Hacker News: positr0n

New comment by positr0n in "The main way I've seen people turn ideologically crazy (2025)"

positr0n — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:47:06 +0000

Well I mean someone killed them. So whoever did it is who OP is talking about.

New comment by positr0n in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

positr0n — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:03:57 +0000

I can't think of another regulated utility that doesn't provide service to (essentially) all humans directly in their homes.

Everyone knows what water and electricity are, the vast majority couldn't explain what service AWS provides.

New comment by positr0n in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

positr0n — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:16:45 +0000

The market will more efficiently settle on a price if market participants can push the price up (buying) and push the price down (shorting).

New comment by positr0n in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

positr0n — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:15:23 +0000

How is shorting a stock gaming the market?

You feel a stock is overvalued and you short it. You feel a stock is undervalued and you buy it. What's the difference?

New comment by positr0n in "A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn't"

positr0n — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:09:57 +0000

I know plenty of line level engineers (mostly non-software) who's main interaction with unions is things like waiting for a week to move their desk to the other wall of their cubical because that's a union job and they're not allowed to touch the Ethernet cables.

Notice the story has cubicals, how nice! Most these stories are pretty old. I suspect because there are less jobs in some big F500 campus with colocated engineering, accounting, etc and a unionized manufacturing plant all in the same place.

New comment by positr0n in "Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute"

positr0n — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:48:00 +0000

Even if I do accept your claims that cooling in space is not insurmountable, you still would grant that launching and cooling (and shielding??) a data center in space still cost more dollars than building a data center on earth right? What is the use case that people will spend money to rent servers in space? I think nations have a strong enough grip on the internet now that the customer use case of "evading my country's laws" won't generate that much revenue.

Is the hope that power will be cheaper because solar panels have direct and continuous exposure to the sun?

New comment by positr0n in "Claude will use all SpaceX Colossus datacenter capacity"

positr0n — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:29:25 +0000

I don't really follow the politics and GPU drama in this space, but I'm surprised GPUs owned by SpaceX are going to Claude instead of grok or whatever AI stuff Tesla is trying to do.

New comment by positr0n in "Maryland Is First to Ban A.I.-Driven Price Increases in Grocery Stores"

positr0n — Sun, 03 May 2026 04:20:35 +0000

Most algorithms doing this charge lower prices to the wealthy since they are more valuable customers.

Total spend is higher. And if your $20 tricket breaks you're less likely to bother to return it if $20 doesn't mean that much to you. Plus other reasons I'm sure.

New comment by positr0n in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

positr0n — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:07:16 +0000

>> Where does "grey" end and "black" begin? >When the color is 100% black.

But what does this mean? Only vantablack is black, everything else is grey?

New comment by positr0n in "The Impact of AI on Game Dev Jobs. Open to Work Crisis"

positr0n — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 03:55:20 +0000

Can you compare daily active users to peak simultaneous users? Seems like apples to oranges. 150 million DAU could easily be the same as 45 million peak online.

Also how believable are both Steam and Roblox's numbers with regard to bot accounts? I have no idea about this, I'm biased towards Steam but based on the HN comments every time Roblox comes up I get the vibes that they are a comparatively less ethical company that might be willing to push the boundaries of ignoring bots for the sake of better metrics to impress investors. Also this isn't data at all but the steam games I play wouldn't benefit from bots, but I could see players of some of the silly little games my kids play in Roblox benefit from having some bot accounts to help you.

New comment by positr0n in "IP Addresses Through 2025"

positr0n — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:28:28 +0000

What's the public good that justifies the government dictating which networking stack people use?

New comment by positr0n in "IP Addresses Through 2025"

positr0n — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:25:08 +0000

I think the people complaining about compatibility are more talking about the concepts in IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 could have been "everything is the same except the IP address is 16 bytes instead of 4". Instead there are new ways to do everything.

Addressing works differently (no broadcast, multicast everywhere, link-local is mandatory). Configuration works differently (SLAAC, RA, DHCPv6 is not a drop-in replacement for regular DHCP). Neighbor discovery replaces ARP and depends on ICMPv6 working. Fragmentation behavior changed. NAT is “not a thing” by design, which breaks a bunch of assumptions people built entire networks around.

New comment by positr0n in "Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success"

positr0n — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 03:02:11 +0000

That sounds like just describing the way the current global system works, not entitlement.

Transitioning to another system would work (and seems inevitable at some point in the next hundred years??) but oof it would be chaotic.

New comment by positr0n in "AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'"

positr0n — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:04:10 +0000

I'm clued in to that but at this point who cares. All the models are fungible for the coding assistance use case.

New comment by positr0n in "SoundCloud has banned VPN access"

positr0n — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 05:59:23 +0000

I live a thousand miles from another country. No I don't have friends in another country and I don't even know anyone with friends in another country except immigrants or spouses of immigrants.

New comment by positr0n in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

positr0n — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 01:05:42 +0000

Pretty sure OP means liberal in the sense of "classical liberalism". Ideas like free market, rule of law, private property, etc.

New comment by positr0n in "Satellite megaconstellations will threaten space-based astronomy"

positr0n — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:47:04 +0000

How do you figure that? Capitalism has been chugging along for hundreds of years before artificial satellites existed.

New comment by positr0n in "Europe converged rapidly on the United States before stagnating"

positr0n — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:53:30 +0000

This is a problem, but unrelated to what the parent is saying. If you taxed 100% of the wealth of all US billionaires it looks like it would pay for social security, medicare, and medicaid for about a year and a half.

You still need a strong economy and middle class tax base to have any sort of welfare state.

New comment by positr0n in "How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods"

positr0n — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 14:24:50 +0000

Are we still talking about yogurt? I do not find it difficult or have to put in any work to buy low sugar yogurt. I buy large amounts of full fat zero added sugar Greek yogurt and yogurt cups with 2g of added sugar and there are always multiple options clearly labeled on the shelf among all the other more sugary options.

New comment by positr0n in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

positr0n — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 19:55:01 +0000

I certainly don't think the industry's hiring processes are perfect, but $100k on top of a normal wage for an incompetent worker is a lot of money to throw down the drain and not either run out of money or have someone competent notice and stop the situation before too long.