of people have never worked on a "high" (maybe we could say >1B requests per day as a starting point) scale distributed service and think it's trivial to run one with more than 2 nines. You see comments all the time here mentioning that their own desktop at home is achieving more than that which belies deep misunderstanding of how systems are measured. Or that unofficial github status page repeatedly posted here that counts all github services together into one number.

New comment by Anon1096 in "I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots"

Anon1096 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 11:43:18 +0000

Before the ad, you had no brand awareness at all of Liberty Mutual. Now, you know their name enough to call them out specifically in a Hacker News comment. Your propensity to buy has improved a lot just based on that fact, regardless of whether you consciously want to avoid them now.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Claude is only available to people over 18 years"

Anon1096 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:40:43 +0000

Yes multiple companies in people's favorite acronyms.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Claude is only available to people over 18 years"

Anon1096 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:22:24 +0000

Literally every single HN thread these days mentioning big companies the top comment is some cynical conspiratorial nonsense. Say Big Tech is out to get you in any way possible no matter how outlandish and people eat it up. Nothing can just happen for good or neutral reasons it's always tied to some master plan.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Muse: Meta's personal AI agent, features and capabilities"

Anon1096 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:01:09 +0000

This is probably why they are launching now. There's no real other competitor right now in the nicely made managed openclaw space for personal use (or at least, very very early. Maybe Grokbot can be considered the lead competitor but afaik it did not gain mindshare). Instinct is supposed to come out soon and by not being associated with Meta it'd be really appealing just on that front vs this. But being first to market is a real reason to use it and chance to gain lasting market share.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent"

Anon1096 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:51:07 +0000

The best selling point is an end-to-end purchase flow that you don't have think about at all, it does the price comparisons for you. However, if you want to use it to just get the list of top candidates and compare and go make the final decision yourself I'm sure it can do that for you too. Either way I see a future where these claw-like agents can fit into everyday use cases.

New comment by Anon1096 in "ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage"

Anon1096 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 19:04:15 +0000

HN isn't really a good place to have an informed discussion on ads efficacy unfortunately. In this thread we have many many people talking about how online ads in general are completely worthless. All of the top comments I see are harping on things like Google Ads having bad targeting for reasons like you are getting recommendations on products you just bought (having experience in the ads industry, yes this is actually a good signal that you might buy another one, even if you don't want to believe it).

Meanwhile, the article is actually discussing ChatGPT ads specifically compared to Google Ads, which they do have success with.

Anyway, my guess is that it's a combination of 1. OpenAI being new and not having the massive work needed yet to set up a fully successful ads network, but they're recruiting a lot of talent from the area + recsys so it's probably not too far off. And 2. we don't really know in general yet how best to do in context ad recommendations. I think this will also improve pretty rapidly with how much talent is working in the space. The best ads will probably look a lot more like Google Search per-request targeted ads rather than Instagram style per-user targeted ads, but I believe we'll see lots of gains fast.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

Anon1096 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:43:48 +0000

Nah, I think this is a common misunderstanding of how LLMs work, where people think that they mimic the pre-training data. Stylistically everything you see is an artifact of post-training, which is from reinforcement learning not from absorbing mass amounts of text. At some point a person or more recently a bot gave a thumbs up to an A/B tested response including em-dashes and claudisms galore.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Claude Code reduces it's weekly limit by 17% – compared to today"

Anon1096 — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:31:41 +0000

Nothing is priced according to what they really cost. Things are priced at what the market will bear based on supply and demand. You might as well ask this question for oil, iphones, bitcoin, restaurants, or housing the answer is all the same.

New comment by Anon1096 in "Hy4 preview"

Anon1096 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:51:06 +0000

That is the point though, if labs are maximizing svg image generation capabilities it is a very good thing. That's a general skill that is useful. So assuming they aren't specifically maximizing pelican bicycle svgs (and it doesn't look like they are) then incentives are aligned that the "benchmark" is measuring a general desirable capability.

New comment by Anon1096 in "The August 17 outage"

Anon1096 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 23:04:54 +0000

How much infra have you seen of the top 100 sites in the world? I've worked on multiple top 10, and absorbing a 2x increase (and the peak is very likely more than 2x) is a very very hard problem that would cause hundreds of pagers to go off and load shedding to very high degrees. There is just not tons of unused capacity lying around in wait at the scale of github. "No one takes chances with critical components" is also very wrong for the simple fact that you don't know which is the weakest link in the chain until it fails.