Hacker News: benced

New comment by benced in "Mother convicted of: her 5 yo walks short way to pond alone in Virginia"

benced — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 04:21:25 +0000

This is potentially stupider than the claimed crime.

Apple should allow under-13 kids to use digital transit passes

benced — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:06:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.slowboring.com/p/an-easy-way-to-give-kids-more-freedom

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49538363

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by benced in "Stripe Clinches over $7B Deal to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter"

benced — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:34:24 +0000

All the model companies except kind of Anthropic (and even they half-assedly do) implement the OpenAI API. It's not an open standard but, like the S3 API, it effectively is.

And, to answer your question, no. The existence of a common API makes it trivial to change zero code and send requests to a different model.

New comment by benced in "So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂"

benced — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:48:16 +0000

This seems trivial: if you could add enough plants to your room to reduce CO2, we could easily do the same thing at planet-scale and global warming wouldn't be an issue.

New comment by benced in "San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing"

benced — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:56:40 +0000

The situation you're positing already basically exists with housing - who literally ask for proof of your income - and while housing goes up at unreasonable rates due to lack of construction, it clearly doesn't go up at the same rate (and _definitely_ not by the same raw amount) as income does.

New comment by benced in "San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing"

benced — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:48:39 +0000

I suspect part of the reason this is playing well on this website is banning surveillance pricing is great for rich people. I don't have the time or inclination to coupon or aggressively cross-shop but I benefit a lot from the less well-off folks who do. The grocery store, without any ability to differentiate, has to assume that I might be one of those people and sell me a banana at the same price.

New comment by benced in "San Francisco: Don't Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing"

benced — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:45:08 +0000

I worry about corner cases like rural towns with only one grocery store (although I suspect that those are already gouging people?) but that isn't San Francisco.

New comment by benced in "Rewriting Bun in Rust"

benced — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:09:28 +0000

I would be mad if the syntax was constantly changing but I want the internal implementation to be moving as fast as possible while retaining success. I think that rate is higher than what humans alone can do.

New comment by benced in "After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell"

benced — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:05:56 +0000

Python has so many footguns for server work and the world's worst typing system. It sounds like Golang is perfect for your use-case

New comment by benced in "Rewriting Bun in Rust"

benced — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:13:50 +0000

More gets done in the Bay Area than those places.

New comment by benced in "Rewriting Bun in Rust"

benced — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:23:39 +0000

GLM 5.2 (open-weights) is at or near Opus 4.7 level performance already. I think it's unlikely Anthropic will be able to durably charge us much more than the CapEx depreciation cost of GPUs + the OpEx of running them for non-frontier models (which Fable will be in 6 months to a year).

New comment by benced in "Rewriting Bun in Rust"

benced — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:20:11 +0000

The scary thing is the zig project prohibits LLM contributions - the world is going to move faster than them.

New comment by benced in "Rewriting Bun in Rust"

benced — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:43:29 +0000

I would guess the cost to do this with humans would be _at least_ $1.5M in compensation alone (I'm thinking three 500k/year Bay Area engineers) so this is already an order of magnitude cheaper.

Is it worth $165K? I'm less sure of that but it's honestly a moot point - this will get to 5 then 4 digits of cost pretty fast.

New comment by benced in "Rewriting Bun in Rust"

benced — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:32:28 +0000

> We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

God forbid an engineer express uncertainty.

New comment by benced in "Rewriting Bun in Rust"

benced — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:29:53 +0000

Not a compiler expert - shouldn't language verbosity and binary size be, at best, very loosely related?

New comment by benced in "I design with Claude more than Figma now"

benced — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:12:30 +0000

Anyone with knowledge of Indian regulatory culture would not take this as dispositive.

New comment by benced in "Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen"

benced — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:46:33 +0000

It's pareto better, all else equal (which, fair, it may not be in this case) for a company to serve businesses from $1 and up than to only serve $5M and up.

New comment by benced in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

benced — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:05:51 +0000

The headline is implying that AI mode is super unpopular with the very large number "28" and not the more accurate number of .16.

New comment by benced in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

benced — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:53:40 +0000

... DDG had .7% marketshare (https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share). 28% more visits would take it to .84%. Assuming those all come from Google, that would mean .16% of Google users didn't love AI mode enough to switch.

Classic example of misleading with stats.

New comment by benced in "Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier"

benced — Tue, 26 May 2026 23:33:58 +0000

I meant the structural problem of the EU not having a tech industry (nor any similarly prominent 21st century industry).

Yes, it would be better for America and for the EU if America acted normal but I would not advise anyone to plan hoping on that.