Hacker News: thundergolfer

New comment by thundergolfer in "Australia is the safest place during a global catastrophe, study suggests"

thundergolfer — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 01:22:30 +0000

Work in USA for exposure to good tail outcomes, have Aus citizenship as a refuge from v. bad tail outcomes.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident"

thundergolfer — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:20:09 +0000

Modal was not hacked. A Modal customer left an unauthenticated web endpoint running on Modal which could be used for code compilation and execution.

See https://modal.com/blog/a-note-on-the-hugging-face-agent-inci... for details.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace"

thundergolfer — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:02:44 +0000

Modal eng here. Getting the model running is quite challenging, but its accessible right now on Modal via Endpoints: https://modal.com/blog/kimi-k3-by-moonshot-now-available-on-...

New comment by thundergolfer in "The startup's Postgres survival guide"

thundergolfer — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:18:17 +0000

Having been early at a startup that relied on Postgres I think this post doesn't put enough focus on monitoring and alerting. Postgres has a few key failure modes that you want to avoid ever happening, and you can use alerting to get early warning that you're danger of it happening.

For example, AWS will send you an email if you're approaching XID wraparound. In a startup that email is very likely to be missed, especially if it's sent on Boxing day. You want whatever AWS is watching to send you that email to be something connected to a pager.

Scaling to 1M concurrent sandboxes in seconds

thundergolfer — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:04:32 +0000

Article URL: https://modal.com/blog/scaling-to-1-million-concurrent-sandboxes-in-seconds

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48940231

Points: 76

# Comments: 15

New comment by thundergolfer in "Punk, or why I don't stream anymore"

thundergolfer — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:11:10 +0000

Not really that related. Refinement culture is concerned with evolving aesthetics and marketing which is partly a response to globalization and the rising middle classes of asia, partly related to digitization, and partly just a normal evolution of style.

What George is talking about here is much more related to the ideas of Nick Land, technocapital, Marshall McLuhan, and man's relationship to industrialization.

> Isolation is basically impossible because the Internet follows you everywhere. And it’s perfectly uniform, there is no other Internet, just a place with five corporate towns and some Chinese ones that are really hard to visit if you don’t speak Chinese.

This is McLuhan's "global village".

> I don’t think I’m properly capturing the scope of the machine. First you build the fence to keep the animals out then you build the fence to keep the animals in. It’s a Fullmetal Alchemist homunculus maybe it has already eaten your soul.

This is Nick Land.

New comment by thundergolfer in "MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control"

thundergolfer — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:18:57 +0000

Major Sandbox providers (e.g. Modal) run on non-hyperscaler bare metal not AWS and so don't need to markup on AWS's markup. Thus, prices are comparable or better than AWS.

New comment by thundergolfer in "How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s"

thundergolfer — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 05:34:00 +0000

You're talking about AWS Lambda?

- Their use of bare metal isn't necessarily the latest gen hardware - AWS Lambda is part of AWS, and obviously has privileged access to supply

New comment by thundergolfer in "How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s"

thundergolfer — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:42:40 +0000

Unfortunately supply is quite limited. If you want to horizontally scale on these instances you need to have a good relationship with AWS so they'll give you a big allocation before c9i is a thing.

Failure numbers every programmer should know

thundergolfer — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:16:55 +0000

Article URL: https://thundergolfer.com/blog/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497743

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by thundergolfer in "Surprise, pay $1000"

thundergolfer — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:32:14 +0000

> Well, we tried switching back to GitHub Actions, and… yeah it still sucks. Blacksmith has grown explosively because it makes an increasingly frustrating bottleneck in the dev cycle faster.

Where's the "grown explosively" bit coming from? Google doesn't have growth news from 2026, only early 2025.

New comment by thundergolfer in "OpenAI Submits S-1 Draft to SEC"

thundergolfer — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:56:17 +0000

No a Ponzi scheme involves not output, but here there is very much output in the inference being sold by Anthropic. Pretty big difference.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

thundergolfer — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:18:13 +0000

> That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package.

Probably better to use the fully-loaded cost of the engineer, which is much higher than their compensation package. The fully-loaded cost is the total cost paid for the labor power of the engineer, and it includes big ticket items such as office space, food, equipment, insurance, payroll tax, fringe benefits, recruiting costs.

If the median compensation package is $330k/year then the median fully loaded cost is probably around $450-500k.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Can we have the day off?"

thundergolfer — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:28:15 +0000

This is downvoted but's it pointing out a fundamental dynamic in capitalism. Labour activists had to intervene in this dynamic to protect workers from being exhausted by the constant need for capital to increase labour exploitation to increase profits.

Almost this entire thread is people discussing a labour issue with no reference to the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Training our own AI models"

thundergolfer — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:28:00 +0000

“Opt-in by default” is just Opt-out. We already have the term.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

thundergolfer — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:04:38 +0000

https://teachyourselfcs.com/ is an excellent list

Safetykit: A small collection of safety demos for human-in-the-loop scripts

thundergolfer — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:59:03 +0000

Article URL: https://thundergolfer.com/safetykit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48194235

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by thundergolfer in "Where Are All the Data Centers?"

thundergolfer — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:36:26 +0000

I just can’t handle this guy’s “it’s a tulip bubble!” approach when just yesterday Thinking Machines released a demo which would have been taken as literal magic if it was shown 20 years ago.

The tech is astonishing and Ed spends 98% of his writing acting like the industry is a scam.

New comment by thundergolfer in "To my students"

thundergolfer — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:45:44 +0000

Completely agree that it's off-putting. The author indeed has only ever worked in academia per his LinkedIn.

But disagree that this is a path to unemployment. At work we go very fast and yet I think fast is compatible with each of those points, just not in all situations.

Marc Brooker, distinguished eng at AWS, gives much more useful advice for industry, as you'd expect given his almost 30 years in industry.

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03/25/ic-junior.html

New comment by thundergolfer in "The Vercel breach: OAuth attack exposes risk in platform environment variables"

thundergolfer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:30:48 +0000

> AI-accelerated tradecraft. The CEO publicly attributed the attacker's unusual velocity to AI augmentation — an early, high-profile data point in the 2026 discourse around AI-accelerated adversary tradecraft.

Attributed without evidence from what I could tell. So it doesn't reveal much at all.