Hacker News: eitally

New comment by eitally in "Google changes its search box"

eitally — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:59:59 +0000

Anecdotally, I find Google's AI Search results to be genuinely helpful much of the time, and the box isn't so intrusive that it prevents me from digging into literal search results if I am not satisfied with the AI summary.

New comment by eitally in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

eitally — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:57:56 +0000

Brazil has a huge advantage in that they've required full transaction-level transparency for tax authorities -- with clearly defined technical requirements -- for almost 20 years now. One can argue whether it's a pro or a con to share this level of detail with the federal government, but it certainly makes taxation easier and fraud prosecution simpler, too.

New comment by eitally in "Googlebook"

eitally — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:36:00 +0000

I would virtually guarantee that any Chromebooks for Education versions of these new devices would be hobbled by restrictive data sharing policies forcing the disabling of the Gemini Intelligence features.

Also, most schools purchase the most abysmally low quality Chromebooks for students, which cost in the $200-300 range in bulk orders. They're awful.

New comment by eitally in "50K Tahoe residents need power as utility eyes redirecting lines to data centers"

eitally — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:32:18 +0000

There are quite a few already (though not as many as in the southern part): https://cleanview.co/solar-farms/nevada

New comment by eitally in "Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website"

eitally — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:53:31 +0000

Absolutely. I also hand-edited HTML (and XHTML and CGI scripts and Java applets) back in those days and the majority of web pages were no more than a few hundred lines of code long. Regular notepad.exe was absolutely fine at home, and I did a lot of editing server-side in vi. It was a simpler time....

New comment by eitally in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

eitally — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:35:32 +0000

One thing I've been doing lately -- and I'm in a business function, not a technical one, although I have an engineering background -- is pitting LLMs against each other. For example, if I'm structuring a proposal or a contract with the assistance of Claude, I'll begin my 360 feedback review first by asking Claude how it would react if it were the counter-party receiving the proposal. After some iterative changes, mostly manual, I will then run the same output document past Gemini and ask it to adopt personas from both sides and provide reactive feedback. The result of this is almost always a stronger proposal that I can also accompany with proactive objection handling and a solid FAQ, as well as clear points of negotiation that will likely be acceptable to both parties.

For this sort of thing, using multiple LLMs is extremely helpful.

New comment by eitally in "What makes a good smartphone camera?"

eitally — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:03:10 +0000

It would probably help you to compare what you can do on a phone vs what you can do with desktop software (Lightroom/Photoshop, DxO, Topaz, CaptureOne, etc). It's generally quite good, with the exception of challenging liminal areas (e.g. hair, foliage).

Fwiw, Topaz -- which I have a license for but essentially never use -- has pretty incredible denoising & upsizing features (for both photo & video), but to get the optimal quality output you offload the processing to their cloud infra (and buy credits from them to pay for it). It's roughly the equivalent of a SWE using a local LLM that's good enough" vs a frontier model that's SOTA but requires a consumption-based subscription.

New comment by eitally in "What makes a good smartphone camera?"

eitally — Wed, 06 May 2026 18:58:58 +0000

For Android, you can sort of get some of this with Snapseed. I occasionally use it, and it's "ok". I'm more frustrated by the fact that my preferred RAW editor (DxO) doesn't handle Android's DNG files. For me, at least, editing raw images on a phone screen is just not tolerable.

New comment by eitally in "Meetings are forcing functions"

eitally — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:09:05 +0000

Meetings are one type of forcing function. Anything with concrete, time-bound deliverables is a forcing function, too. In a well-managed organization with trained & competent staff, it should not require meetings to ensure progress.

New comment by eitally in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

eitally — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:41:23 +0000

I do not envy the stress the partnerships, strat ops and infra teams must be perpetually dealing with at OpenAI & Anthropic.

New comment by eitally in "GPT-5.5"

eitally — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:55:05 +0000

I have found something similar. I am easily distractible and if I don't have a written task backlog in front of me at all times, I find that when Claude is spinning I'll stop being productive. This is disconcerting for a number of reasons. Overall, I think training young people & new hires on agentic workflows -- and how to use agentic "human augmentation" productivity systems is critical. If it doesn't happen, that same couple of classes that lost academic progress during covid are going to suffer a double-whammy of being unprepared for workplace expectations.

Fwiw, I haven't spoken with any management-level colleague in the past 9 months who hasn't noted that asking about AI-comfort & usage is a key interview topic. For any role type, business or technical.

New comment by eitally in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

eitally — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:11:22 +0000

I'm not even sure it's Christianity that makes people less sad (I would argue that it isn't). It's the civic community that churches often create that breed purpose & happiness. Churches aren't the only types of communities that do this, but they're by far the most common.

New comment by eitally in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

eitally — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:08:07 +0000

I would suggest that grocery quality is higher in the suburbs than in the city, but restaurant quality typically isn't.

New comment by eitally in "3.4M Solar Panels"

eitally — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:36:59 +0000

Your labor costs are far lower than coastal US... and that was 10 years ago. Ten years ago in San Jose I got 5.5kW installed for $17k. Because it was that long ago, this is something like 23 panels.

New comment by eitally in "The purist's guide to phở in Hanoi"

eitally — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:38:43 +0000

There are so many Vietnamese restaurants in San Jose it's really more similar to the Hanoi recommendation: you just have to experiment until you find the ones that resonate with your personal tastes. I recommend searching reddit for "best pho in San Jose" -- you'll find a number of threads, many of which feature similar sets of restaurants.

New comment by eitally in "Backpacks got worse on purpose"

eitally — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:20:56 +0000

You need to consider usage patterns as you evaluate the cost/quality value curve, though. $35 for a Jansport for a school kid who will brutalize their pack regardless is probably a much better value than a $130 Osprey that is objectively superior but which a teenager would still brutalize to death in 1-2 years of daily school use.

Fwiw, my elementary kid is on year 3 with her Lands End pack (which is way crappier than the Lands End / Eddie Bauer / LL Bean school packs from the 80s-00s), and my two older kids use Osprey Nebula packs in high school -- both also on year three. The Osprey packs are terrific, but would be overkill for a younger kid, and we purchased them mostly because our kids bike to school and needed something that would comfortable carry 20+ lbs of crap.

New comment by eitally in "Backpacks got worse on purpose"

eitally — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:17:28 +0000

I still have two Dana Designs packs I purchased in the mid-90s. They're going strong and supremely comfortable (one daypack, one backpacking pack).

New comment by eitally in "DaVinci Resolve – Photo"

eitally — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 01:47:42 +0000

I'm also a semi-pro (technically I'm a pro but it's just a side gig) photographer who uses DxO. I really like DxO for color & exposure, as well as denoise, but I've gotten supremely frustrated at it's lack of more sophisticated editing functionality. I'm increasingly considering an Adobe subscription just to have something with more effective AI masking -- DxO stinks for this -- not to mention small things like generative fill to simplify stuff like powerline removal.

New comment by eitally in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

eitally — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:11:38 +0000

I get that, but it's difficult to reconcile this with media's second principle of protecting/anonymizing sources. I don't think it's reasonable for them to have it both ways, especially when exposing an anonymous subject could result in physical danger.

New comment by eitally in "Tree Calculus"

eitally — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:48:01 +0000

Much better intro article about tree calculus here, vs the actual site: https://olydis.medium.com/a-visual-introduction-to-tree-calc...