Hacker News: bberenberg

New comment by bberenberg in "Rampart: Browser native on-device PII radaction"

bberenberg — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 16:33:28 +0000

I think all of your points are very valid, but it doesn’t remove the point that the government is trying to make it free and easy for application builders to do a little bit better than they are today. This is commendable on its own, even if it’s not perfect.

New comment by bberenberg in "TiddlyInstall: A universal, reusable, install system"

bberenberg — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 03:46:30 +0000

If you can do x and a pro can do x better who do you think can do it better using AI?

New comment by bberenberg in "Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout"

bberenberg — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:12:18 +0000

I think the main thing people paid for was avoidance of change. Devs already use mermaid (by preference or policy) and therefore they wanted to keep using it. When I first build the Markdown Macro in 2012/2013 my thesis was that people would want to keep using Markdown in place of WYSIWIG, and that there was value to having a file in git be a source of truth and updating it there would keep Confluence automatically updated thereby reducing work to keep docs accurate. The first half proved true for devs, the second half did not, the stats showed that almost everyone would paste the markdown source into the in Confluence editor. When we added Mermaid, we saw more of the same. I am not sure how much I can say without violating NDAs, but I would encourage anyone working in this space to work to understand the ratio between how often content is authored vs consumed and by whom in each category. The idea that 1% of people author the content for 99% of consumers that we see on the internet does not translate to corporate environments and this has important product implications.

New comment by bberenberg in "Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout"

bberenberg — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:31:01 +0000

I’m the author of one of the most popular mermaid renderers in Confluence. People spent huge sums of money on this. Feel free to message me if you have questions about the space.

New comment by bberenberg in "Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder"

bberenberg — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:26:28 +0000

Yup I agree with the consistent access across surfaces ideal. WorkOS has some cool piping to support this and uses it for their internal version of the same thing. I think everyone experimenting here is a good thing. I expect we’ll end up with a few good commonly use OSS approaches, a few tech companies with NIH syndrome versions for their needs, and commercial options like we have with past technologies. These are more reflections of culture amongst buyers than anything else.

New comment by bberenberg in "Show HN: Sx 2.0 – Share AI skills with your team through a Dropbox folder"

bberenberg — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:11:26 +0000

Hey Dylan, long time. The solution we landed on was that the skills should be authored by a small set of people who know what they’re doing and made available to non technical team members “magically”. This means either use your IT systems to push the configs, or embed them into an agent that doesn’t live on the desktop. We’ve gone the latter route and are building a whole company around solving this for regulated customers.

New comment by bberenberg in "The Meta Glasses backlash is changing how (or if) people use them"

bberenberg — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:37:47 +0000

The use cases I care about is roughly:

1. GoPro on my face for “action” activities like gokarting

2. Portable speakers + glasses + voice control for audio while running

3. Audio triggered camera for when hands are full. This one sounds dumb, but it’s one specific object in hands that matters. Your own kid. It’s a less intrusive way to capture moments from your perspective that you have with them. I am surprised that this isn’t where they focused ad dollars.

New comment by bberenberg in "Amazon without the knockoffs"

bberenberg — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:46:30 +0000

In the current age of AI, deepfakes, etc this is a very hard problem and I don't envy you. I think asking vendors to go through a paid verification process is fair. There are a slew of KYB vendors out there who can help.

New comment by bberenberg in "Amazon without the knockoffs"

bberenberg — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:25:40 +0000

Allow users to opt into you injecting referral links. If they opt in, when they land anywhere, you rewrite amazon links to your referral code. Costs users $0, it's opt-in, and you make money.

New comment by bberenberg in "Rent collections are down in New York"

bberenberg — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:02:11 +0000

We have 36 units in our coop iirc, so we are “large”. Generally I think our taxes are fairly reasonable. I just don’t think there is any reasonable solution here that isnt focused on a simple triangle:

- Build more, destroy short term value of existing owners

- Lower taxes, hurt short term city functioning

- Lower interest rates, drive up inflation

The only “fun” solution IMO is cut taxes and cut jobs programs that don’t deliver city value. DOE is a welfare scheme at this point.

New comment by bberenberg in "Rent collections are down in New York"

bberenberg — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:20:14 +0000

Am I understanding your point correctly as you hoping that an increase in tax rates drives property values down enough thay aggregate tax amounts are reduced?

The practical rental math in NYC is simple. Buy a $1M coop in a building with near zero costs. HOA will be at least 2k per month with the majority of that being property taxes. Thats your base rent. If you have a loan, add that to the base. You will not get cheaper rent until you drive aggregate taxes or interests rate down. There isn’t a huge profit margin on rents in NYC. I looked at a unit next door, and if we wanted to have rents break even on mortgage we would need to offer 85% cash up front. Im on the board of our coop, so I see how all of our financials function and same for prior buildings.

New comment by bberenberg in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)"

bberenberg — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:06:49 +0000

We're helping non technical users adopt AI by making usage visible. Power users become role models and people can upskill to gain value rather than lose their jobs to AI.

It's a complex problem because we need to balance trivial UX, with a slew of security and compliance requirements.

This is the first non founder developer role on the z0.ai codebase. We need someone who can own the full stack end to end: product surfaces people enjoy using, services that stay correct, and the taste to make both feel like one product.

We're funded and are live with our first customer already. We expect to onboard our next customer later this week and are actively ramping up sales efforts.

Check out the full job posting at https://www.z0.ai/careers/founding-engineer/ and send an email to join@z0.ai

New comment by bberenberg in "Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia"

bberenberg — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:33:13 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Use_of_primary_sourc...

It’s their official policy.

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

bberenberg — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:12:06 +0000

Stripe can’t do anything per the way CCs work. Asking for that to change is a big ask. Asking my vendor to help me not do business with people who are likely to scam me is a smaller one.

New comment by bberenberg in "Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia"

bberenberg — Wed, 27 May 2026 02:30:36 +0000

I have a hard time with the idea that Wikipedia is unbiased when the main source in most cases is news reporting. Wikipedia is a societal form of Gell-Mann Amnesia.

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

bberenberg — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:56:32 +0000

It matched their LinkedIn photo.

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

bberenberg — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:43:16 +0000

I got hit with a fraudulent chargeback (claim was the purchase was unauthorized and the person showed up in person to a class) and it was doubly bad because they paid via Link which means that Stripe actively verified them via 2FA.

Can someone explain to me why Stripe (or a competitor) doesn't offer a setting "refuse transactions for cards that have filed > x chargebacks with merchants this year"?

New comment by bberenberg in "Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files"

bberenberg — Mon, 25 May 2026 23:05:49 +0000

Only if it has access to exfiltrate data. We deny by default and the company has to allowlist each individual destination.

New comment by bberenberg in "Show HN: Tag Promptless on any GitHub PR/Issue to get updated user-facing docs"

bberenberg — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:58:16 +0000

I've built something similar to this internally and absolutely agree that timing is the real challenge.

Getting an AI to navigate a process is now easy. However, the difficult problem is having it understand: 1. How to screenshot or, even better, capture a GIF of exactly the right points in time 2. How to move the mouse and pause at the right points in time such that a human understands it

New comment by bberenberg in "Show HN: Sweep, Open-weights 1.5B model for next-edit autocomplete"

bberenberg — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:13:34 +0000

This seems great for code, but can this be used for non-code use cases?