Hacker News: janpeuker

New comment by janpeuker in "Why were Victorian elites so effective?"

janpeuker — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 01:57:17 +0000

WIP drifts more and more towards 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible'. Apart from 1 word in the intro 'parasitically' and not a single mention of slavery, child labour (but boarding schools), women (but very consistent use of 'men') or colonialism (apart from it being used as a _credential_) the entire article literally argues that 'Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg' should run a techno-oligarchy of the absolute worst people? On the other hand the article seems to be unaware the Victorian empire went down and bankrupt because of its decadency, not being able to foresee let alone counter events such as the Indian independence, Japanese offensive and end of slavery alongside its change in economic primitives (see e.g. 'Capitalism and Slavery'). In that sense the article is maybe spot on, showing how completely disconnected the elites are?

New comment by janpeuker in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

janpeuker — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 10:02:29 +0000

I dislike a badly designed mall like everyone else, but is it already sealioning if an article ends on a leading question to hide its far-right liberal conservative agenda?

The National Civic Art Society is designing the White House State Ballroom [1] and Create Streets is a conservative influence group that likes speaking at Reform UK events [2]. As many others here have pointed out, visual preference, especially in such a binary choice between obviously cheap and ugly vs expensive and generous, is of course highly biased - pseudo greek style doesn't fly in Asia, even in Australia minimalist styles are much more en vogue.

The most important claims like "exclusively teaches broadly modernist styles" are completely unsupported - especially when a few lines down they literally use their own review of an architect's design, but then call it "in a style drawing on Victorian commercial architecture and Art Deco", again unsubstantiated - it has pretty "modern" clear lines, probably due to sustainability [3], and brick facades themselves have been around for long. In the report they praise the 2010 (!) London city building design guide recommending exactly this brick design. "hardly a single public commission" and "we commissioning styles"?

Where is the line between justifying dictator-style grandiose architecture and the actual empathy needed for simply good design?

I'm just asking questions.

1) https://www.dezeen.com/2025/01/29/justin-shubow-trump-archit... 2) https://www.building.co.uk/focus/reform-uk-conference-fundin... 3) https://www.archpaper.com/2025/10/biennale-architettura-carl...

New comment by janpeuker in "The Dataflow Model Revisited"

janpeuker — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:57:13 +0000

I used to be extremely into Dataflow/Apache Beam and literally had the paper printed on my desk AND the book. I agree they got Event time versus processing time and Never rely on completeness right, and I love they go deeper into why that was just a hard thing to accept. My head still hurts thinking about unbounded stream triggers and I'm happy we got around to a table-centric model. I still think taking some ideas from Spanner, databases as message bus or consistency information per row, basically in-database CQRS would have been nice, though. Great paper.

New comment by janpeuker in "AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems"

janpeuker — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 16:03:46 +0000

I like the idea of simulations - maybe not in the flight simulator sense of a fixed rhythm, but more in the training in using the tools quickly sense, like a chaos monkey in your log search. My most memorable exam was Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), the hands-on simulation part was exhilarating.

New comment by janpeuker in "Claude's new system prompt doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics"

janpeuker — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 15:57:55 +0000

I'm not sure if it's just the new prompt - this has happened to a comical degree for me since a long time. For example it even refuses to translate even just single verses of old songs, I asked for a translation of Tu vuò fà l'americano once. Niente.

New comment by janpeuker in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

janpeuker — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 10:38:16 +0000

To be fair not predicting accurately doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong - Michael Burry is the perfect example here, a market may actually just be so fraudulent (AI companies being funded by AI companies etc) that it can defy common economics for a while.

New comment by janpeuker in "What's the Scam?"

janpeuker — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:47:29 +0000

My guess would be it's to build up reputation of the sending accounts, by being "connected" to trusted, aged, accounts? However, the combination of garbled text + number @ large provider on its own should be pretty suspicious by now. Another idea is some kind of affiliate marketing / pumping attack, but I don't see ads.

New comment by janpeuker in "[dead]"

janpeuker — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:03:40 +0000

European Commission has designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE), as well as Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), under the Digital Services Act (DSA)

New comment by janpeuker in "Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds"

janpeuker — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:25:28 +0000

Yep mentioned in the original thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727144

New comment by janpeuker in "Bug Blindness"

janpeuker — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 10:47:42 +0000

I agree quality blindness is curable. Many communities (e.g. Japanese, Swiss, Yemeni, Peruvian etc) have shown attention to detail is just a learning and, most importantly, social status process. Bugs are just the opposite of caring, and caring is at odds with hustle culture. I think Apple is a great example here - used to be meticulous and now every day the amount of tiny defects is just infuriating (just now I realised, for example, that Photos can't scroll with a mouse).

New comment by janpeuker in "Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private"

janpeuker — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 10:39:22 +0000

A long time ago I walked into a public library to get a library card, already my ID in hand. Staff looked at me aghast "why would we need an ID for a card, that'd be ridiculous!". I feel Brits take privacy quite seriously.

New comment by janpeuker in "Monzo Stand-In"

janpeuker — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:36:44 +0000

Agree, I know nothing about their system but in terms of clear auditability and accountability of systems I agree it's great. Every subsystem failure or inconsistency can be clearly attributed to one or the other site/stack, and the stand-in could for example apply other rules (e.g. approve only smaller transaction amounts that are accepted by an incident-only set of risk rules).

New comment by janpeuker in "Monzo Stand-In"

janpeuker — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:22:37 +0000

Minor thing but I do like they use the word "Stand In" here in the payments / financial sense of Stand-in processing (STIP), which is usually used when a bank is offline to keep essential services such as public transport working.

New comment by janpeuker in "Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days"

janpeuker — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:48:47 +0000

I do get the anxiety about new bugs but to be honest I fear more that in a few years it's so cheap to fix medium to high security bugs that lowkey hacking and finding worrying privacy violations becomes prohibitively expensive for citizens.

New comment by janpeuker in "Global demand for sand spawned a worldwide boom in illegal mining (2015)"

janpeuker — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 23:45:59 +0000

That article is a bit old but I loved this one (a bit more arty) from 2023: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/137/544999/extracting-soverei...

New comment by janpeuker in "AWS Acquires DuckLabs"

janpeuker — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:19:35 +0000

I didn't even necessarily mean diverting from the mission, just that optimising for network storage now reads like a feature maybe prioritised in anticipation of a stronger cloud user base

New comment by janpeuker in "AWS Acquires DuckLabs"

janpeuker — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:16:11 +0000

I was a real fan from the very beginning, but now DuckDB 2.0 "as a server" and 5. asynchronous I/O [1] looks aimed at something very different from what I thought first.

1) https://duckdb.org/2026/08/17/duckdb-20-highlights

New comment by janpeuker in "How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer"

janpeuker — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:32:29 +0000

As others have mentioned this is particularly prevalent in the US. I always liked that Australia's vision for a peer-to-peer payment system (note cards are mainly for merchants, hence the rewards) has inclusivity [1] as one of its core tenets "continue to transact ... without disproportionate burden or risk ... those experiencing financial hardship". They also just stopped surcharging [2] and have capped interchange fees since a long time.

1) https://a2apaymentsaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/...

2) https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/review-of...

New comment by janpeuker in "Anger, Anxiety and Agency"

janpeuker — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:16:56 +0000

Big +1. Uncertainty is where we learn, and where non-zero-sum games are, but most western AI labs right now operate firmly in zero-sum game territory.

New comment by janpeuker in "Thinking in Python"

janpeuker — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:58:22 +0000

Nice formatting - None of the book seems to be about "Thinking" though. It's basically an annotated syntax guide for readers from a C++ background?