> And this is the gate that lets me sleep: a story only auto-publishes if the editor says PASS, the risk score is comfortably low, a hero image exists, and it has at least one source
I've read more than a handful of AI-generated articles on HN recently. The last one even had a fake author with a fake face. despite the site insisting it had human editors and reviews. The web property was created by a marketing/AI agency from (AFAIK) a European country with zero employees credentialed to edit hard science news articles, also zero employees with English names and faces like the supposed author.
> the worst infinite scroll I've ever seen making it impossible to access the footer
Let's be fair, it's possible to reach the footer! You keep pressing the end key for like a minute or two and 665 requests (with embedded base64 encoded images and all) later, you have your footer.
So saying it's possible to reach the footer would be technically correct - the best kind of correct!
But the hero image is an AI homage to cute paper-craft, to remind us that people cannot or will not put in that level of effort any more, so it's okay!
I helped set up the first meeting between a Microsoft executive and Thomas Preston-Werner.
One of the moments that stood out to me was when Robert Youngjohns (the exec) asked Tom what it would take to have GitHub move to Azure. I was surprised that Tom had a response ready, saying that IOPS were really important and that virtual disks weren’t fast enough.
If there’s one thing that surprised me at AWS during my time there - over a decade ago now - that I was not clearly expecting in advance, it was the scale and competence of the units fulfilling the colossal and unceasing growth in capacity demand.
This led me to reconsider Amazon as a whole, and I still think of it basically as a logistics firm, with the shop and the public cloud merely a monetisation thereof.
It’s filling in a lot of the holes, but it’s putting a very convincing paper cover over the ones it misses. So it’s very hard to find the ones it didn’t fill, better hope your most valuable customers don’t walk over the paper ones!
I am surprised it is that low. The Bun Zig-to-Rust AI port was 6755 commits in like two weeks. If you make 10 commits per working day, that is 2500/year.
While that is (hopefully) the upper end of the distribution, several companies have loudly encouraged engineers to light tokens on fire to the AI gods, so it only takes a handful of the devout to push up the average in gas town like ventures.
I suspect there is a cacophony of work that happens when a commit hits the server. That request needs to get replicated, git repositories need to be repacked, pull requests need to calculate diffs, CI jobs need to execute, on and on.
That's also just assuming the good-faith usage. There are probably plenty of adversarial and poorly behaved scrapers that are putting additional load on the system.
That commit count alone should not become any problem for infrastructure, even for Azure. They probably developed some ungodly mess with actions that did not/could not translate very well on Azure infrastructure.
Seems very reasonable, from my use. I commit much more often, as checkpoints, with branch rules that prevent force pushes/deletions, so the agents can't delete anything. And, suspect MS is only counting commits, and not the eventual squashes to one commit.
We had it internally with our teams that open a PR to then push like 10-20 more commits but never actually interested in the client builds etc. turned out they opened the PR as a checkmark/ way to share the current state.
We set cooldowns and auto cancel for the ci. And then there is the developer who uses the CI compute to run tests instead of running them locally for various reasons.
We had to remind that compute isn’t for free.
Nope. You can configure CI to not run for every commit of every branch (seems insane to have full CI for every commit, unless you don't allow your devs to push until done with something, which also seems insane).
They were originally on their own datacenters + huge amounts of burst and ancillary stuff in AWS, the internal push to move away from "the competitor's cloud" after the acquisition was huge and entirely stupid. I'm ex-GitHub and was one of the annoying people constantly saying GitHub should only move where it was provably the best option for GitHub - the third best major cloud provider is likely never it on merits alone.
If this story is true, it's good that they finally realised that GitHub's performance and availability mattered more than using Microsoft's products. It would mean someone finally came to their senses rather than forcing a wholesale push to Azure - but I bet they still want to have it both ways even if they concede some AWS now.
In the early 2000's they did the same dumb thing to WebTV: forced a move from Solaris to Windows, that completely wrecked the engineering team's velocity and motivation.
AWS gets a lot of money from both the unclassified government work they do plus the more secretive work. If they were required to disclose as part of that, they would disclose - why put all those contracts at risk?
I clicked on the PRs to see if there was anything interesting to look at. I started reading one when I just realised I was just reading someone’s Claude talking to GitHub Copilot. That was when I decided that the Dead Internet Theory had already happened.
