Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | amirhirsch's commentslogin

MIT should spin up MIT.ai for-profit, raise 100B @ 1T, then go buy big computer.

At least in my experience (MIT ’06) many of the people most comfortable gaming academics ended up in finance.

I've always felt that it was these kind of folks that caused the 2008 financial crisis


That's a very interesting call out, the connection between gaming academics and (gaming) finance.

They both do have very concrete point systems with a parallel set of less-measured but very real externalities, don't they?

This brings me to a bit of a related story.

A family member of mine who attended Princeton and was an undergraduate Residential Advisor (RA) in the dorms responsible for care of freshmen recalled hearing a presentation in the early 2000s to parents of students from an academic dean or faculty member. The dean boasted to the parents how great their kids were, describing how each year in the last decade they kept adding more work to the students and the students kept rising to the challenge. My family member RA, very aware of the resulting stress the students were under was horrified. This family member thrived at Princeton and loved it, but is quite wary of trying to put their own children on a track to get there or go there.

This event correlates with the increasing fraction of students at Princeton going into finance which began in the early 1990s and which peaked in 2006 with 46% of students at Princeton going into Finance. I had not considered a correlation between student psychological stress and psychology of "gaming"/cheating and the psychological going into finance until your comment.

At that time, there was some sense that perhaps many Princetonians went into Finance because they had to pay of the huge loans from the price tag. After a couple decades on working on financial aid improvements, now that Princeton (tuition) is free for people with family incomes under $250k/year and has been for a while, and still large numbers (admittedly not quite as large) are still going into finance, I'm not sure some of the psychological factors around taboo topics like gaming/cheating and/or more prosaic related factors like reducing cheating while properly sizing the expected workload for the non-cheating population have been explored.


Intentionally or negligently caused '08?

Intentional negligence? In many parts any reasonable looking into future should have made it clear things were unsustainable. Both on loan origination where rates would end up unsustainable for borrowers but also the derivative side with unsustainable liabilities. Screams of being intentional and negligent at same time, but it did make money.

Intention is becoming worthless in the disinformation age.

Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” suggests this is a cause for social instability and revolutions


Please have an endpoint for up-to-minute billing with hooks for notifications and setting limits, importantly have it correlate-with/be the endpoint that shows usage analytics.

Previous-co could never get argo billing to match argo analytics, and with no support from CF over months we backed away from CF completely in fear that scale-up would present new surprise unknown/untraceable costs

Previous-previous-co is probably the largest user of web worker


Dude is on hacker news on a Sunday. half the GDP of the world is competing with him. What metrics would you like to see?


An enforceable SLA with the services that Anthropic offers rather than putting an employee to respond to things on Sunday.


>> rather than putting an employee to respond to things on Sunday.

Maybe just maybe they didn’t put him here, rather he just a normal guy who reads HN, who is passionate about his role, and is here on his own time.


Maybe... maybe... maybe... none of this builds trust when there is something that does build trust; putting revenue on the line and opening yourself to legal liability. Otherwise everything is empty and meaningless, its just PR, and nothing more.


You can get a SLA and ZDR by choosing one of the Claude partners (eg on Bedrock)

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/api-an...


Then you should offer to pay them for one. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you, and they could probably deliver one to you for the right price. But it will be a high price.


They don't offer a ZDR [0] for files, even if you have a BAA or dealing with HIPAA data, no matter how much you pay them. Trust me, we have tried.

[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/zero-data-retention


I’m really confused. We were talking about SLAs, not other product features. Are you moving the goalposts?


There isn't an SLA nor is there any protections around file uploads to their services. Two, bad, things can be true at the same time.


Did you talk to them about purchasing an SLA? If so, what did they say?


I feel like you aren't really understanding what a Service-level Agreement actually is in practice. It's not a piece of paper with a specific number of nines and an associated price tag. They can be and often are very complicated documents that take multiple rounds of redlining to arrive at something both parties agree to.

If zero data-retention was non-negotiable for the customer, it's totally possible that the negotiations ended there.

I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish or unearth beyond what's already been said, which certainly suffices for me.


As both an attorney and SRE, I understand what an SLA is. And you can absolutely get an SLA when you buy cloud services from many vendors, including AWS. Some vendors provide it at all price points; others include it at higher service tiers, without complex negotiations needed at all. And, yes, if it’s not on the menu, you may need to negotiate one. But you can’t conclusively say “they don’t offer one” unless you’ve actually gone to the company and asked.

https://aws.amazon.com/legal/service-level-agreements/

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/slack...

https://support.atlassian.com/subscriptions-and-billing/docs...

Before you casually accuse someone of not knowing what they’re talking about, first make sure you’re on firm ground yourself.


It seems like you could save a lot of time and confusion by talking about the SLA that you pay for from Anthropic instead of establishing your bona fides by posting links to various unrelated companies’ SLA pages.

Like how was your experience negotiating your SLA with Anthropic? What ballpark are you paying for the SLA with Anthropic that you have in place? How many 9s does your Anthropic SLA cover? Obviously you haven’t posted a half dozen times in this thread about how Anthropic by nature of existing offers SLAs without any knowledge of that, so some simple stuff about your SLA with Anthropic would be helpful.


I make no unqualified claims as to whether Anthropic offers an SLA. I never did. But I do know that it's unreasonable to claim they don't when you didn't even take the steps to conclusively determine it for yourself.

As I said: "I’m sure they’d love to hear from you, and they could probably deliver one to you for the right price. But it will be a high price."


