Hacker News: florakel

New comment by florakel in "Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber"

florakel — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:19:33 +0000

It’s really surprising. When Apple announced the multi-billion dollar deal with Google to power Apple Intelligence I thought great things were coming. Instead we are getting more and more bad news: delayed Pro models and AI leadership leaving. I wonder if Apple know something the rest of us don’t know or if they are already regretting their decision.

New comment by florakel in "The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel"

florakel — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:58:00 +0000

Ok, weird, I don’t know how the system works then. My wife is Colombian and on her last entry she just scanned her passport and that was it.

New comment by florakel in "The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel"

florakel — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:35:42 +0000

No, if you don’t change your passport you only have to scan your fingerprints once in the EU.

New comment by florakel in "Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling"

florakel — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:25:43 +0000

I believe the coding tool revenue is an important factor right now but not the endgame. The AI companies have to become consumer products to justify their gigantic valuations. We always talked about the “super apps” - one app that fulfills most consumer needs, like WeChat in China. OpenAI is the company most visibly making a huge bet on becoming a “consumer super device”, even designing their own hardware to stop being dependent on Apple and Android. The long term battle is not AI companies vs SaaS, but rather AI companies vs big consumer brands - Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon. Imagine having the ultimate digital assistant that you can throw any task at. Under the hood it creates its own code and interfaces on the fly to help you accomplish your task. By using LLMs as coding assistants we are all training them to become really good at it. If the newcomers succeed to deliver the ultimate digital assistant first, then even a monster like Apple could become obsolete.

New comment by florakel in "At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic"

florakel — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:08:39 +0000

I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. We are still dealing with the consequences…

New comment by florakel in "Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning"

florakel — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:00:22 +0000

I totally agree with you that our unhinged consumption behavior is the core problem. And with AI we stepped on the accelerator again.

But regarding your second statement. The actual problem is the greenhouse effect of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere which traps the suns energy in our atmosphere heating up oceans, ice and landmass. The heat we produce is negligible compared to the energy the sun sends every day. The greenhouse gases are the problem. And you are right, pulling away that blanket so that more heat can dissipate into space will take a looong time (growing trees) or cost an insane amount of (clean) energy, reversing the chemical processes of burning oil, gas and coal.

New comment by florakel in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

florakel — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:34:45 +0000

Maybe not a relevant experience then, as most people in this forum look for startup advice and take on external investment.

You can totally setup a Inc or LLC equivalent pretty fast in Germany as long as you stick to the standard. What he is setting up is basically an LLC owning an Inc.

New comment by florakel in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

florakel — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:08:59 +0000

Looks like he got hot milked by “advisors” who insisted in an overly complicated setup. Setting up a UG is fast and easy as long as you stick to the standard and you don’t need advisors or lawyers.

New comment by florakel in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

florakel — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:05:49 +0000

You can do the same in Germany. Costs 29 Euros with an online form. Once the sole proprietorship is setup you apply for your tax id and done. The whole process took 2 weeks in my city. Legally you can even start invoicing as soon as you registered your business.

The problem with OP is that he chose an overly complicated structure. Probably got milked by lawyers and advisors.

New comment by florakel in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

florakel — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:38:51 +0000

I don’t know the specifics but the OP chose a complicated setup. Why not just use a GmbH which is the equivalent to an Inc in the US? The capital requirement is 12500 in the bank not 25000 as stated. There are online services that run the whole process for you similar to Stripe Atlas. Even setting up a UG (with 1 euro stating capital) is very easy but you have to upgrade to a GmbH once you receive investment (investors usually demand it). For the whole process there are standard forms. You only need to pay lawyers if you want to personalize your setup.

