<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: alex_sf</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alex_sf</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:53:34 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=alex_sf" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:53:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660488</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660488</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660488</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The models will only get better and inference cost will go down.<p>I don’t see any reason to think the same thing that happens with all tech won’t happen here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 05:35:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653927</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653927</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653927</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I take the specifications from the customer and type them into the AI</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 04:05:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653418</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653418</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653418</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> It’s either a maintenance issue. e.g., Opus recommended and implemented a fix for a database corruption crash. This was ~400 lines of code with many moving parts. I reviewed, and found out Android Room library already handles this recovery case, and all I needed was a 10 liner PR that catches this exception and ignores it.<p>I understand this, but I just can't bring myself to care.  I've been doing professional software work for almost two decades.  These sorts of improvements/time savers are great without AI.  With AI?  Whatever.  It's fine.<p>When the underlying lib has an issue, it'll be quicker to debug with the whole thing in context.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 03:27:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653209</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653209</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653209</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "I Connected My Withings Body+ to Home Assistant with an ESP32"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Whatever values you stick in there are about as accurate as the scale is, so.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:45:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602196</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602196</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602196</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Intelligence per unit of compute will almost certainly keep increasing.  That doesn't mean having more compute isn't still way, way better.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:49:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250973</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250973</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49250973</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My agent is currently doing the work of ~6 senior engineers, based on ticket closures.  These are not trivial tasks: all of them involve a mix of code, judgement, executing remote commands in a production environment, etc.<p>This is at a well-known tech company operating at massive scale (and resulting complexity).<p>L1/L2 tech support is completely dead within a couple years.  The delay is only around how long it takes people to realize.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:54:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471583</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471583</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471583</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> 1. that closed source models are more efficient than open source<p>Not a reasonable assumption for a variety of reasons.<p>> 2. Deepseek is served at a profit and not a loss<p>Not a reasonable assumption either.<p>> Why do you need to know the architecture? Just compare Deepseek V4's performance with GPT 4 and treat internals as a blackbox.<p>Because the internals are what actually matter and what drives inference cost.<p>It would be entirely reasonable to expect that GPT-5.5 has some sort of optimizations or changes to the architecture to make it easier to train, or to make runtime ablation easier, or to better handle large batches, or whatever.<p>Those changes, particularly if they are non-public, can easily result in worse inference performance than a comparably sized model without those changes.<p>> It is borderline conspiratorial to believe it this way.<p>It's not any sort of conspiracy.  It's how land-grab tech companies have always worked.  To presume otherwise is silly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 20:11:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172781</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172781</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172781</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's silicon valley and they are trying to aggressively grow.  Your baseline assumption should be the exact opposite.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 18:11:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171541</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171541</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171541</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's no reason to think that the latest frontier models have similar inference costs to open source models.<p>It would be more surprising if the surrounding architecture hasn't significantly diverged.  If it _hasn't_ significantly diverged, then given the performance difference it would imply that the frontier models have significantly greater param counts, which would result in a higher cost.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 18:10:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171526</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171526</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171526</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The price a company charges, _particularly_ a high growth VC-backed one, is a poor signal for their costs.<p>That blog post is not very compelling either.  Without knowing details of the architecture, comparing the various frontier models to open models doesn’t make sense.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 17:39:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171116</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171116</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171116</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean, they do (and did).  If you aren't shipping, you'll be out eventually.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 01:05:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057238</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057238</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057238</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Where the goblins came from"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"shape" too, at least with gpt5.5, is coming up constantly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 04:41:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958190</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958190</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958190</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> It is in the same way that educated guessing is.<p>I guess (heh) it depends on your definition of 'educated guessing'?  Looking at the problem, considering a solution, discarding it, trying another and testing, iteratively, is how most people would approach any tricky problem.<p>Brute force is substantially different.  It would be saying that, other than maybe setting some basic bounds and heuristics, I'm going to try literally everything and test each.  That's not at all what the LLM did here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:28:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917701</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917701</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917701</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This isn't brute force.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 03:59:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907208</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907208</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907208</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Open models, in actual practice, don't match up to even one or two generation prior models from Anthropic/OpenAI/Google.  They've clearly been trained on the benchmarks.  Entirely possible it was by mistake, but it's definitely happening.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Apr 2026 02:17:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47821284</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47821284</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47821284</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Claude Design"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Which is why compilers decimated the software industry.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 05:38:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47813421</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47813421</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47813421</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The same way companies already deal with any cost.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:51:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811427</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811427</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811427</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Claude Design"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Most people just want something that looks nice.  I understand it’s deeper to someone really into it, but the rest of us are fine with it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:10:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809456</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809456</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809456</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alex_sf in "Claude Code Routines"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Everytime I've tried a local model, and I have tried lots for a couple years now, they just seem like they were overtrained on benchmarks.  They consistently perform dramatically worse than even older models from Anthropic/OAI/Google.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:55:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774157</link><dc:creator>alex_sf</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774157</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774157</guid></item></channel></rss>