Hacker News Reader

bootsmannon US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike

Oil markets are global, you cannot hike prices for China while enjoying cheap oil yourself.

bootsmannon US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike

Noone could’ve seen this coming, how were they supposed to know that the strait of hormuz is so important!

bootsmannon How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform

Idk how big your team is of course but imo try to hire a technical writer (they’re really cheap now), it pays dividends for a long time as consistent style and keywords build up SEO reputation. This article is making the rounds, some bigger papers picked it up, it is very valuable to land it well.

bootsmannon Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages

This wouldn't happen if they used my CLAUDE.md of course!

bootsmannon Ask HN: Would you use a job board where every listing is verified?

Imo it might be worthwhile creating a job board that solves the “company-side” issue with the current recruitment process where 200 people will spam AI generated slop CV to every post that opens up. Some kind of account coupled with a ratelimit and you should already deliver some value to people recruiting.

bootsmannon UUID package coming to Go standard library

Really? Doesn’t v4 locally make the inserts into the B-Tree pretty messy? I was taught to use v7 because it allows writes to be a lot faster due to memory efficient paging by the kernel (something you lose with v4 because the page of a subsequent write is entirely random).

bootsmannon A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4k Developer Machines

Holy hell you’re right, scrolling through the post history of this “person” is crazy wtf.

bootsmannon What Python’s asyncio primitives get wrong about shared state

This is why we moved a lot of our concurrent python project to golang. There were a couple of cases where some engineer built the system by implicitly relying on the assumption that some coroutine would run blocking until a certain point was reached (avoiding a potential data race) that was then later broken by another change. At least in go we know we cannot rely on this so the concurrency safety has to be considered at all times, leading to better code.

bootsmannon OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub

> is the friction with all the alternatives you mention in getting something working

Have you tried to run openclaw? Their own docker container (apparently a compose now (???)) doesn't work for half the versions and the docs are probably the least informative thing you'll ever read.

bootsmannon The whole thing was a scam

This has already happened, its a key reason why the dollar is down 15% since the new admin took power.

bootsmannon Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension

This underlines the argument of the OP no? The argument presented is that the situation where nobody knows how and why a piece of code is written will happen more often and appear faster with AI.

bootsmannon Red Hat takes on Docker Desktop with its enterprise Podman Desktop build

(The poster works on podman for redhat)

bootsmannon Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

Infineon is _opening_ its fab plant in Dresden this year which was supported by around 1bn euros from the EU equivalent of the CHIPS Act. They started building this fab in 2023, while TSMC, who started building its fab in the US right after covid just delayed the opening to 2027

bootsmannon Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

> Well first of all, the CHIPS Act was not "axed", it is federal law passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of the House and Senate. It would take a complete reversal of congress to repeal it and it's still very popular among both parties.

DOGE cut basically all staff from the CHIPS Program Office, congress passed the money but Trump is choosing to turn it into a slush-fund the admin spends on industrial policy (such as buying a stake in Intel). Wolfspeed went into bankruptcy in part because the admin delayed CHIPS funding agreed by the previous admin [1] (it's unclear whether they received the grant now that they have left it).

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4aac09f9-19df-401a-9ab3-ef14a47bb...

bootsmannon Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

Are those plants still functional after CHIPS act was axed? I thought they mainly produce in Asia now.

bootsmannon Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

America doesn't manufacture DRAM either, this is all South Korea and Taiwan.

bootsmannon Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%

A significant part of this is probably just the hockey-stick growth in the price of memory we have seen in the past 6 months. Would be surprised if this wasn't impacting their bottom line for maintenance.

bootsmannon Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

Have you seen the code of OpenClaw? It would not surprise me if there is a mistake in there somewhere that causes the bot to hammer google auth for the refresh token in a very identifiable manner because noone in that repo is bothering to look at the code before merging. Moved fast, broke things.

bootsmannon Evaluating AGENTS.md: are they helpful for coding agents?

> Libraries (um looks like other LLM generated libraries -- I mean definitely not pure human: like Ragas, FastMCP, etc)

How does this invalidate the result? Aren't AGENTS.md files put exactly into those repos that are partly generated using LLMs?

bootsmannon Evaluating AGENTS.md: are they helpful for coding agents?

This reads a lot like bargaining stage. If agentic AI makes me a 10 times more productive developer, surely a 4% improvement is barely worth the token cost.

bootsmannon Apache Arrow is 10 years old

> Really, prefer DuckDB SQL these days for anything that needs to perform well, and feel like SQL is easier to grok than python code most of the time.

I switched to this as well and its mainly because explorations would need to be translated to SQL for production anyways. If I start with pandas I just need to do all the work twice.

bootsmannon US businesses and consumers pay 90% of tariff costs, New York Fed says

https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/2016/us-tire...

Ratio of 3 jobs lost per tire job saved.

> The thousand of hours labor, the material to source the widget, the real estate for the factory, the transportation now all occurs overseas.

This frees up massive amounts of capital that is more effectively spent playing to Americas strengths, this isn’t a zero sum game.

bootsmannon US businesses and consumers pay 90% of tariff costs, New York Fed says

> by increasing the cost of doing business with nations that subsidize their exports or undercut your companies with slave labour or lax environmental regulations

This is why the ”overregulated” EU got hit with a 30% tariff?

bootsmannon US businesses and consumers pay 90% of tariff costs, New York Fed says

> It does get hard to math out when you have to weigh the money the average consumer would save over the 10 million auto jobs in the US.

Not that hard to math out, the deadweight loss of tariffs is always non-zero. IIRC there was a pretty good paper that mathed out the impact of Obamas tire tariffs and concluded that it cost the economy significantly more jobs than it saved.

bootsmannon Sleeper Shells: Attackers Are Planting Dormant Backdoors in Ivanti EPMM

> but now there's a very strong incentive to not report data breaches and have your insurance premiums go up or government regulation come down

I would argue the opposite is true. Insurance doesn’t pay out if you don’t self-report in time. Big data breaches usually get discovered when the hacker tries to peddle off the data in a darknet marketplace so not reporting is gambling that this won’t happen.

bootsmannon Sleeper Shells: Attackers Are Planting Dormant Backdoors in Ivanti EPMM

Actually there is a significant push to more effective products coming from the reinsurance companies that underwrite cyber risks. Most of them come with a checklist of things you need to have before they sign you at any reasonable price. The more we get government regulation for fines in cases of breaches etc. the more this trend will accelerate.

bootsmannon Vouch

Maybe it is because I mostly contribute to projects that have corporate backers but this has not been my experience at all. Usually opening an issue with “I would be willing to fix this” gets good and quick responses from maintainers. Maybe linux kernel devs are different but I doubt many of us have to interact with that as part of our day-to-day business.

bootsmannon Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

It references sources that don’t claim what it says they do. Notably the Minnesota report alleging 50% fraud does not say that.

bootsmannon X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

Why do you think France doesn’t have such laws that delineate this legal definition?

What you’re implying here is that Musk should be immune from any prosecution simply because he is right wing, which…

bootsmannon Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

Tariffs cause a currency appreciation (they reduce imports, driving down the supply of the currency outside the country)