Maybe OP was just not advised well which is surprising given the amount of information available online (startup guides for Germany)

New comment by florakel in "Claude Design"

florakel — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:03:11 +0000

For me it was the missing piece when working with Claude Code. I am a PM by formation so neither do I know how to design nor do I know how to code but I am pretty good at describing what I want and why. I just played with Claude Design for a while and it made it really easy to explore different solutions, reorganize the interface, adjust little detail with the "comment" function, move buttons around, etc. Then export to Claude code including the design system, and I spend way less time writing a spec and can focus more on corner cases and the ugly details. 2 years ago I still had to hire a freelance designer and a developer for small projects, now for the fraction of the cost I am totally independent and can iterate as much as I want. We always mention that "the design is not unique" or "the software architecture is not clean and the code to verbose" - I get it I managed Series C startup product teams before I got sick of the VC shit show. Now I am working mostly with lifestyle businesses and SMBs that have the ambition to be profitable - and average is good enough for them. They gain access to custom designed software for specific use cases which was completely out of reach for them 3 years ago. Custom solutions meant working with mediocre, overpriced agencies creating "solutions" with Wordpress. Anything I can do with the Claude stack is on higher level at a fraction of the cost. And as long as it works and looks good those business don't give a ** about unique design and scalable software engineering.

New comment by florakel in "Attention Media ≠ Social Networks"

florakel — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 20:19:02 +0000

I have never used mastodon, but why is it so much better than X (twitter)? I also follow a small group of people on X that I find interesting and I get a chronological feed of their posts in the “following” tab. I know that the “For You” tab abyss is right there. I opened it once, was shocked by all the crap the system assumed I would like, and never went back. The good thing is that nobody forces me to use it. I am perfectly fine in the “following” feed and not exposed at all to recommender systems trying to grab my attention. Only the ads in the feed annoy me - and they are so bad that I wonder how X makes any money.

New comment by florakel in "Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it"

florakel — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 22:06:26 +0000

Sounds Like you rediscovered the “opportunity solution tree” (Teresa Torres) and were skipping a crucial step in product management / UX which is product discovery. I would suggest not to generalize your learnings by saying “why most product planning is bad…” and rather use a more humble title “why our product planning was bad and what we did about it”.

New comment by florakel in "GPT-4.1 in the API"

florakel — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 17:28:40 +0000

> it's quite confusing to see half a dozen models to choose from in the UI. In an ideal world, ChatGPT would just abstract away the decision

Supposedly that’s coming with GPT 5.

New comment by florakel in "GPT-4.1 in the API"

florakel — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 17:23:16 +0000

Exactly, they like to call it “bringing new energy to an old industry”.

New comment by florakel in "OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’"

florakel — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:47:22 +0000

Why is everyone so sure that technology can’t be the moat? Why are you convinced that all AI systems will be very similar in performance and cost, hence be interchangeable? Isn’t Google the perfect example that you can create a moat by technological leadership in a nascent space? When Google came along it was 10X better than any alternative and they grabbed the whole market. Now their brand and market position make it almost impossible to compete. I guess the bet is that one of the AI companies achieves a huge breakthrough and a 10X value creation compared to its competitors…

New comment by florakel in "AMD's Marketcap is now double the marketcap of Intel"

florakel — Wed, 29 May 2024 12:32:55 +0000

Stock price is a bet on the future: - intel: uncertain future for their X86 business lines. AMD caught up and even overtook Intel in desktop, laptop and SERVER. Extremely high Capex on Fab business with uncertain outcome. Can they really compete with TSMC, Samsung, etc? No real AI growth story to tell, (yet).

- AMD: took the X86 crown from Intel in some areas. Also suffers from big threat of ARM processors. The bet with AMD is that they will be able to compete with NVIDIA to become a major GPU provider in the AI boom.

New comment by florakel in "Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For"

florakel — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 15:04:08 +0000

Government should force google to give competitors access to its search index so that they have a real opportunity to build a competing service on top of it, AI or search. The same way monopoly telcos were forced to open infrastructure to competing service provides.

Google products are getting increasingly crappy. Would be great to see what others could build with their information monopoly.

New comment by florakel in "Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs"

florakel — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 00:22:55 +0000

The current Mac Pro is kind of pointless. Before you got a powerful workstation (power consumption was irrelevant), now you get a Studio Mac in a new package. I feel they just launched it for “compliance” not because it is a great product. They hit a wall with scaling the M chip architecture. Building an even larger chip than the Ultra would be insane and going multi socket is not possible.

New comment by florakel in "Apple M2 Ultra SoC isn’t faster than AMD and Intel last year desktop CPUs"

florakel — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 18:52:56 +0000

It’s a fair point. Especially for the new Mac Pro they could have implemented a more robust thermal solution and clock the whole thing higher. That’s one advantage of a bigger chasis, isn’t it?