Hacker News: bananaquant

New comment by bananaquant in "Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux"

bananaquant — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:59:17 +0000

It is bad enough that Microsoft just piggybacks on all the work that Red Hat is doing.

Now they are snapshotting the bleeding-edge distribution and call it general purpose, which carries a strong implication that it is ready for all kinds of production workloads.

It is not. That is why there is a Fedora/RHEL split in the first place.

New comment by bananaquant in "SourceFS: A 2h+ Android build becomes a 15m task with a virtual filesystem"

bananaquant — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 19:37:16 +0000

I think I got the magic part. You can store all build system binaries in the VFS itself. When any binary gets executed, VFS can return a small sham binary instead that just checks command line arguments, if they match, checks the inputs, and if they match, applies the previous output. If there is any mismatch, it can execute the original binary as usual and make the new output. Easy and no process hacking necessary.

New comment by bananaquant in "We investigated Amsterdam's attempt to build a 'fair' fraud detection model"

bananaquant — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 08:48:47 +0000

Good catch about the project being shelved. It is buried pretty deep in the document to the point of making it misleading:

> In late November 2023, the city announced that it would shelve the pilot.

I would agree that implications regarding the use of those models do not hold, but not the ones about their quality.

New comment by bananaquant in "We investigated Amsterdam's attempt to build a 'fair' fraud detection model"

bananaquant — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 07:45:38 +0000

What nobody seems to talk about is that their resulting models are basically garbage. If you look at the last provided confusion matrix, their model is right in about 2/3 of cases when it makes a positive prediction. The actual positives are about 60%. So, any improvement is marginal at best and a far cry from ~90% accuracy you would expect from a model in such a high-stakes scenario. They could have thrown a half of cases out at random and had about the same reduction in case load without introducing any bias into the process.

New comment by bananaquant in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"

bananaquant — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 21:08:59 +0000

The US has a massive advantage of being the largest economy, having a vast single market, issuing the world's reserve currency, and having unique hubs like the Bay Area attracting the best and brightest. It would be hard to replicate its success elsewhere without having some of the above prerequisites.

New comment by bananaquant in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"

bananaquant — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 20:45:39 +0000

I second that. In addition, most of those companies use a portion of their revenue to buy back their shares, pushing their price up. So, the value created worldwide ends up growing the US stock market.

VSCode for Linux remote code execution vulnerability

bananaquant — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 12:50:06 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/230824

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858479

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by bananaquant in "AWS claims its cloud faces competition from on-premises IT"

bananaquant — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 11:56:06 +0000

Indeed, that is decided on a case-by-case basis. So if a company determines that moving on-premise is cheaper than AWS, perhaps that is actually true for them.

New comment by bananaquant in "AWS claims its cloud faces competition from on-premises IT"

bananaquant — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 11:44:43 +0000

Those are indeed similar situations, but your examples except the first one do not come from the article. So it is not clear why do you assume that everyone did not read beyond the headline.

New comment by bananaquant in "AWS claims its cloud faces competition from on-premises IT"

bananaquant — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 11:28:11 +0000

That doesn't really make sense. AWS is very profitable [1]. That means that whatever the amount of money they put into engineering, their customers pay, and then some.

As for the customers, very few of them operate at a scale that requires the monumental amount of engineering required to replicate the whole of AWS with its many dozens of services.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-reports-...

New comment by bananaquant in "AWS claims its cloud faces competition from on-premises IT"

bananaquant — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 11:00:24 +0000

> People and processes you’ll have to manage to achieve SLAs like Amazon’s?

In reality, you can have almost any people and processes. The trick is to put your servers and data in more than one place. If you have uptime of just 99% for a server (~3 days off in a year) and have them in 2 unrelated places, you will get 99.99% uptime. 3 places will give you 6 9's. The only thing that has to be ensured by people and processes is graceful fallback.

Notice how I say uptime and not SLA. SLA just means that you will get a little bit of money back if uptime dips below the SLA level. Oh, and for EC2 it is just 99.95%. So, if you really care about your users, you will engineer your systems to stay up rather than hoping that a third-party provider's SLA will save you.

New comment by bananaquant in "AWS claims its cloud faces competition from on-premises IT"

bananaquant — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 10:45:28 +0000

That is fantastic news if true. AWS and two other major cloud providers have done everything in their power to make it painful for businesses to switch off of them. Case in point: egress data fees are something like 80x compared to what the cloud provider actually pays. You still have to pay them in full unless you decide to leave AWS completely.

New comment by bananaquant in "Microsoft TypeSpec"

bananaquant — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 19:11:55 +0000

As someone mostly using compiled programming languages, I am perplexed about the built-in types that this new language provides.

According to https://typespec.io/docs/standard-library/built-in-data-type...:

* unixTimestamp32, but no 64-bit version

* plainDate that can be "April 10th" without the year

* DefaultKeyVisibility, OmitDefaults.. what?

I am genuinely curious how did that happen. Design by committee? Some secret use cases that leaked into specification?

New comment by bananaquant in "Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off"

bananaquant — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 07:05:02 +0000

As an HR would say, those people are "a bad cultural fit", which legitimately raises the probability of them being laid off to 100%. Simple.

Which countries produce the most programming languages?

bananaquant — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 20:43:43 +0000

Article URL: https://pldb.com/posts/which-countries-produce-the-most-programming-languages.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32622997

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by bananaquant in "As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia"

bananaquant — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 00:15:06 +0000

False. H1B visas given to work for a university are "cap exempt." They allow to work for universities and other nonprofits only. H1B visas to work for a for-profit company can only be obtained through a lottery.

New comment by bananaquant in "The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)"

bananaquant — Tue, 03 May 2022 01:42:15 +0000

Yep. They got... power pegged.

New comment by bananaquant in "AI training is outpacing Moore’s Law"

bananaquant — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 00:27:14 +0000

If I'm reading the plot from the article right, the most impressive gains have happened in the first half of 2019. Since then, the progress has been notably slower, with year-on-year performance increases for some network architectures falling behind Moore's law already.

New comment by bananaquant in "Zillow just gave us a look at machine learning's future"

bananaquant — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 18:23:43 +0000

Yes, but there is more than pricing that goes into a successful operation.

New comment by bananaquant in "Zillow just gave us a look at machine learning's future"

bananaquant — Sun, 07 Nov 2021 15:05:36 +0000

One thing that I feel this article misses is the notion of domain expertise. Zillow has entered the house flipping market that has been already populated by human real estate agents and investors, who already do their work of pricing houses and striking deals quite well. To compete, a successful entrant needs to excel in at least one thing and be not much worse in all the others. In practice, that is a tall order.