Hacker News: kristianc

New comment by kristianc in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

kristianc — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:13:47 +0000

Draconian law gets introduced, public outcry ensues. Oh okay we will make it six months then. This is how civil liberties get eroded.

New comment by kristianc in "Show HN: Baton – A desktop app for developing with AI agents"

kristianc — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:22:46 +0000

Theo's t3code does a lot of this for free I think. Interested to know if it uses the same trick for accessing Claude without violating their TOS.

https://t3.codes

New comment by kristianc in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

kristianc — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:58:37 +0000

Yeah, definitely not the "straight in" one...

New comment by kristianc in "Launch HN: Vela (YC W26) – AI for complex scheduling"

kristianc — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:56:20 +0000

> One of our first customers is a staffing firm that searched for a scheduling solution for almost eight years. Their coordinators manage hundreds of candidate-client interviews where each side needs separate email threads, separate Zoom accounts to avoid double-booking links, and calendar invites connecting parties who never directly communicate. A client reschedules one interview and it cascades into four others. A candidate responds on SMS to a thread that started on email. Vela solved this in just 10 minutes of onboarding.

My very strong advice would be to pick one of these use cases and niche hard. Multi channel, multi party scheduling isnt a problem anyone thinks they have (even if they actually do). They wake up thinking they have 40 truck driver shifts to fill tomorrow.

Deputy cleaned up by going after rota scheduling for independent coffee shops. Logistics sounds like a great shout. Each have messy edge cases which you can develop a strong solution around but you'll get crushed trying to go horizontal in this space. Best of luck!

New comment by kristianc in "TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe"

kristianc — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 13:48:46 +0000

In an ideal world it would work something like that. In reality in the UK the pattern more often is:

1. New power introduced after crisis or scandal, justified as exceptional and targeted

2. Enforcement is patchy or politically difficult. Police either lack resources or big tech platforms don't want to or can't play ball

3. Failure or abuse case becomes public and reported in chattering classes tabloid press

4. Response is not "use existing powers better" but expand powers, broaden scope, lower initial 'targeted' thresholds

5. Cycle repeats

Issue is compounded because you have politicians who will either not understand things or pretend not to understand things.

New comment by kristianc in "TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe"

kristianc — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:04:05 +0000

Sure, but it comes down to framing.

If you asked 'Would you support weakening encryption in messaging apps if it helped catch some criminals, even though it could make it easier for hackers to read your messages and steal your passwords, bank details, or personal photos?' I'd bet a large proportion of the general population would say no.

But that side never gets explored, or there's an assumption that there's some way of only letting the good guys access the information.

New comment by kristianc in "TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe"

kristianc — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:15:28 +0000

It's never been controversial, it's the BBC. doing it's usual job of laundering the arguments the establishment want you to hear for domestic consumption.

New comment by kristianc in "OpenAI – How to delete your account"

kristianc — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:37:12 +0000

I always assume people have lost the argument when they resort to giving people comedy names, regardless of what else they've said.

New comment by kristianc in "Tech people keep falling for the same scam"

kristianc — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:56:28 +0000

OP is right. Surely we will all go back to on premise any day now.

New comment by kristianc in "How will OpenAI compete?"

kristianc — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 07:05:29 +0000

MySpace never had close to a billion users.

New comment by kristianc in "Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents"

kristianc — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:49:15 +0000

> Once you have multiple agents across multiple sessions generating code in production, you hit the same observability problems every other distributed system hits: tracing, attribution, debugging failures across runs.

This has been the story for every trend empowering developers since year dot. Look back and you can find exactly the same said about CD, public cloud, containers, the works. The 'orchestration' (read compliance) layers always get routed around. Always.

New comment by kristianc in "Wall Street just lost $285B because of 13 Markdown files"

kristianc — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:02:08 +0000

The thing that keeps on getting glided past in most discussions of this is the distinction between systems of record and systems of workflow.

If you're SAP, Workday, Procore, maybe even HubSpot, you have a shout. Growth won't be fast, but you're okay for now and might even be able to position yourself as an integrator.

If you've raised large rounds and you're just a system of workflow that won't trigger a years long political fight to get you out - a document review startup, good luck.

New comment by kristianc in "Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy"

kristianc — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 15:13:11 +0000

No, there's GSuite / Google Workspace instead. OpenAI doesn't have one of those.

New comment by kristianc in "Find a pub that needs you"

kristianc — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:24:17 +0000

Every one of them individually seems like a weird place to draw the line. Social fabric and the ties that bond matter.

New comment by kristianc in "Find a pub that needs you"

kristianc — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:22:08 +0000

"Does Britain really need?" has been responsible for the gutting of so much of what used to make Britain a nice place to live over the last 20 years. You can say she same about public libraries, local bus routes, civic architecture, arts funding, youth services, maintenance budgets. The damage has been incalculable.

New comment by kristianc in "A website to destroy all websites"

kristianc — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 11:50:55 +0000

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.” - Christopher Hitchens

New comment by kristianc in "A website to destroy all websites"

kristianc — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 21:47:12 +0000

Lovely design - but also shows the inherent problem. Not everyone can create a design like this. Medium and Substack mean that not everyone needs to. When everyone is able to publish, you invariably end up with a lot more crap, and it has to hosted by someone else.

New comment by kristianc in "OpenAI is paying employees more than any major tech startup in history"

kristianc — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:35:17 +0000

The value of any traditional RSU is to treat it as a nice bonus if you get it, so not so much different from any other stock or option package.

New comment by kristianc in "Is Northern Virginia still the least reliable AWS region?"

kristianc — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 01:58:29 +0000

I find it funny that we see complaints about why software quality has got worse alongside people advocating to choose objectively risky AWS regions for career risk and blame minimisation reasons.

New comment by kristianc in "Ryanair fined €256M over ‘abusive strategy’ to limit ticket sales by OTAs"

kristianc — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:26:32 +0000

And who cleans up the mess when OTAs miss emails, get passenger details wrong, display outdated prices or add markup through algorithmic pricing? Ludicrously one sided take.