Hacker News: el_benhameen

New comment by el_benhameen in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

el_benhameen — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:45:07 +0000

No no, I find that having to click back through almost 40 years’ worth of months to get to my birthday allows for a nice pause to consider the fleeting and ever-accelerating nature of life.

New comment by el_benhameen in "Native Instant Space Switching on macOS"

el_benhameen — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:17:33 +0000

Just wait until you notice that it’s inexplicably slower on 120hz monitors and that your input devices remain focused on the previous space until the animation fully completes!

New comment by el_benhameen in "The Impact of AI on Game Dev Jobs. Open to Work Crisis"

el_benhameen — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 01:45:35 +0000

I think the point is that the banner is more likely to extend your search by sending a negative signal than it is to speed up your search. Fair or not, potential employers often have a negative bias toward people who are unemployed, so indicating that you’re likely unemployed is unhelpful.

New comment by el_benhameen in "Have a fucking website"

el_benhameen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:14:58 +0000

I recently stood up a personal and a business site using Claude + Astro + GitHub + Cloudflare Pages, and apart from the Claude subscription, it’s all free.

Definitely not skills that are going to be in the typical restaurant owner’s wheelhouse (not hard to learn, just not likely to care) so you’d need to figure out how to host per-business to avoid hosting everything under one account and running over the free tier. But there’s very little management or payment necessary until you get quite a bit of traffic, which is probably not likely for your average suburban sandwich shop.

New comment by el_benhameen in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

el_benhameen — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:35:06 +0000

I have used em dashes and semicolons for decades. The LLM appropriation of my writing style has been almost as devastating as their impending vaporization of my career path.

New comment by el_benhameen in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

el_benhameen — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:10:50 +0000

Facebook’s feed is mostly AI slop and Moltbook’s feed is mostly humans posing as AI, so there’s some good synergy here.

Good Vibes, Bad Vendors

el_benhameen — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:44:11 +0000

Article URL: https://werd.io/good-vibes-bad-vendors/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47299847

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by el_benhameen in "Tech jobs are getting demolished in ways not seen since 2008"

el_benhameen — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 17:36:40 +0000

The process of figuring out what to build has always been harder and more drawn out than the process of building it. I’m not arguing one way or the other for the Jevon’s paradox claims, but the steelman argument that you’ve missed is that job losses can happen very quickly (“last week’s version of Claude code is good enough that we can fire Joe and have Sarah do twice the work”), but the recovery can take a long time as the tech slowly diffuses throughout the economy and slowly spurs new ideas.

New comment by el_benhameen in "Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs"

el_benhameen — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:36:00 +0000

I keep hearing this from the naysayers, but I just think that they haven’t fully integrated unilateral phase detractors into their work effectively. Maybe you’re using the free retro encabulator tier so you don’t see the full capabilities, but some of us are already twice as productive.

New comment by el_benhameen in "Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs"

el_benhameen — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:59:11 +0000

A delightful update to https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w

New comment by el_benhameen in "Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’"

el_benhameen — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 03:39:54 +0000

Yeah, I guess my point is that “killer robot” evokes a terminator-like image for a lot of people. Something that marches around and kills of its own accord. I don’t like either one, but I don’t think they’re the same thing.

New comment by el_benhameen in "Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’"

el_benhameen — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:12:08 +0000

I’m not sure that “killer robot” is the actual concern outside of media hyperbole. I’m imagining a loitering munition-type drone that has some kind of targeting package loaded into it with different parameters describing what it should seek and destroy. Instead of waiting for intelligence and using human command to put the munition on target, it hangs out and then engages when it’s certain enough that it’s found something valid.

In a world where LLMs produce very convincing but subtly wrong output, this makes me uncomfortable. I get that warfare without AI is in the past now, but war and rules of engagement and AI output etc etc etc all seem fuzzy enough that this is not yet a good call even if you agree with the end goals.

Lose Myself

el_benhameen — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:13:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.eod.com/blog/2026/02/lose-myself/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250624

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by el_benhameen in "MacBook Neo"

el_benhameen — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:01:53 +0000

My kids have (insanely shitty) chromebooks from school and we are absolutely responsible for the cost if they break. We have to sign a release at the beginning of the year. Whether or not they’d be able to collect from the vast majority of families is a different question, granted. But the responsibility is there.

New comment by el_benhameen in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

el_benhameen — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 02:41:54 +0000

Absolutely incompetent, but I don’t think that’s the cause here. I think Anthropic’s sin was publicly challenging the administration. They’re huge on optics. You can get away with anything as long as you praise and bow in public.

New comment by el_benhameen in "Why Developers Keep Choosing Claude over Every Other AI"

el_benhameen — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:56:25 +0000

I like this feature and rely on it too. I get that some people hate it and that it can make some pretty insidious mistakes when it uses it, but I’ve found it valuable for providing implicit context when I have multiple queries for the same project.

Worth noting that Claude also has a memory feature and uses it intelligently like this, sometimes more thoughtfully than cgpt does (fewer “out of left field” associations, smoother integration).

New comment by el_benhameen in "Ghidra by NSA"

el_benhameen — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:42:47 +0000

God forbid someone pose an interesting question on a discussion board.

New comment by el_benhameen in "Pink noise reduces REM sleep and may harm sleep quality"

el_benhameen — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 03:31:23 +0000

Yeah that seems silly. I was a quiet-room sleeper until I met my wife, who needs some kind of white noise to sleep. I eventually adapted and now sleep much better with noise than without (at least subjectively), but that change took a while, at least several months. I found it quite difficult to sleep with for a while.

New comment by el_benhameen in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

el_benhameen — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:43:23 +0000

On the off chance you’re in the Bay Area, look into Walk N Roll: https://walknrolltoschool.org/

I helped start the chapter at my kids’ school and I’ve been impressed by the enthusiasm given how car-centric the school is (we’ve got the big SUV line, too).

Like you, we were usually one of two or sometimes three bike families. Walk N Roll days are now packed with bikes, and the bike population has increased substantially on regular days, too.

We’ve met some cool families, and the “goddamned big cars idling, you live three blocks away why don’t you just walk” grumbling in my head has quieted a bit.

New comment by el_benhameen in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

el_benhameen — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:56:39 +0000

I like using it to listen to narrated versions of New Yorker articles.

Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”.

And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off.

Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.