I'm not sure if it was entirely true, but there are stories that after Microsoft bought Hotmail in the mid-90's, they quickly attempted to move them from FreeBSD (?) to Windows NT. But it failed miserably, and they went back to the original stack for another ~decade.
the FreeBSD migration didn’t take that long - iirc this was the frontend migration to an IIS ISAPI.
the Solaris bits (storage and routing tables) took far longer - and again iirc the frontend had been rewritten in C# before all the Sun hardware had been decommissioned.
What kind of vibecoded website is this?
- the worst infinite scroll I've ever seen making it impossible to access the footer
- the title tag doesn't seem to work properly (just shows the URL in the tab title, on Chrome and Firefox)
- 2007-style keyword stuffing in meta keywords
- the entire page is client-side react with a completely empty body?
The agency that built it even proudly states on their website that they vibecode everything: https://gradientnoise.com/
EDIT: Turns out, the articles are mostly AI-generated as well? https://blog.ryanmerket.com/how-i-built-runtimewire-a-one-pe...
> And this is the gate that lets me sleep: a story only auto-publishes if the editor says PASS, the risk score is comfortably low, a hero image exists, and it has at least one source
I've read more than a handful of AI-generated articles on HN recently. The last one even had a fake author with a fake face. despite the site insisting it had human editors and reviews. The web property was created by a marketing/AI agency from (AFAIK) a European country with zero employees credentialed to edit hard science news articles, also zero employees with English names and faces like the supposed author.
The interslop is real. Simulacra and simulation.
> the worst infinite scroll I've ever seen making it impossible to access the footer
Let's be fair, it's possible to reach the footer! You keep pressing the end key for like a minute or two and 665 requests (with embedded base64 encoded images and all) later, you have your footer.
So saying it's possible to reach the footer would be technically correct - the best kind of correct!
But the hero image is an AI homage to cute paper-craft, to remind us that people cannot or will not put in that level of effort any more, so it's okay!
works fine on the phone
I can't confirm that.
Mobile Chrome can't show a tab title either https://i.k8r.eu/3vVCTQ.png
And the infinite scroll causes the page to constantly jump back up, again preventing me from accessing the footer
And of course with JS disabled you get nothing at all (which affects RSS readers, kindle devices, etc)
Now i see the problem yeah same on my device to
I helped set up the first meeting between a Microsoft executive and Thomas Preston-Werner.
One of the moments that stood out to me was when Robert Youngjohns (the exec) asked Tom what it would take to have GitHub move to Azure. I was surprised that Tom had a response ready, saying that IOPS were really important and that virtual disks weren’t fast enough.
I had a feeling this was all related to someone trying to run a database on networked disks.
every fucking time
Wait, are you trying to tell me that 1/100th the speed at 50x the price isn’t a great offer for Microsoft’s customers!?
Heathen lies!
Oh, wait… we have to use it? Oh, that’s terrible…
If there’s one thing that surprised me at AWS during my time there - over a decade ago now - that I was not clearly expecting in advance, it was the scale and competence of the units fulfilling the colossal and unceasing growth in capacity demand.
This led me to reconsider Amazon as a whole, and I still think of it basically as a logistics firm, with the shop and the public cloud merely a monetisation thereof.
I wonder how that translates to Blue Origin and how they managed to be so completely outclassed by SpaceX.
> commits were on pace to hit 14 billion in 2026, up from 1 billion in 2025
So AI means 14x the checkins? That's not 14x features completed, but still... wow.
AI has 100x'd our productive capacity such that we're moving at unforeseen speeds at digging holes and refilling them!
This is too generous, they aren't even filling in the holes.
It’s filling in a lot of the holes, but it’s putting a very convincing paper cover over the ones it misses. So it’s very hard to find the ones it didn’t fill, better hope your most valuable customers don’t walk over the paper ones!
I am surprised it is that low. The Bun Zig-to-Rust AI port was 6755 commits in like two weeks. If you make 10 commits per working day, that is 2500/year.
While that is (hopefully) the upper end of the distribution, several companies have loudly encouraged engineers to light tokens on fire to the AI gods, so it only takes a handful of the devout to push up the average in gas town like ventures.
Is that even a lot?
Spread over a year, roughly estimating a generous 4 kbytes of data per commit, comes out to a throughput of a little under 2 MB/s.
Of course, it isn’t spread out uniformly and there is also a lot of hashing and other things going on.
Maybe pulls and clones drive more I/O ?
I suspect there is a cacophony of work that happens when a commit hits the server. That request needs to get replicated, git repositories need to be repacked, pull requests need to calculate diffs, CI jobs need to execute, on and on.
