Hacker News: laluser

Improving storage efficiency in Magic Pocket, Dropbox's immutable blob store

laluser — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:56:25 +0000

Article URL: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/improving-storage-efficiency-in-magic-pocket-our-immutable-blob-store

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632157

Points: 60

# Comments: 21

New comment by laluser in "Platforms bend over backward to help DHS censor ICE critics, advocates say"

laluser — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:53:33 +0000

I think that moment happened when Trump said, "drop to your knees and beg, and he would have done it,” to Elon. [1]. Once Trump assumed the presidency, it was game over for tech.

[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...

New comment by laluser in "Why I Joined OpenAI"

laluser — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 08:36:59 +0000

I have been attempting to write a lot more with AI, but it's so gimmicky. It's always spitting lines like this: " it's not just about x – it's about y." like in this post. I find it so frustrating that no matter the prompt I throw at it, it eventually repeats itself again after some time. Good technical and succinct writing is almost impossible to iterate on with AI for me.

New comment by laluser in "Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon"

laluser — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 01:49:36 +0000

It also increases profits for multi-national US companies since they get paid in other currencies, which they then convert to dollars locally. Basically, they have favorable FX tailwinds.

New comment by laluser in "ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data"

laluser — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 02:14:16 +0000

It’s likely citizen children on Medicaid with potentially undocumented parents that they are targeting, which is pretty sad to think about.

New comment by laluser in "US to suspend immigrant visa processing for 75 nations, State Department says"

laluser — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:02:21 +0000

It's such a small country and an even smaller amount are coming to the U.S. that this would have no material impact. Strange to see them there, but not Argentina (in much worse financial situation).

New comment by laluser in "OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race"

laluser — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 20:13:27 +0000

That will be less of a problem since OAI can spill out to other providers as needed if their own capacity is under high utilization. They already use coreweave, aws, azure, etc. Google doesn't do that as far as I know and don't see why they would, so they are stuck eating the capacity planning.

New comment by laluser in "OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race"

laluser — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 20:11:18 +0000

OAI is already working on shipping their own chips.

New comment by laluser in "OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO"

laluser — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:53:23 +0000

Sam A is pretty well connected and knows the game well. No doubt there will be some risks where the whole thing goes right down to zero, but I personally wouldn't bet against them.

New comment by laluser in "OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO"

laluser — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 23:45:18 +0000

Look at all the companies that have 'burned cash' with no viable path to profitability over the last 20 years. The good ones outlive that criticism, easily. Think Uber, etc. They clearly see a path to profitability and they have plenty of room to experiment here with what works. With new partnerships and dependencies, they won't run out of cash for a long time.

New comment by laluser in "After the AI boom: what might we be left with?"

laluser — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 21:54:48 +0000

The reason for not keeping them too much longer than a few years is that at the end of that timespan you can purchase GPUs with > 2x performance, but for the same amount of power. At some point, even though the fleet has been depreciated, they become too expensive to operate vs. what is on the market.

New comment by laluser in "Data on How America Sold Out Its Computer Science Graduates"

laluser — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 05:16:38 +0000

Not a great comparison, but agree that it just takes passing some goofy interviews. That guy lied his way through all of his interviews.

New comment by laluser in "How a yacht works: sailboat physics and design"

laluser — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 16:25:03 +0000

Isn't that the case with every hobby?

New comment by laluser in "Upcoming changes to how live videos are stored"

laluser — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 05:07:41 +0000

The majority of data is rarely accessed after the first week. However, that data represents 99% of the costs. If storing data is not your primary business, then why keep it around? This is what most of the large companies are realizing now that growth is slowing down.

New comment by laluser in "In S3 simplicity is table stakes"

laluser — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 15:18:46 +0000

Yep! There’s a lot of checksum verification, carefully orchestrated deployments, hardware diversity, erasure code selection, the list goes on and on. I help run a multi-exabyte storage system - I’ve seen a few things.

New comment by laluser in "In S3 simplicity is table stakes"

laluser — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 14:09:05 +0000

It’s designed for that level of durability, but it’s only as good as a single change or correlated set of hardware failures that can quickly change the theoretical durability model. Or even corrupting data is possible too.

New comment by laluser in "Anthropic raises $3.5B at $61.5B valuation"

laluser — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 19:13:22 +0000

It's integrated into X, but they are separate companies.

New comment by laluser in "Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI"

laluser — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 19:06:23 +0000

I think they both want a future without each other. OpenAI will eventually want to vertically integrate up towards applications (Microsoft's space) and Microsoft wants to do the opposite in order to have more control over what is prioritized, control costs, etc.

New comment by laluser in "TSMC expected to announce $100B investment in U.S."

laluser — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:39:07 +0000

Exactly. China has held this position for a long time. Chip plant manufacturing is a recent development. China will eventually catch up with their own manufacturing in a decade or so. They don't care about the immediate short-term - they think in decades.

New comment by laluser in "DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL"

laluser — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 04:41:49 +0000

That's actually the whole company.