Re: Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

A business man at a prior employer sympathetic with my younger, naive "Microsoft sucks" attitude told me something I remember to this day:

Microsoft is not a software company, they have never been experts at software. They are experts at contracts. They lead because their business machine exceeds at understanding how to tick the boxes necessary to win contract bids. The people who make purchasing decisions at companies aren't technical and possibly don't even know a world outside Microsoft, Office, and Windows, after all.

This is how the sausage is made in the business world, and it changed how I perceived the tech industry. Good software (sadly) doesn't matter. Sales does.

This is why most of Norway currently runs on Azure, even though it is garbage, and even though every engineer I know who uses it says it is garbage. Because the people in the know don't get to make the decision.

petterroea, 2 days ago

Я в певний момент прийшов до схожої думки, і мене досі цікавить який відсоток з цих угод мають під ковром якийсь відкат. Я навіть не здивуюся, якщо в них є якийсь стандартизований спосіб давати хабарі, щось типу gift-cards або якийсь Certified Microsoft Partner статус і фейкові (і не дуже) лекції

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

I worked for Equifax many moons ago. They had a problem with people taking jobs there that no one else wanted, solely to gain access to their systems and reset their own credit scores. And, for some reason, they couldn’t roll it back once found out. Great company.

xvxvx, 13 hours ago

Чекаю коли хтось додумається проводити бенчмарки для LLM на людях. Хочу побачити середній depth of thinking

Re: Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)

This man poured concrete around a power strip, chemically aged copper with ammonia, rusted rebar with peroxide, faked a damaged cable for vibes, and vibrated out the air bubbles with a dildo. This is the most unhinged and delightful Show HN I've ever seen.

atlgator, 2 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Kimberly-Clark_Distribution_Center_fire

>The warehouse building was estimated to be worth $156 million.[8] and $500M in inventory. According to a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, loss of the warehouse could impact 3% of sales in the West Coast region.[9]

>Abdulkarim had shared a video of him starting the fire, repeatedly saying "All you had to do was pay us enough to live" while lighting pallets on fire,[7] and ending his statements with, "there goes your inventory".

Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

I had a strange and similar interaction with Google recently. I was asked to do the Android developer verification, but then I missed a deadline at some point. Support said that I would need to create a new Google account for all of this. I said this was unacceptable as this was a Google account I had for nearly 25 years and I didn't want to create another. They said tough luck, go make the new account. Luckily, I had recently married and was making a new account for the name change. I tried to use that account, but it wanted a different phone number to use for verification, but I only have one number and you can't use Google voice numbers. I went back and told Google I cannot use the same phone number to verify and I'm not buying a burner phone to do this with. Then they just said "Ah, ok, we'll fix your original account then" and fixed the original account. This was literally a week of back and forth. Pointless waste of time.

ddtaylor, 2 days ago

Re: How We Broke Top AI Agent Benchmarks: And What Comes Next

This is a phenomenal paper on exploits and hopefully changes the way benchmarking is done.

From the paper: We achieved near-perfect scores on all of them without solving a single task. The exploits range from the embarrassingly simple (sending {} to FieldWorkArena) to the technically involved (trojanizing binary wrappers in Terminal-Bench), but they all share a common thread: the evaluation was not designed to resist a system that optimizes for the score rather than the task.

ggillas, 18 hours ago

Re: Tell HN: docker pull fails in spain due to football cloudflare block

Heh, lucky you, at least you get a message. My ISP just drops traffic to the affected IPs. No ping, no traceroute, just a spinner in the browser until it says "page not found".

Every response and comment from LaLiga, the football organization responsible for this, has been so far that this is a minor issue that only affects a few bunch of nerds who talk about "docker images" or "github repositories" or "whatever that means".

Meanwhile, there are testimonies of smart home devices like anti-theft alarms or automatic doors, that stop working whenever there is a football match, because their backends rely on Cloudflare.

Last week, a woman asked for help on social media, as the GPS tracking app she uses to see where her father with dementia is, went offline during a match. It was getting late and he still wasn't back home, and she couldn't locate the tag he was wearing to find him: https://www.infobae.com/america/agencias/2026/04/05/laliga-d...

It's hard to say this, because no one should experience an event like this, but as stressful as these are, it's the only way to make the mainstream people care about this censorship. "I cannot pull a docker image" will never be on nightly news, but safety and personal security is a more powerful driver for discourses.

danirod, 4 hours ago

Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs

> We had a budget alert (€80) and a cost anomaly alert, both of which triggered with a delay of a few hours

> By the time we reacted, costs were already around €28,000

> The final amount settled at €54,000+ due to delayed cost reporting

So much for the folks defending these three companies that refused to provide hard spending cap ("but you can set the budget", "you are doing it wrong if you worry about billing", "hard cap it's technically impossible" etc.)

benterix, 2 hours ago

Ну я типу звик що маршрутчики ведуть і паралельно рахують гроші і перекладають монетки, але до того, що він на ходу буде їбатися з тіпом, щоб той йому кинув на карту за проїзд, я був не готовий)