Hacker News: benmanns

New comment by benmanns in "Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets"

benmanns — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:42:08 +0000

On Polymarket you can be the bookie and put up a yes at $0.72 and no at $0.74 if you’re confident in that 73% estimate.

New comment by benmanns in "Aliens.gov ~ domain registered 17MAR2026"

benmanns — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:40:52 +0000

Ask and ye shall receive: https://manifold.markets/benmanns/aliensgov-prop-bets (play money). I set this up so multiple can resolve and other users can add additional speculations.

New comment by benmanns in "Show HN: Trackm, a personal finance web app"

benmanns — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:47:04 +0000

I thought Plaid have (had?) a developer account that could connect something like 100 accounts that was free.

New comment by benmanns in "Home Assistant waters my plants"

benmanns — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:09:02 +0000

Same. The complexity of HA also leaves my family with a bus factor of one re: keeping the lights on.

New comment by benmanns in "Two Bits Are Better Than One: making bloom filters 2x more accurate"

benmanns — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 05:51:49 +0000

They were only touched on (and just barely) in my CS education, so don’t feel too left out. Spend an evening or two on the Wiki for Probabilistic data structures[0]. With a CS education you should have the baseline knowledge to find them really fascinating. Enjoy!

Oh, and I don’t find myself actually implementing any of these very often or knowing that they are in use. I occasionally use things like APPROX_COUNT_DISTINCT in Snowflake[1], which is a HyperLogLog (linked in the Wiki).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Probabilistic_data_st...

[1]: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/functions/approx...

New comment by benmanns in "Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2025?"

benmanns — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 19:19:10 +0000

I've really been enjoying Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11) of HN fame. Additionally: Odd Lots, Money Stuff, Chat with Traders (hit or miss, some guests are not great).

New comment by benmanns in "New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books"

benmanns — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 21:08:58 +0000

Audiobook publishers require/request this when you sell subsidiary rights. We’ve been able to push back citing accessibility concerns. I find it really annoying when not available for my own reading.

New comment by benmanns in "Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN"

benmanns — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:50:10 +0000

For Shopify in particular, they have a headless front-end services called Hydrogen[0] (with optional hosting called Oxygen). It's basically an opinionated wrapper around the storefront[1] and customer account[2] APIs, which allows interacting with the store from the front-end. It allows you to host Shopify on your own domain under your own control and gives a bit more customization than is available via hosted Shopify. It's what I run for the Creature Publishing site[3] and allows some extra customization for wholesale accounts, etc, without the exceptionally expensive enterprise (Shopify Plus) plan. To be completely honest, sometimes I question the decision over a simple hosted shop subdomain. Some light SSR/API calls are necessary for our setup, which is hosted on Cloudflare Pages/Workers.

[0]: https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/

[1]: https://shopify.dev/docs/api/storefront/latest

[2]: https://shopify.dev/docs/api/customer/latest

[3]: https://creaturehorror.com/

New comment by benmanns in "Disney Lost Roger Rabbit"

benmanns — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:42:50 +0000

It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs (relative to a straight 100% increase relative to the basic income). So you might send everyone $100 per month and costs go up $100 per month, until supply chains shift towards supplying lower income humans with more goods and services than they used to get, at which point costs will decrease (from the $100 increase).

With enough forewarning, suppliers could anticipate the increased demand and prepare for it.

New comment by benmanns in "Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync"

benmanns — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 01:33:11 +0000

The trouble is, you have to place the outbound call to those contacts to trust them. People could spoof an incoming call from numbers in your contacts and it will look as legitimate to you as a receiver as if the real number was calling you. With voice spoofing, it's now possible to call someone as [grandchild] with [grandchild]'s voice with a pretty horrible story about what's going to happen if some Bitcoin or Google Play gift cards are not purchased and handed over immediately.

New comment by benmanns in "FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores"

benmanns — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:21:43 +0000

IMO the game is to get the highest credit score while spending the least on credit. That way if you e.g. need to acquire housing, a reliable vehicle, business loans, even employment or insurance, you will be able to and can get a good deal. Sure, paying nothing saves you money, but it also costs you the opportunity cost between what you could earn/save by utilizing credit vs waiting months to years to save up and pay cash.

New comment by benmanns in "FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores"

benmanns — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 01:04:04 +0000

I’m not sure. I’m sophisticated enough to use BNPL and set aside the funds in a HYSA, but I never have as you miss out on: credit card rewards, credit card purchase protection, credit card extended warranties, credit card chargeback infrastructure. Additionally, I’ve seen BNPL offers where the first payment is in 2 weeks compared to 30-50 days for credit cards depending on when your statement closes and how soon you have to pay, so the extra interest is less than you might think. It could make sense for very large purchases, but then, that’s also where credit card features can really come in handy.

New comment by benmanns in "Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work"

benmanns — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 21:02:08 +0000

Like you, I’m far too risk averse to not fact check everything an LLM outputs, but I’ve also fixed bugs that have been present for 5+ years. Maybe at a certain point you can just wait for the next generation of model to fix the bugs. And wait for the generation after that to fix the newly introduced and/or more subtle bugs.

New comment by benmanns in "France fines Apple €150M for “excessive” pop-ups that let users reject tracking"

benmanns — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 19:29:08 +0000

This is interesting to me—are you an app developer that does this pattern for that reason? I definitely figured it was exclusively because they can request repeatedly for the fake prompt, and only “use” their prompt when the user is inclined to accept. There are times where I’ll accept the first prompt and reject the second prompt when apps are spammy about it.

New comment by benmanns in "AWS S3 SDK breaks its compatible services"

benmanns — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:31:46 +0000

Another case of Hyrum's Law, where the entire functionality of the S3 SDK and any competing service provider borrowing from it becomes Amazon's problem to fix at their own cost. Maybe it's time for a non-Amazon but S3 API compatible library to emerge among the other cloud storage providers offering S3 compatible APIs. OpenDAL looks interesting. Also another reminder to run thorough integration tests before updating your dependencies.

New comment by benmanns in "Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected"

benmanns — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 02:26:17 +0000

You probably know more about this than me, but it looks like some lines do: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/transparency/freedom-of-informa...

Regenerative braking in cars also keeps a lot of brake dust out of the air. A pair of brake pads lasts about as long as the life of an EV.

New comment by benmanns in "FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness"

benmanns — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 16:23:07 +0000

Also keep in mind there’s something like 180 days per year of K-12 education in the US each year, so that’s something like 0.62 to 5.4 per school day.

New comment by benmanns in "1-800-ChatGPT"

benmanns — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 20:52:01 +0000

I think so, but not a bad marketing gimmick. It gives a pretty easy way for the general public to interact with ChatGPT on a trial basis without signing up or paying for it using a somewhat hard to acquire identifier (phone number). I'm curious if they're doing anything to avoid abuse from spoofed numbers.

New comment by benmanns in "Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest"

benmanns — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 01:57:38 +0000

I think we should start doing more taxes combined with subsidies. Give everyone a $1/t carbon tax. Give everyone a ~$1/t farming subsidy based on current carbon production. Nobody loses, but everyone is incentivized to decrease carbon production and the faster ones profit more. Phase out the subsidy over X years if you like.

Otherwise, you’re right. We’re upsetting the balance of a very complex, very important system and causing a regressive tax in the form of price increases.

New comment by benmanns in "Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)"

benmanns — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 07:44:40 +0000

Email rendering is a great analogy.