Hacker News: Hilift

New comment by Hilift in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

Hilift — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:37:01 +0000

2023: "A Party in Cannes Announces a New Hollywood Power Player". Something like ~300 attendees, probably $10 million. Zaslav and Graydon Carter co-hosted. There were rumored to be thousands of bottles of Dom champagne, which is probably inexpensive in bulk.

https://archive.is/ITc2a

New comment by Hilift in "WinApps: Run Windows apps as if they were a part of the native Linux OS"

Hilift — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 13:25:51 +0000

You have minimal to zero leverage of the native Windows debugging, logging, or instrumentation. At best an opaque box with one knob and hopefully it doesn't fail or you will be roaming the countryside learning how to perform correlated packet captures at various levels of crappy obtuse networking. Could be useful for concealing non compliant vulnerable applications from pesky security vulnerability assessment teams. Combine that with the price is right and it is a solid 97% win exceeding performance metrics bonus pool refreshed.

New comment by Hilift in "Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure"

Hilift — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 14:21:43 +0000

No. The UK refuses to accept reality, which is a poverty rate 12% higher than the US, and families with three or more children poverty rate of 47%. The cost of benefits and other costly boondoggles compete with these failed public works ventures. The largest water utility has £20 billion debt and will probably need to be un-privatized. They probably breathe a sigh of relief knowing that France is twice as bad financially, so that feeds the denial mass delusion. And the economy doesn't have the fantasy growth that was expected, so automatic additional borrowing. And it's budget season. Yay!

New comment by Hilift in "Android developer verification: Early access starts"

Hilift — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 11:39:51 +0000

Mobile is such a second class operating system platform. I look forward to doing everything with Meta eyewear that also corrects vision impairments.

New comment by Hilift in "Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model"

Hilift — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:41:04 +0000

This seems like it should be an easy task for an AI to implement. For example, the question "what is the most helpful rated negative review of the book 'Original Sin' by Jake Tapper?" There are obvious and prominent "helpfulness" ratings of reviews, but they don't seem to be scraped, at least not by Gemini. Additionally, Gemini reports seemingly inaccurate or minimal effort information:

"It is difficult to pinpoint a single "most helpful" negative review of Original Sin by Jake Tapper, as helpfulness ratings on platforms like Amazon or Goodreads are dynamic and subjective, and the provided search results *do not include specific user reviews with their respective helpfulness votes*."

https://share.google/aimode/OnWrGe4j508c4u3gh

New comment by Hilift in "Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking"

Hilift — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 14:49:45 +0000

The typically tier 2 carriers are the main ideal perfect market for eSIMs. If you want to do everything online, you really can't if it relies on a physical something. I would estimate 90% of the market is for mint mobile and consumer cellular. eSIMs are a genius move progression from the old burner phone days, from the perspective of overhead costs and flexibility.

New comment by Hilift in "How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise"

Hilift — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 14:54:26 +0000

Most of the funds lost to SBF were recovered. And CPZ has a pardon. Crypto has evaporated about $2 trillion in assets since then.

New comment by Hilift in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

Hilift — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 20:43:01 +0000

"Multiple Active Result Sets=true;"

New comment by Hilift in "Tell HN: Azure outage"

Hilift — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 09:48:43 +0000

Ironically, the GitHub Desktop Windows app is quite nice.

New comment by Hilift in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

Hilift — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 08:46:07 +0000

It is a setting in connection string in the client app.config, "MultipleActiveResultSets=true;".

New comment by Hilift in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

Hilift — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 20:14:37 +0000

Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS). During large query responses or bulk loads, "full" packets cause an additional packet to be sent over the wire with about five bytes to hold the MARS "wrapper". The net result is one full packet, and one empty packet on the wire, alternating. The performance impact in LAN latency is negligible. However on higher latency between AWS and your premises it has a terrible performance impact.

MARS isn't strictly needed for most things. Some features that requires it are ORM (EF) proxies and lazy loading. If you need MARS, there are third party "accelerators" that workaround this madness.

"MARS Acceleration significantly improves the performance of connections that use the Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) connection option."

https://documentation.nitrosphere.com/resources/release-note...