Oh, well in that case, if posting URLs counts as proof of… something, there doesn’t appear to be any SLA page anywhere in their sitemap. https://www.anthropic.com/sitemap.xml

Maybe it is just common for enterprise SaaS businesses to offer SLAs without having a page about it though. Something like that could possibly be unjustifiably burdensome as well because it’s not like they could just type “make a page about how we offer SLAs” and have it magically appear


Not everything a business might be willing to do is listed on their public website.


That’s a good point. Having an SLA page is an indicator that a business offers SLAs, not having an SLA page is also an indicator that they offer SLAs, just secretly. If you think about it all of the people constantly complaining about uptime and saying stuff like “I would pay money for an SLA from Anthropic if I could” probably means that they are killing it with all those secret SLAs.

I mean obviously they have to offer them, because they exist, as otherwise you’d have to believe something crazy like “they don’t currently offer them” for reasons “that they haven’t disclosed”


Again, many companies will do things they don’t ordinarily offer for the right price. I’ve seen it happen myself (on both the buyer and seller side) on many occasions.

It goes to the extent of the company itself! Very few businesses publicize that they’re for sale or put their company’s purchase price on their website. But acquisitions happen all the time.

Anyway, I don’t appreciate your sarcasm coupled with what seems to be willful ignorance about how the world works, so I won’t be participating in this discussion with you anymore.


I don’t get it. If you wanted to convince everybody about a vast universe of secret business and your expertise in it, why would you start with telling people that weren’t able to get an SLA from Anthropic that Anthropic offers SLAs? And then admit that you don’t actually know and then double down?

Like if I wanted to convince people that In’N’Out has a secret menu (they do) I wouldn’t start by saying “They have the ingredients to make onion rings, therefore they sell onion rings” (they do not). They offer burgers with lettuce instead of a bun (“protein style”) though. That’s a fact that you can verify by going there or calling them and asking about it. I didn’t rely on my assumptions based on other fast food restaurants, I relied on my knowledge of the topic!

Edit: It seems like bad faith to admit that you’re using “probably” interchangeably with “I don’t know” and then editing in “for a billion dollars” several posts into a conversation.

I guess enjoy posting about entirely unrelated conversations in other threads though. (otterley’s post about my having previously had a short amicable exchange with dang in a different thread was deleted, but I’ll leave this part up. I think digging through people’s post histories to find unrelated grievances is icky, for lack of a better word, and wildly unhelpful for any type of discussion)

Even with the “for a billion dollars” addition, admitting “I don’t know” and “probably” are interchangeable doesn’t really change anything from a logical standpoint. Nobody argued against you not knowing, so I don’t understand the purpose of the repetition.


> why would you start with telling people that weren’t able to get an SLA

That hasn’t been established. There’s no evidence that they went to Anthropic and tried to negotiate one.

> that Anthropic offers SLAs

I didn’t. I said “they probably will for the right price.” There are two modifiers in that statement. And the price is unspecified. Their first offer could be a billion dollars. Too expensive? Negotiate down.


I would invite you to notice your interlocutor's assumptions, especially as revealed in his prior comment. Look at how he misunderstands the situation:

> If you wanted to convince everybody about a vast universe of secret business and your expertise in it...

> Like if I wanted to convince people that In’N’Out has a secret menu...

You are discussing business. He is understanding you to be attempting to "mog" him, because he cannot adopt a perspective wherein the conversation represents anything other than a vacuous social challenge or "brodown."

In short, you're wasting your time.


I am so old :(

I looked up “mogging” and I’d think “my assumptions about stuff are valid because I’m a lawyer and don’t know what you do” would count more as mogging than “that doesn’t quite sound right, this is a conversation about something specific and not your general cleverness” but I’ve got a Benny Hill archive to get through


Those are not assumptions on your interlocutor's part. You've embarrassed yourself quite badly, I'm afraid. I know you don't understand how, but that doesn't change the fact of it.


> You've embarrassed yourself quite badly, I'm afraid.

:( you are right. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost an argument because hours into a discussion somebody introduced “what if a billion dollars” or “magic amulet” or “ブルマの母” etc


Boring corporate Ai will surely come, but hey, lets enjoy the wild west while it lasts. I am grateful to see Boris come here to address problems people face. I 100% sure nobody is making him - he has one of the coolest jobs in the world.


>he has one of the coolest jobs in the world.

So that means we just eject any critical thinking when it comes to companies, especially where they is no liability or obligation for them (Boris or Anthropic) to be honest.

Other than 'trust'.


Don’t like Anthropic? Use a competing service. At this point the sheer volume of your commentary is not particularly complimentary to your own critical thinking skills. It’s not your job to correct the internet or to convince randoms of the rightness of your position. Of all the things in the world to be pissed at so insistently, this seems to be a pretty minor one.


Gp was referring to AN/TPY2 which is the THAAD radar.

Iron dome has nothing to do with that systems.


Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. If you are the editor of Gray’s Anatomy, incompetence is malice.


> incompetence is malice

A subtle distinction, but I'd flip this as "malice is incompetence".


Both ring true, in this case.


Critically, Amdahl’s Law remains a conjecture until we have the maths to disjoin complexity class P from NC.


Not sure about the conclusion regarding NVidia value capture. I imagine the context for many applications will come from a physical simulation environment running in dramatically more GPUs than the AI part.


Beat me to it. Now I have to delete my reply.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: