Hacker News: spacebanana7

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Patreon laying off 20% of staff"

spacebanana7 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:40:19 +0000

The negative metric is more important - if you can cut staff costs by 20% with only 5% reduction in revenue/innovation that’s a win from an investor’s perspective.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)"

spacebanana7 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:06:13 +0000

> They discuss the changes as the team are doing them (software design and architecture)

I find the format of PRs to be better suited to discussion than slack/teams messages. Key developers need to actively sign off, code suggestions are much easier, and the CICD makes sure we're not wasting time discussing code that's not compliant with obvious standards.

Obviously some level of agreement is needed before creating a ticket at all, but implementation details around say creating a terraform module to share functionality between teams do need to be discussed somewhere - and it can be difficult for any individual dev to have all the low level context.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Why is it so hard for the U.S. to win wars?"

spacebanana7 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:22:16 +0000

Rome lost loads of soldiers in the Germanic wars too. The parallel is that these wars are too expensive (for a non-existential conflict) to take to fulfilment, but also can't easily be disengaged from.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Why is it so hard for the U.S. to win wars?"

spacebanana7 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:17:40 +0000

From Ukraine's perspective it's existential for sure. Russia however, just revises its objectives every few months according to how well/badly its prospects on the battlefield are looking.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Why is it so hard for the U.S. to win wars?"

spacebanana7 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:58:04 +0000

The “special military operation” euphemism that both the US/Russia used in Iran/Ukraine does have a degree of truth.

These wars are really military engagements with directional objectives rather than truly existential wars with binary outcomes.

Modern wars really resemble Rome’s Germanic wars more than the Punic ones.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:51:30 +0000

This makes stripe more valuable. No company on the web wants to manage dozens of local payment methods with slightly different rules and possible local bank account requirements.

Stripe is a much stronger company when they're able to aggregate a large number of small payment networks rather than just relying on Visa/MC.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites"

spacebanana7 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:06:52 +0000

There are huge military advantages right now. The US military will not willingly give up starlink, and they can use it in every country without permission.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "TLS certificates for internal services done right"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:43:50 +0000

It's hard to get right when OSs, programming languages, browsers and sometimes other applications have their own opinions about trust stores. I understand why our IT department want corporate devices to use internal CA certs on paper but it just breaks stuff in the real world.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Remote Attestation"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:35:24 +0000

Not your keys, not your computer

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Grok 4.5"

spacebanana7 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:06:56 +0000

The (optimistic?) take is that xAI is genuinely better at building datacenters at scale than anyone else, and the freedom to use Nat Gas as the primary energy source allows them to have lower marginal costs.

The (pessimistic?) take is that they have loads of idle GPUs and want to get some revenue out of them rather than none. Compare this to OpenAI/Anthropic where every token used by a consumer has to compete with enterprise spenders, and there’s not enough to go around for everyone.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Egypt Is Building a New Nile"

spacebanana7 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:07:46 +0000

Franco, at least in the sense of GDP per capita indicators and escaping WW2.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "EU Court of Justice allows criminal prosecution for reposting RT videos"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:14:30 +0000

But with RT, my government does the ad blocking and the Russian government pays the paywall

New comment by spacebanana7 in "EU Court of Justice allows criminal prosecution for reposting RT videos"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:59:19 +0000

One major benefit of Russia Today’s news site is that there’s no ads, because of sanctions.

If you’re comfortable ignoring the Russian government propaganda on many topics it’s actually pleasant to browse as one of the least bloated major news sites.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as protection"

spacebanana7 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:44:04 +0000

Yes but that’s a blunt instrument, which would risk reaction. However putting an individual on a sanctions list is routine and easy.

And a president could always just call up the CEOs and ask for their least favourite Norwegian to be cancelled without any paperwork.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors"

spacebanana7 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 05:40:01 +0000

Most of the GDP per capita divergence has happened since 2008. My same comment could’ve been written when Biden was president.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors"

spacebanana7 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:37:22 +0000

A couple of decades ago both France and Britain had higher per capita GDP than the US. Now they are significantly behind.

Similarly top European companies used to rival American companies in profitability, power and valuation. There’s not really an equivalent of FAANG/ NVIDIA in Europe, just ASML and LVMH.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

spacebanana7 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 08:23:32 +0000

Usually export controls are applied to stuff where some significant % is made in America so a few US based engineers could make the project export controllable.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

spacebanana7 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:45:22 +0000

There’s a difference from being able to protect privacy, and doing so in a way that complies with EU law

New comment by spacebanana7 in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

spacebanana7 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:01:05 +0000

Cars can still show that they're poorly made pretty quickly.

New comment by spacebanana7 in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

spacebanana7 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:33:46 +0000

Additionally, vertically integrated companies don't get to tag along on innovations produced by upstream suppliers. Many EV companies will effortlessly have their range increase by a couple % each year, with battery costs falling, just because they can adopt the improvements of CATL/Panasonic/BYD etc.