Same - 72 million if it gets you a government favourable to your interests is a cheap price for the kind of resources those famously altruistic billionaires can throw around.
In the same week as the undercover documentary where one of the senior Reform figures said on hidden camera "but if gets you a friend in No 10, worth it" while discussing how to circumvent the law on foreign donations.
If we don't crack down hard on this shit now we'll pay for it later.
> If we don't crack down hard on this shit now we'll pay for it later.
The USA provided an excellent example for us to learn from. But I do wonder if this cancer of corruption has already spread worldwide and is too powerful to stop the well financed populism through which it spreads.
Its 13:15 UTC and 21 of the 30 submissions on the HN home page are not AI related. I'm not saying there isn't a problem with AI-related submissions, but I'm not sure its a flood.
If it is on the homepage then is it not algorithmically what the community wants? Have you tried the https://news.ycombinator.com/newest link? I find that I prefer it over the homepage and have does so for years.
I think your parent commenter's point is that the satellites are used to detect launches. No satellites == no early warning == temptation to launch preemptively.
It's possible. IIRC, the large powers have enough mobile nuclear capabilities that even if they suffered from a first strike, they could still retaliate and cripple the striking country, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
It's pretty much what Iran is doing to the US now with their supply of mobile ballistic missiles and drones, but on a global scale with subs/etc... added to the mix.
Github used to be built on mysql / redis / ruby on rails / C / shell, running on dedicated hardware. Microsoft left it like that after they acquired the company.
Eventually, though, they decided to migrate the whole thing to Azure. And they were far enough through that to be basically committed... when AI coding started hitting them with much higher workloads.
I personally think the reliability problems are more to do with the reliability of the Azure migration. But both factors are likely relevant.
They didn't leave the architecture alone, right? They shoved React in and created a weird SSR + React frankenstein that is objectively worse in many ways.
Ruby can't render React code. JavaScript can. With GitHub it seems that they sometimes can do SSR for the React bits, but that must mean that they're invoking a JavaScript interpreter within the Ruby process. Which means they have the overhead of two runtimes and the jank that comes with the IPC between the two.
It's just pointless hacks on hacks. GitHub didn't need React on the frontend and any potential resource savings of client side rendering were lost when they realized they need to do SSR on that stuff too.
I've encountered so much frontend jank as they expanded that portion of the stack whereas it was always excellent when it was just Ruby SSR and minimal JS on the frontend.
Wish they spent some AI tokens on that abomination to fix at least some of the countless issues it has, because their human engineers definitely won’t.
Well, maybe not completely down but the amount of navigation issues, screen flickers and unhydrated stylesheets I have everyday is not something I'd expect from such a product.
After their infamous "Fail Whale" outages, Twitter replaced its Ruby on Rails / MySQL stack with modern (at the time) technologies: Scala (functional language running on the JVM) / Finagle (RPC) / Thrift (framework) / Kafka (message queues) and this made Twitter stable under the load of several hundred million users.
Ruby is single-threaded, slow with poor GC and memory leaks. As Twitter's Alex Payne said publicly in 2008: "there shouldn't be doubt in anybody's mind that Ruby itself is slow" and that scaling Rails meant "just throw more instances at it"
tell that to Shopify that handles 8.15 million requests per second and processes 5.1 million per minute in sales during Black Friday. You scale your architecture, not your programming language.
Current Rails and Co are miles away from where they used to be then, but even then my feeling was that maybe it was the skill/culture/dev ops at Twitter that was at least partly responsible for the fail whale. But I don’t have any insight as to what was actually going on inside before and after that transition.
It’s 2026 and we’re still benchmarking Ruby using Twitter’s 2008 architecture. It was less about a language choice and more about years of architectural redesign. I thought we were past this by now.
The whole thing seems pretty opaque. I have a personal Pro subscription that I'm using exclusively with Claude Code on personal projects. I have no idea how close I'm currently getting to any limits, or whether that will start happening tomorrow. Nothing I've been able to find has really clarified it either way.
I've been using it on a few personal projects and run into the limits quite often. With Sonnet on high, I often hit right about the 5 hr mark when it resets. With Opus, I'll hit sooner.
I'm kind of surprised that you haven't been watching it with /usage to see where you're at. I've had a couple times that it ran out and lost what it was doing and had to start over, so I've gotten more careful.
And the time it burned $100 credit (that they gave us) and the fizzled with multiple agents, leaving me nothing of that work... Well, that was certainly instructive.
Then you'll probably also like /statusline too :D You just give it instructions on what you want to see down there, and it'll set it up. I like the model name and context.
My dictionary says torture implies pain or suffering, so based on that... I don't think it's fair to say that keeping people from dying by malnutrition is somehow akin to torture. Interfering with their personal freedom, yes, but not the same as torture. Some also argue hunger strikes are a psychiatric issue... and we force people to go to mental hospitals sometimes, don't we? How is that any better?
As others have said, this is about deliberate reality-destruction.
Scientists are notorious for believing in things like observable reality, truth, scientific and academic integrity, etc. That puts them in opposition to the people currently running the US government — who absolutely do not want "experts" pointing-out the deficiencies in their policies and scams.
Ron Suskind's quote of a Bush2-era politician sums it up:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'." [1]
Trump etc want to create a non-reality reality in which their grift and social engineering are so normal that they're unnoticed. Their contempt for, and dismantling of science, is part of that.
Essentially Brandolini's Law with a serving of dumbed-down-for-managers OODA-loop in action; all together essential ingredients for any cook specializing in post-truth dishes. Shake it well with learned helplessness and plenty of distraction-providing scapegoats, e. g. minorities, and your got a splendid poison stew people will line up for. Before they are lined up, in one fashion or another.
Scientists are also notorious for being ideologically infiltrated by authoritarian or totalitarian ideologies/regimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
The Soviet Union was convinced that collectivism was the ultimate form of human society and organization. Lysenkoism fed their biases, and Soviet Agrarian scientists struggled to point out the new collective experimentation by the government was a disaster (a similar problem was faced by Chinese scientists and Bureaucrats trying to implement Mao's great leap forward).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
Nazi Germany was convinced they were the greatest race on Earth, that Jews and Slavs were sub-human. Phrenology promised them a way to determine racial purity and back it up with scientific results.
The scientific community brought us lobotomies and eugenics too.
I don't try to keep up with HN. I check the home page (and Ask) when I'm bored or need distraction. If there are things that look interesting then I'll open the comments in separate tabs. If the comments are interesting then I'll maybe even [1] look at the article. If I miss stuff then whatever. HN is a firehose not a book.
[1] The main exception to this is Ken Shirriff's posts on righto.com (and maybe others) where I go straight to the post because they're so good.
I subscribe to The Guardian Weekly [1]. I read it at the weekend.
I'm a long-time Guardian reader, but I'm trying to reduce my exposure to constantly-updating, anxiety-inducing news. I only recently subscribed but it seems to be having a positive effect.
The subscription also includes access to their food and drink app, which I enjoy, and an app that gives me a static, digital version of that day's newspaper.
Nobody donates those kind of sums without wanting a quid pro quo. And the donors, as you say, are extremely dodgy. As a brit it frankly frightenes me.
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