New comment by Hilift in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

Hilift — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 12:29:06 +0000

> The direct cost is the easy part

I don't think it is easy. I see most organizations struggle with the fact that everything is throttled in the cloud. CPU, storage, network. Tenants often discover large amounts of activity they were previously unaware of, that contributes to the usage and cost. And there may be individuals or teams creating new usages that are grossly impacting their allocation. Did you know there is a setting in MS SQL Server that impacts performance by an order of magnitude when sending/receiving data from the Cloud to your on-premises servers? It's the default in the ORM generated settings.

Then you can start adding in the Cloud value, such as incomprehensible networking diagrams that are probably non-compliant in some way (guess which ones!), and security? What is it?

New comment by Hilift in "NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966"

Hilift — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 11:25:18 +0000

> Near 100 per cent probability of continuing to function against multi-megaton weapons (i.e., underground location).

That of course wasn't possible, only a best effort. There was also the pseudo belief that ICBM missiles could be intercepted, and an entire system was designed and deployed (Project Nike), then decommissioned in 1974 due to it was a waste of money.

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

New comment by Hilift in "Key IOCs for Pegasus and Predator Spyware Removed with iOS 26 Update"

Hilift — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 10:51:05 +0000

This month, London police discovered and intercepted a shipment of 1,000 stolen iPhones destined for ... China.

"46 people were arrested, including two men who were detained in London last month on suspicion of handling stolen goods after 2,000 phones were found in their car and addresses linked to them."

These aren't local street thugs. This is a massive, global criminal enterprise:

"London Metropolitan Police, which had initially assumed that "small-time thieves" were behind the city's wave of phone thefts, got their first major lead on Christmas Eve last year. A woman using "Find My iPhone" had tracked her stolen device to a warehouse near Heathrow Airport."

"We discovered street thieves were being paid up to 300 pounds ($403) per handset and uncovered evidence of devices being sold for up to $5,000 in China."

https://www.timesunion.com/news/world/article/uk-police-unco...

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/industrial-scal...

New comment by Hilift in "Key IOCs for Pegasus and Predator Spyware Removed with iOS 26 Update"

Hilift — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 12:03:30 +0000

"fail to secure"?

Do you really think that with all of the years of iPhone device and account takeovers, from a text message requiring no reading or interaction, Apple with their maximum controlled walled garden aren't facilitating? Apple spent billions moving factories because the US government told them to. They are the keymaker.

Apple could do a lot of things, such as preventing the black market for stolen phones from existing. A single city, London, had 80,000 phones stolen in 2024.

"...Onwurah argued that "robust technical measures" such as blocking stolen phones taken overseas from accessing cloud services could make devices "far less valuable".

"She also pointed to comments by Mobile UK, the trade association of the UK's mobile network operators, who said blocking IMEI in other countries was a "necessary step to dismantle the business model of organised crime".

"However, she said when giving evidence, Apple, Google and Samsung had avoided saying why they would not implement the technology." <--**

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2y037pg41o

New comment by Hilift in "Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?"

Hilift — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 16:27:15 +0000

I would take that further and say that residential solar without batteries has been proven to be a bad solution. Solar with batteries allows utilities and consumers to schedule when power can be sent to the grid. California utilities consider solar without batteries a PITA, and incentive structures have changed to reflect that shift in policy.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/distributed-energy-reso...

https://enphase.com/blog/homeowners/understanding-nem-30-and...

New comment by Hilift in "Alaska Airlines' statement on IT outage"

Hilift — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 08:47:04 +0000

No details? I say we assume it was an expired certificate outage.

New comment by Hilift in "US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic"

Hilift — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 16:31:56 +0000

You don't owe anything. You're spending someone else's money!

New comment by Hilift in "US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic"

Hilift — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 16:30:14 +0000

Are you serious? California has an $180 billion annual obligation just for Medicaid (Cal-Aid). Los Angeles borrowed $1 billion to fund DWP operations this year, and borrowed $3 billion to borrow another $3 billion to fund a $6 billion renovation for the LA convention center that no one wants. Denver wants to borrow $1 billion to basically fund operations.

Neither party has any intention of repaying any of the $38 trillion, or care what it is spent on.

https://www.torched.la/why-this-convention-center-expert-is-...

New comment by Hilift in "French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence"

Hilift — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 16:23:44 +0000

> 90% of medias in France belongs to a few wealthy families that are friends with him.

That isn't a problem if the electorate aren't easily influenced.