That's also just assuming the good-faith usage. There are probably plenty of adversarial and poorly behaved scrapers that are putting additional load on the system.
Recalculate percentage of each language in the repo, recalculate top contributors, recalculate the stats for the committer's profile etc etc.
That commit count alone should not become any problem for infrastructure, even for Azure. They probably developed some ungodly mess with actions that did not/could not translate very well on Azure infrastructure.
Seems very reasonable, from my use. I commit much more often, as checkpoints, with branch rules that prevent force pushes/deletions, so the agents can't delete anything. And, suspect MS is only counting commits, and not the eventual squashes to one commit.
And every checking runs a whole CI run?
We had it internally with our teams that open a PR to then push like 10-20 more commits but never actually interested in the client builds etc. turned out they opened the PR as a checkmark/ way to share the current state. We set cooldowns and auto cancel for the ci. And then there is the developer who uses the CI compute to run tests instead of running them locally for various reasons. We had to remind that compute isn’t for free.
Nope. You can configure CI to not run for every commit of every branch (seems insane to have full CI for every commit, unless you don't allow your devs to push until done with something, which also seems insane).
I wonder what percentage of pull requests are cascading updates caused by dependabot and multiple code review bots reviewing those PRs.
My belief is it is likely 1% or more. And likely coming in as an avalanche.
Easy to criticize this, but I rather see GitHub survive than fail under its own success. So thanks for acting on this MS!
They were originally on their own datacenters + huge amounts of burst and ancillary stuff in AWS, the internal push to move away from "the competitor's cloud" after the acquisition was huge and entirely stupid. I'm ex-GitHub and was one of the annoying people constantly saying GitHub should only move where it was provably the best option for GitHub - the third best major cloud provider is likely never it on merits alone.
If this story is true, it's good that they finally realised that GitHub's performance and availability mattered more than using Microsoft's products. It would mean someone finally came to their senses rather than forcing a wholesale push to Azure - but I bet they still want to have it both ways even if they concede some AWS now.
In the early 2000's they did the same dumb thing to WebTV: forced a move from Solaris to Windows, that completely wrecked the engineering team's velocity and motivation.
They did the same thing to Hotmail as well. It was fine running on FreeBSD/Solaris. Microsoft didn't need to switch to windows for no good reason.
Interesting to see Anthropic go with xAI and Microsoft go with Amazon.
(Probably just tea leaves. If you wanted to be extra spicy, you’d note that Jassy just threw Fable under the bus.)
AWS gets a lot of money from both the unclassified government work they do plus the more secretive work. If they were required to disclose as part of that, they would disclose - why put all those contracts at risk?
Doesn't most of Anthropics revenue come from AWS still?
Saving this for the next time someone trots out the "All cloud providers are the same" line
I was recently looking at a Python project to learn a bit about RTC and just generally hack around and try something out.
https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc
It was fun and I found the code nice and helpful.
I clicked on the PRs to see if there was anything interesting to look at. I started reading one when I just realised I was just reading someone’s Claude talking to GitHub Copilot. That was when I decided that the Dead Internet Theory had already happened.
GitHub used to get code after someone had thought about it.
Agents are starting to use it while they think.
Nature abhors a monoculture.
After a decade and hundreds of billions in spend, Microsoft has finally upgraded from Azure to AWS.
I have to imagine this is very temporary.
So this is an Hotmail moment?
Is this in reference to something that should be linked for those not alive or in the know at the time?
I'm not sure if it was entirely true, but there are stories that after Microsoft bought Hotmail in the mid-90's, they quickly attempted to move them from FreeBSD (?) to Windows NT. But it failed miserably, and they went back to the original stack for another ~decade.
the FreeBSD migration didn’t take that long - iirc this was the frontend migration to an IIS ISAPI.
the Solaris bits (storage and routing tables) took far longer - and again iirc the frontend had been rewritten in C# before all the Sun hardware had been decommissioned.
Yes. This happened.
Maybe this from 2012 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/aug/01/microsoft...
Soon we can see limits on free github account. I guess that is clean way to end this AI slop fiasco.
Still, it’s mostly text. You’d think it wouldn’t be that much of an issue.
and programming is just typing!
and now it's not even that!
My favorite part of this is that MS is just bending over to take it lest the gods scorn their "free" training data temple.
If they pull out "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." on AWS then I'm going to be impressed beyond mad.
That only work on smaller business/organization.
How is this relevant or possible here.