Hacker News: ValentineC

CEO to staff: You're not getting a raise. We're spending on AI instead

ValentineC — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:54:33 +0000

Article URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/teradata-pauses-raises-employee-compensation-ai-budget-2026-6

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407401

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by ValentineC in "Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India"

ValentineC — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 01:46:10 +0000

I'm sweating as I read this in a non-air-conditioned room.

No, I'm already not comfortable indoors. It's much worse outdoors.

New comment by ValentineC in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

ValentineC — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:18:03 +0000

> I wonder to what extent models should figure out which model to forward a query to. Or perhaps the big models could learn the difference between an easy and a hard question and charge accordingly?

This sounds like something a harness could do (and might already be doing), with work delegated to subagents running on lower-cost models.

New comment by ValentineC in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

ValentineC — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:38:36 +0000

> I noted that my own token usage comes to about $1,000/month against each of Anthropic and OpenAI - which currently costs me just $100 per provider thanks to their generous subsidized plans for individual subscribers.

Do we know that AI providers are going to keep these per-token prices, or eventually lower them because of competition from China?

Many lower-budget individuals are now moving to China open weight models like DeepSeek. I wonder if China's really subsidising the providers, or if inferencing costs are actually much lower, and Anthropic/OpenAI are just making sure no money's left on the table for their eventual IPOs.

Agent-Model Matching Guide

ValentineC — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:08:15 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/code-yeongyu/oh-my-openagent/blob/dev/docs/guide/agent-model-matching.md

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48376312

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ValentineC in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

ValentineC — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:25:21 +0000

> The simple fact that 2FA can be removed by low level support staff drives me mad. It defeats the whole purpose of the process.

Crazy Domains (one of the few registrars for my ccTLD) removed 2FA from my account (that was in the process of getting hijacked) despite me being on the phone with them specifically telling them not to do so [1][2].

What's worse was that my account got targeted by the same hijacker again when they seemingly changed their support system, and was hijacked for a few hours, leading to my Twitter account getting compromised (this happened around the same time fElon laid off a bunch of people and removed phone-based 2FA from accounts).

Fuck Crazy Domains and Newfold Digital (formerly known as EIG).

I eventually lost my OG username because fElon wanted it for his Grok nonsense anyway [3]. Fuck Elon too.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913341

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47859496

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47856983

New comment by ValentineC in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

ValentineC — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:19:04 +0000

> The fact it can be removed by anyone is the problem. If you lose access to your 2FA (and recovery codes) then you should lose access to your account. Having it removable by anyone (other than a logged in account holder) defeats the entire point.

At least make it a major pain in the ass to recover like AWS, which requires some kind of notarised identity verification [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13122723

New comment by ValentineC in "Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions"

ValentineC — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:43:17 +0000

Good luck trying to not use Meta products (specifically WhatsApp) as a (non-tech) professional outside the US needing to communicate with their counterparts.

The best compromise for such people, I guess, would be a work phone number that's solely for business WhatsApp communication.

New comment by ValentineC in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

ValentineC — Sun, 31 May 2026 14:42:15 +0000

A lot of non-software businesses probably outsource their websites to some bottom barrel consultant in LCOL countries.

That, or they're such a small business that they never expected one of their random products to be HN hugged to death.

New comment by ValentineC in "United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert"

ValentineC — Sun, 31 May 2026 14:40:19 +0000

> Those new obfuscated links prevent old.reddit to work.

Can't you just set the old theme in your profile? That's what I do.

New comment by ValentineC in "Various LLM Smells"

ValentineC — Fri, 29 May 2026 23:31:57 +0000

> Business logic is disconnected. It's why agentically produced codebases are MUCH larger than they should be; every feature is developed in a vacuum.

I just had Opus 4.7 build a feature twice, because it didn't close a ticket the first time. (I'm trying to solo-build a fairly large greenfield project, and am at the point where I let it go ham over my codebase because of the scale of things.)

I then spent a couple of hours asking it to compare the features. It argued that they were completely different features for a while, then eventually acquiesced and said that they were redundant.

That's a couple of thousands of tokens and time I'm never going to get back.

New comment by ValentineC in "Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”"

ValentineC — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:27:19 +0000

There aren't any screenshots of conversations with Stripe support in the blog post, but I'm guessing one other reason is that support agents are incentivised to close tickets or end conversations as quickly as possible.

Bedrock and a hard place: Claude adventure leaves AWS user with $30K invoice

ValentineC — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:35:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theregister.com/saas/2026/05/14/bedrock-and-a-hard-place-claude-adventure-leaves-aws-user-staring-down-30k-invoice/5238153

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285618

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by ValentineC in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

ValentineC — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:23:47 +0000

> OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox.

OneDrive for Business and OneDrive Personal are two different backends. I'm guessing that you're using the "Business" version?

New comment by ValentineC in "Incident with Actions and Pages"

ValentineC — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:46:20 +0000

Not reflected on GitHub Status: most of the frontier models disappearing from most people's subscriptions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1toa9tf/mode...

New comment by ValentineC in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

ValentineC — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:19:03 +0000

> I get excessive storage utilisation warnings for some shared drives I used to have but because I no longer have a paid up license, I can’t manage shared drives anymore. So I can’t delete them.

I had the same problem, and when my account was suspended, it was practically impossible to resubscribe because no Workspace plan could accommodate the amount of storage I used.

I'd thankfully managed to transfer out most of my important data elsewhere, so I made my peace with the less important Linux ISOs getting deleted.

New comment by ValentineC in "Ruby for Good"

ValentineC — Mon, 25 May 2026 08:04:56 +0000

Opus 4.6 and 4.7 can probably come up with something better than most open source contributors, given a few iterations.

We should figure out how to get more designers contributing to open source.

New comment by ValentineC in "Vivaldi 8.0"

ValentineC — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:45:49 +0000

Vivaldi is somehow the only Chromium-based browser whose extensions survive a macOS migration, presumably because they don't do the same extension encryption that other Chromium browsers do.

It's also fantastic for tab hoarders like me.

New comment by ValentineC in "Cisco workforce reductions"

ValentineC — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:49:43 +0000

Most "work" visas are non-immigrant visas. H-1B is dual intent, at least.

New comment by ValentineC in "Claude for Small Business"

ValentineC — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:40:07 +0000

> The drug is scary when everyone is depending on it. I wonder what is future like.

I can't wait for a Hollywood blockbuster that'll pretty much be science non-fiction.