Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
Assets are for practical purposes means and when relatively comfortable retirees draw on SS/401(k)s it is income. There are broadly two choices for the wealthy retirees:

1. cut back on SS and other benefits you can afford out of pocket 2. tax your income higher

I would wager they would choose 1. To this group, the taxes hurt worse than the benefit losses

For poor retirees: 1. cut benefits 2. don't cut benefits

I would wager they would choose 1

The other two commonly suggested fixes -- tax the wealthy and broad tax increases -- also fail in my opinion. The holes we are talking about are in the hundreds of billions per year and won't be fixed by taxing just the wealthy. A broad middle class tax increase will also likely be rejected as unpopular.

It really is my belief that a slow-motion failure here is best. If any fix occurs as the social security trust fund is at 0 cash and while the bond market is in revolt, there will be no fiscal room to maneuver to raise cash from the debt which forces rationing.

Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
If they can't implement something as simple as "decode upstream headers and determine if 429/503" I don't know what to say. Since this has knocked out all customers it indicates they likely don't have anything of this form implemented.
Comment · 2 months ago
I find this hard to believe in this context. They should be utilizing load shedding or admission control and killing/rejecting jobs rather than hard failures if it is a scaling issue. It's much more likely an actual software defect than just more load. If this was the case (which they would likely prefer) free/public tiers would be removed first to preserve paying customers services.
Comment · 3 months ago
Cloud procider revenue is generally understood to be highly durable and safe because it is associated with both diversified customers and workloads which are expected to be reasonably constant in aggregate.

Zitron's point is thay OpenAI and Anthropic have generated considerable sector concentration in GCP and Azure. If the LLM sector were to contract in volume, this concentration could harm cloud providers financials more than what would normally be expected based upon their prior revenue streams.

Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
Social security is funded through payroll taxes on employees and emloyers. The "run out" is in the sense of the amount of money going out exceeds that coming in and the saved funds have been depleted. In this sense, it can "run out" that the savings are depleted and the plan is cash flow negative.
Comment · 4 months ago
First I know what next is. Its standard enough.

Second, take this for what it is: your product may not be compelling in its current form. Building it to many different markets will not make it compelling. If you had a stronger revenue, please share it. This sounds incredibly thin.

Third, dont mistake building the same thing 20 times for different verticals for bonifide software skills. When a SWE builds the thing they have built before its usually to learn a language which is the easiest part of software. There is a reason a common adage in software is "9 women cant make a baby in a month". Breath is no replacement for depth.

Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 4 months ago
Having see what terminal vibecoding looks like (to the point where customers say "fix your app" during renewal conversations), I don't think this is likely to happen. There is definitely selection pressure being applied to SaaS companies and I would not expect people not directly responsible (PMs, sales, etc.) to be willing to accept responsibility for technical outcomes; after all they are product, not software experts.

It is possible this leads to a decrease in salary (and positions) but I do not believe the social commentary will pan out in the manner the author proposes. The people who most argue for vibe coding will themselves never accept responsibility for the technical outcomes.

Comment · 4 months ago
Because then the units fall into disrepair (because they no longer make sense to maintain) leading to less supply leading to lower availability of units leading to higher cost of housing.

See what happened in NYC regarding the consolidation of housing units.

Comment · 4 months ago
Also in OFAC compliance. It just comes up in a lot of places where workflows are compliance heavy.
Comment · 4 months ago
Compensating controls also come up in the context of BSA/AML.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton