Hacker News: oxymoron

New comment by oxymoron in "Amazon Allegedly Replaced 40% of AWS DevOps Workers with AI Days Before Crash"

oxymoron — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:13:01 +0000

Yes, but that wasn’t engineers.

New comment by oxymoron in "Amazon Allegedly Replaced 40% of AWS DevOps Workers with AI Days Before Crash"

oxymoron — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 16:39:01 +0000

I’m an AWS engineer and I haven’t seen any evidence of engineering layoffs within AWS since early this year. As others have suggested we generally don’t have ”DevOps Workers” either. There’s definitely a push for AI tools, but there’s no indication that it was related to any off this from what I’ve seen.

New comment by oxymoron in "GCP Outage"

oxymoron — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 18:28:35 +0000

Because a lot of the time, not everyone is impacted, as the systems are designed to contain the "blast radius" of failures using techniques such as cellular architecture and [shuffle sharding](https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/workload-isolation-u...). So sometimes a service is completely down for some customers and fully unaffected for other customers.

New comment by oxymoron in "Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans"

oxymoron — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 21:02:52 +0000

Countering advanced bits is a game of economics. Sure, we know that they can solve the captchas, but they usually can’t do so for free. Eg. Typical captcha solver services are around $1/thousand solved. Depending on the unit economics of a particular bot that might be cheap or it might completely destroy the business model. I’ve definitely seen a lot of professionally operated bots where they invest a lot of effort into solving the fewest captchas possible to keep the cost down.

That captchas are completely useless is a popular myth.

New comment by oxymoron in "Katharine Way, John Wheeler, and the Dawn of Nuclear Fission"

oxymoron — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 11:09:44 +0000

It was of course co-discovered by another woman, Lise Meitner, who understood the theory while taking a walk with Otto Frisch and discussing the experimental findings by Otto Hahn. Meitner and Frisch were friends with Hahn and learned about the experiment earlier than most, so it’s likely one of those contingencies of history. There’s a good discussion of exactly how it unfolded in _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ which is generally a great book and a comprehensive intro to the history of nuclear physics.

New comment by oxymoron in "Donald Triplett was autism’s “case 1”"

oxymoron — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 22:46:21 +0000

I think it’s at least relevant to note that a lot of things relating to autism was completely redefined in DSM-V. DSM-IV had many different diagnosis such as classic autism, autism spectrum disorder, aspergers and PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified). All of those was merged into a single diagnosis titled ”Autism Spectrum Disorder”, where the criterias are communication difficulties and stereotypical behavior. My understanding is that this was mostly due to poor diagnosis stability with the prior set of diagnosis. It seems at least plausible that this general simplification of diagnosis criteria has contributed to an increase in the number of diagnosis. (It’s also worth remembering that any comparison over time has to bundle all of the previously distinct diagnosis to come up with an apples-to-apples comparison.)

New comment by oxymoron in "March 20 ChatGPT outage: Here’s what happened"

oxymoron — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 23:40:51 +0000

Redis latency is around 1ms including network round trip for most operations. In a single threaded context, waiting on that would limit you to around 1000 operations per second. Redis clients improve throughput by doing pipelining, so a bunch of calls are batched up to minimize network roundtrips. This becomes more complicated in the context of redis-cluster, because calls targeting different keys are dispatched to different cache nodes and will complete in an unpredictable order, and additional client side logic is needed to accumulate the responses and dispatch them back to the appropiate caller.

New comment by oxymoron in "How We Knew Space Was a Vacuum (2021)"

oxymoron — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 03:26:49 +0000

I think our understanding of the inner structure of the earth is another interesting example of something that we’ve deduced scientifically but never directly observed. It surprised me a bit when I first realized that the Earth’s crust had never been pierced (by humans) and that it was all based on indirect observation.

New comment by oxymoron in "Amazon S3 now automatically encrypts all new objects"

oxymoron — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 21:03:55 +0000

There is a talk by the S3 VP on Youtube which mentions some rough numbers, I think it’s from re:invent 2019. Also, they mention 100 trillion objects here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3s-15th-birthday-it...

