Hacker News: eloisant

New comment by eloisant in "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]"

eloisant — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:54:53 +0000

This is a short-term view approach and can really hurt a company on the long term.

It's also why US car companies are a wreck.

New comment by eloisant in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"

eloisant — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:42:45 +0000

The difference is that the biggest popup offender was not the same company behind the browser everyone uses...

Just imagine if Netscape and MS made all their money from popups at the time.

New comment by eloisant in "Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin bypasses, Edge, Opera to follow"

eloisant — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:37:04 +0000

"You can make money without doing evil [but that's not what we do]"

New comment by eloisant in "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software"

eloisant — Sun, 31 May 2026 09:17:23 +0000

Is there any evidence this was broken by AI?

I feel like these day any time users find an issue in software they blame it on "vibe coding". But software had bugs before AI.

New comment by eloisant in "Domain expertise has always been the real moat"

eloisant — Sun, 31 May 2026 07:13:31 +0000

You're doing a bit of a "true Scotsman fallacy" here.

New comment by eloisant in "Naphtha shortages in Japan"

eloisant — Sat, 30 May 2026 08:37:48 +0000

The world was not "just watching doing nothing", there was a Iran nuclear deal that made sure they didn't get nuclear weapons.

New comment by eloisant in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

eloisant — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:41:47 +0000

They didn't even lose any money, because by closing the store the damages were never paid.

It's really depressing to see to be honest.

New comment by eloisant in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

eloisant — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:06:28 +0000

It's just as depressing as the other one, it shows that BAM knows exactly how to abuse the law to get away with stealing.

New comment by eloisant in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

eloisant — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:50:58 +0000

It's easy to say after the fact, how are people supposed to know that before doing business with a nationwide franchise?

New comment by eloisant in "We replaced Zendesk"

eloisant — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:40:07 +0000

I know you had commercial arguments when working at Zendesk.

Still: when you code your own solution, you don't need to build an integration with every single platform you can think of. Just those you use.

And sometimes, especially now with AI, coding your own solution exactly tailored to your needs can be simpler than configuring a complex product designed to match as many use case as possible.

New comment by eloisant in "The real cost of owning a home"

eloisant — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:34:40 +0000

> About 80% of your first mortgage payment is interest.

Is it common in US?? In France the current rates are about 3,5% fixed rate, meaning in your first payment on a 25 years loan you pay about 55% interests. Which I think is pretty high already!

What kind of rate do you have to end up paying 80% of interests in your first payment?

New comment by eloisant in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

eloisant — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:21:40 +0000

The problem isn't that the city is full. It's that suburbs are made for cars.

You could have suburbs designed as walkable neighbourhoods with shops. Look at Japan, each area around a station is like a small village. Even if you commute to the "big" city, the area you live can still be a nice walkable place.

New comment by eloisant in "Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket"

eloisant — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:02:13 +0000

When the abstract is limited, you don't add useless qualifiers like "the largest prediction market"

New comment by eloisant in "OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon"

eloisant — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:37:08 +0000

The important thing to remember is:

- With the SP500 you're not that diversified because you're very exposed to the tech sector

- With a world ETF like MSCI World you're still extremely exposed to US stocks (about 70%) and of course the tech sector

New comment by eloisant in "Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier"

eloisant — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:48:36 +0000

I agree, but the same goes for the US. Remember Echelon.

New comment by eloisant in "AI is too expensive"

eloisant — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:30:03 +0000

The thing that everyone seems to be missing is that the US AI companies are focused on the frontier models, that are very expensive for diminishing returns.

If suddenly the money craze stops, meaning (1) AI companies investors want them to become profitable and (2) clients start being cost-sensitive to AI bills (which they are absolutely not currently), then everyone will switch to smaller, cheaper models that are enough for a lot of use case.

Sonnet instead of Opus. GPT 5.4 instead of 5.5.

Chinese models.

People keep comparing to Uber but Uber can't suddenly make it cheaper to operate.

New comment by eloisant in "The lasting influence of Netscape Time"

eloisant — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:16:12 +0000

Didn't they pretty much start from scratch after open sourcing?

Not sure what was left of the older (pre-open source) Netscape code in Firefox 1.0.

New comment by eloisant in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

eloisant — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:58:50 +0000

Counter-point, real incriminating videos will be easy to dismiss.

"No that's not me, that's AI"

New comment by eloisant in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

eloisant — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:57:11 +0000

About Pelicans on bicycles:

> there’s zero chance any AI lab would train a model for such a ridiculous task

Well, I think this guy's tests have got enough visibility that I wouldn't be surprised if some AI models are trained on it specifically...

New comment by eloisant in "Haiku"

eloisant — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:53:25 +0000

That's the thing, it was the most novel OS of the time.

Even the OS we use today are all based on some kind of Unix, except for Windows that trace their legacy to VMS through Windows NT.

BeOS on the other time was written from scratch in the 1990's.