Hacker News: blehn

New comment by blehn in "Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings"

blehn — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:07:08 +0000

Eh, Square and Cash App were pretty innovative when they came out. The industry is mature enough now that all the products are ripping each other off

New comment by blehn in "OpenAI demand sinks on secondary market as Anthropic runs hot"

blehn — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:19:58 +0000

Have never seen an interview or piece of writing where he comes off sounding like he knows what he's doing.

New comment by blehn in "Will Claude Code ruin our team?"

blehn — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:56:12 +0000

After riding in countless Ubers and Lyfts, with drivers who drive all day for a living, I can say confidently that good drivers who grasp the intricacies of driving are by far the exception.

New comment by blehn in "Will Claude Code ruin our team?"

blehn — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 04:48:27 +0000

> It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.

The analogy only illustrates the parent's point. Most licensed drivers have been doing it for years and are still terrible drivers, because they never grasp the intricacies of driving — smoothly accelerating and decelerating, smoothing out corners, anticipating light changes, gauging merge distances and timings, using mirrors well, ensuring cars get by when making a left turn in an intersection, etc, etc

New comment by blehn in "New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers"

blehn — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:37:34 +0000

Obviously to have an unregistered gun?

New comment by blehn in "NYC Spends $200 Million on Cell Service for School Chromebooks"

blehn — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 03:05:40 +0000

Why not just improve the free public wifi?

New comment by blehn in "NYC Spends $200 Million on Cell Service for School Chromebooks"

blehn — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 03:05:00 +0000

> It’s a good idea to enable cellular service for those who don’t have adequate access at home.

But then the students with mobile access have an advantage over those who only have home access. And how do you determine who has adequate access at home and who doesn't? Much easier and more equitable to just provide it for everyone.

New comment by blehn in "A new AI winter is coming?"

blehn — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 18:13:47 +0000

The business trajectory will be like Uber. A few big companies (Google, OpenAI) will price their AI services at a loss until consumers find it to be indispensable and competitors run out of money, then they'll steadily ramp up the pricing to the point where they're gouging consumers (and raking in profits) but still a bit cheaper or better than alternatives (humans in this case).

New comment by blehn in "Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model"

blehn — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 02:03:57 +0000

Configurability is fine, but it's too obvious a recommendation and just creates noise. The purpose of a recommendation system is to help you find things that aren't obvious. I'd still filter them out by default even if it's configurable.

New comment by blehn in "Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model"

blehn — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 01:58:41 +0000

I didn't say it was likely that you'd enjoy the other books by that author. My point is that it's not helpful for a recommendation system to recommend more books by that author — it's common sense. If I've read a book by an author, it's easy enough to look up their other work and decide whether I want to read more of them.

New comment by blehn in "Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model"

blehn — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 22:09:04 +0000

You should filter out authors from the input books in the output. If liked a book by an author, surely I'd read more of their work if I wanted to — recommending them isn't helpful. Along the same lines, I think interesting recommendations tend to be the ones that (1) I like and (2) I didn't expect. The more similar the recommendations are to the input, the more likely I already know them, and the more likely to create a recommendation echo chamber.

New comment by blehn in "DoorDash and Waymo launch autonomous delivery service in Phoenix"

blehn — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 15:33:40 +0000

> There's no air traffic after all

No air traffic until their are drone deliveries. What will the sky look like when you take every _individual_ package from Door Dash, Uber Eats, Postmates, Instacart, Amazon, UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc etc etc and put them on _individual_ drones? Even if the logistics could be sorted out, I worry about the quality of life issues it poses for communities, especially with the amount of noise drones make.

NYC handles 3,000 flights a day; it handles 2,300,000 package deliveries a day.

New comment by blehn in "The AI coding trap"

blehn — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 09:17:31 +0000

> There's a divide between people who enjoy the physical experience of the work and people who enjoy the mental experience of the work

Eh, physical and mental isn't the divide — it's more like people who enjoy code itself as a craft and people who simply see it as a means to an end (the application). Much like a writer might labor over their prose (the code) while telling a story (the application). Writing code is far more than the physical act of typing to those people.

New comment by blehn in "Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company"

blehn — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 22:10:13 +0000

Isn't that basically the same premise as Chrome, which already dominates the market? Google even made something called ChromeOS. Arc wasn't really more than a distracting skin on Chromium with a few innovative bits of UI...

New comment by blehn in "An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia"

blehn — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 14:10:11 +0000

Perhaps the absolute worst use-case for an LLM

New comment by blehn in "Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now' [video]"

blehn — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 16:47:11 +0000

Not that Google needs any more cash, but ReVanced has to be the absolute worst defense for maintaining openness on Android. As in, you could have cited the thousands of legitimate apps that have nothing to do with circumventing a pretty reasonable subscription (compared to other media subscriptions out there) for Google's own app.

New comment by blehn in "Pixel 10 Phones"

blehn — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 04:09:59 +0000

It's slight, but noticeable. The 15 Pro was 187g and felt much lighter than the 14 Pro, it's a shame they added more weight on the 16.

New comment by blehn in "Pixel 10 Phones"

blehn — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 04:06:13 +0000

Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair. A better car analogy is pickup trucks (and cars in generally really) — they've gotten huge over the years, compact pickups have disappeared, and you hear the same arguments about it being a niche audience. The reality is that as soon as something sells well (big trucks in this case), these big corporations go all in on it and alienate large segments. Now 25 year old compact Tacomas are selling for as much as their MSRP and manufacturers (Toyota, Ford, Hyundai) are all scrambling to ship a compact. It's the same with small phones — the industry over-rotated on big phones and as soon as someone ships a good small phone, it'll be a hit and small phones will come back. iPhone Mini was a crippled device compared to the Pro line and it still sold millions. Google and Samsung haven't even tried to make something compact, let alone compact and good.

New comment by blehn in "Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming"

blehn — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 16:18:01 +0000

Counterpoint: I worked there for years and the demand for more people wasn't natural. It came from (1) typical employees not getting much done because they were either not very motivated, not very competent, or stuck in meetings all day, (2) proliferation of people managers who weren't producing anything — product teams of 200 with 50 of them being managers, (3) managers playing the headcount game because it was a path to promotion — all things being equal, who's getting promoted: an L6 manager with 3 reports or an L6 manager with 12 reports? Constant headcount battles

New comment by blehn in "Show HN: NYC Subway Simulator and Route Designer"

blehn — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:23:49 +0000

I want to love this but the visual language makes it kind of unusable for me. Why not match the track and train colors to their line color (red for the 123) and then use different visual indicators for train state (stopped, at station, etc)?

For example: Selected: Black fill Normal operation: Color fill with 100% opacity Slowing down: 70% opacity Stopped: striped fill, 50% opacity At station: pulsing opacity