New comment by oxymoron in "Amazon S3 now automatically encrypts all new objects"

oxymoron — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 21:00:48 +0000

When I started working for AWS as an SDE, I was hoping it’d be possible to visit a datacenter. I was surprised to find out that I’d require L11 (!) approval to so so! The only L11 in my reporting chain is Adam Selipsky.

I’m told the AWS data centers has red zones, which no harddrive can be taken out of, without being mechanically and violently destroyed first.

New comment by oxymoron in "Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022?"

oxymoron — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 17:55:44 +0000

I’ve been using self-hosted TTRSS since Google Reader shut down.

New comment by oxymoron in "The game theory of John von Neumann transformed the 20th century"

oxymoron — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 10:56:13 +0000

He is mentioned in the book, _The Man from the Future_, which gives the impression that Von Neumann did the heavy lifting their collaboration. It paints a relatively unflattering picture of Morgenstern.

New comment by oxymoron in "American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants"

oxymoron — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 16:01:38 +0000

I am not convinced that AA is actively trying to block this app. I used to work for a major anti-bot vendor, so from that I know that all airlines suffer heavily from price scraping and try to protect their flight search endpoints. The impact to them is due to fees from the centralized data services that all airlines depend on.

New comment by oxymoron in "A Windows 95-like shell for Windows 3.1x"

oxymoron — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 23:10:57 +0000

Aside from the coolness of the actual thing, I love the early 00’s web site design. For a while, all sites looked like this.

New comment by oxymoron in "A Review of the Zig Programming Language (Using Advent of Code 2021)"

oxymoron — Mon, 27 Dec 2021 17:18:22 +0000

I also agree with this sentiment, although there are some examples of really weird meta programming that remains opaque to me. For instance, I’m able to use `warp` as a framework, but the use of things like type level peano arithmetic is mostly incomprehensible to me at the moment. I also find that I run into Higher Rank Trait Bounds so rarely that I have a poor grasp of it (which might be as intended). All that to say that there are some odd corners of the language, given that I’ve been using it for five years now and as my main professional language for three years.

New comment by oxymoron in "Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?"

oxymoron — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 16:47:08 +0000

I absolutely adore the Baroque Cycle. Question: Since I read it I’ve wanted to read more about the development of money and financial institutions, but I’ve had difficulty finding good books on the topic. Does anyone have any good recommendations?

New comment by oxymoron in "Ask HN: Which tech stack is the most fun?"

oxymoron — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 14:48:52 +0000

Building a UI is usually tedious irregardless of stack. The fun part is what’s new and creative in the project, which is usually a small part of the overall thing.

My solution is generally to work at many different things in parallell, but that largely works because I’m a senior engineer and I’m naturally pulled to step in and assist in various places. I don’t think there’s an universal answer. Fundamentally, it’s probably not reasonable to expect that all aspects of once work should be thoroughly enjoyable.

New comment by oxymoron in "AWS – The YAML Way"

oxymoron — Sun, 05 Dec 2021 13:21:48 +0000

I haven’t seen it explicitly banned, but the Operational Readiness templates does have a question about that which has to be answered for all product and feature launches. I guess some orgs may just have banned it outright though.

New comment by oxymoron in "Avoiding bot detection: How to scrape the web without getting blocked?"

oxymoron — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 09:50:22 +0000

Different customers have different attitudes towards this. Some of them are _very_ focused on conversion and will disable anything which causes additional user friction. For others, the economic damage of bots is just so painful that it makes economic sense for them to add friction for a few percent of users.

I'm a linux user myself, so I know for a fact that neither my previous employer, nor other bot vendors, will block linux user agents in particular. Customers generally don't mind a universal requirement for JS execution, so that's just a fact of life. We generally did try to avoid blocking privacy focused browsers, though. We certainly monitored false positive rates and knew pretty well how we affected users.

New comment by oxymoron in "Avoiding bot detection: How to scrape the web without getting blocked?"

oxymoron — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 08:08:20 +0000

Thanks for the clarification! I probably misremember some of the details.