Hacker News: nkohari

New comment by nkohari in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

nkohari — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:59:39 +0000

Can you explain how that would happen? This tax is limited to second homes only.

New comment by nkohari in "The Coming Layoffs and the Revenge of the Measurers"

nkohari — Mon, 25 May 2026 18:57:51 +0000

> Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Applying this broadly to most firms today you can divide this up into:

> 1. The producers and marketers (PMs/Sales). [...]

> 2. The leadership (CEO/VPs). [...]

I'm sorry, what? Product managers are producers and executive leadership are innovators, but engineers are just waste?

New comment by nkohari in "Anthropic acquires Stainless"

nkohari — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:39:14 +0000

It's really insulting to the Stainless team to dismiss this acquisition as some sort of chess move against OpenAI. Give me a break.

New comment by nkohari in "AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]"

nkohari — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:45:24 +0000

I don't think it's fair to consider writing an analysis (even a favorable one) about a topic as _shilling_ for it. It's not like he was pushing shitcoins or minting NFTs.

I have always been (and remain!) bearish on crypto but it absolutely was something that couldn't be ignored a few years ago. Even if you came to the conclusion that it was bunk, there was significant enough fervor that any technologist needed to reckon with their position on it.

For example, lots of engineers proclaimed very loudly that document databases would replace the RDBMs, or that GraphQL was the future of APIs. They were wrong, as it turned out, but only with the wisdom of hindsight.

New comment by nkohari in "eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible"

nkohari — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:47:55 +0000

In my defense, I had entirely forgotten GME is/was a meme stock. It's been many years since I spent brain cycles thinking about WSB.

New comment by nkohari in "Googlebook"

nkohari — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:46:14 +0000

We tried Chromebooks for our kids, and the instant I could buy Neos I did. It might just be that we're fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, but I had a hell of a time trying to get stuff like parental controls figured out on ChromeOS.

New comment by nkohari in "eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible"

nkohari — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:06:13 +0000

I agree, but he had to know he'd be asked the question, right? And he had to know that staring blankly and mumbling about the offer being on the website wouldn't suffice as an explanation. It's just mind-boggling behavior from the CEO of a public company.

New comment by nkohari in "eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible"

nkohari — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:37:18 +0000

I have absolutely no clue how you could watch the interview and come away with this conclusion. The purpose of an interview is to ask Socratic questions to allow the guest to talk about something of which they have intimate knowledge.

The CEO made it seem like he himself didn't know how the math for the offer worked, and even when presented multiple opportunities to correct that impression, he made no attempt to convince anyone otherwise.

New comment by nkohari in "Batteries Not Included, or Required, for These Smart Home Sensors"

nkohari — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:40:04 +0000

That's not really true. We've used these for years to control our Hue lights, and they're fantastic: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MMWH2YB

New comment by nkohari in "GPT-5.5"

nkohari — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:49:59 +0000

The prevailing theory is that Anthropic doesn't have sufficient compute capacity to support Mythos at scale, which is the real reason it hasn't released.

New comment by nkohari in "US Department of Justice has officially reclassified cannabis as less dangerous"

nkohari — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:05:40 +0000

This is absolutely true, but it's also difficult to square the legal restrictions around cannabis while alcohol is freely available (and significantly more dangerous and habit-forming), and nicotine use is on the rise again thanks to vapes and Zyn.

(To be clear, they're all drugs, and they should all be used responsibly if at all.)

New comment by nkohari in "Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero"

nkohari — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:01:03 +0000

I used to work in a suburban supermarket during high school and college, first as a cashier and then as a frontend supervisor and payroll clerk. We had a security booth where you could watch security cameras, and it was literally never manned. Tapes were changed, but they were there mostly in case someone would try to rob the place. Cashiers routinely rang their own lunch up either as 99 cents or as bananas. No one cared.

Supermarkets actually factor breakage, theft, and spoilage into their books as "shrink", which averages between 2-3% of sales. There's no detective building a case, biding their time to bring down the banana bandit.

Although, modern self-checkouts have cameras on the scanner with ML-powered item detection, and they will alert the attendant if you incorrectly scan something that's sold by weight. (I've done this before on accident, fat-fingering the wrong PLU.)

New comment by nkohari in "Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing"

nkohari — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:18:20 +0000

I would bet large sums of money that Apple is waiting to make a hardware play. When there's a sufficiently capable and intelligence-dense LLM, they will bake it into custom silicon and ship "the first MacBook with on-device AI, powered by our new I1 chip". Imagine Siri being powered by an LLM running entirely on-device at 10,000+ tokens/sec.

Most consumer tasks don't require a frontier model, and (beyond the app store) Apple isn't interested in being a channel through which a frontier model provider like OpenAI can sell subscriptions to their own model.

New comment by nkohari in "EFF is leaving X"

nkohari — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:19:34 +0000

The problem is that there isn't really an alternative. The discussion is still happening there and nowhere else. (Trust me, I've looked.)

New comment by nkohari in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

nkohari — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:52:22 +0000

I don't disagree with your general premise that eventually it'll just be rewritten, but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital.

New comment by nkohari in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

nkohari — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:50:08 +0000

Because LLMs are designed as emulators of actual human reasoning, it wouldn't surprise me if we discover that the things that make software easy for humans to reason about also make it easier for LLMs to reason about.

New comment by nkohari in "Gemma 4 on iPhone"

nkohari — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:43:48 +0000

You're comparing apples to oranges there. Qwen 3.5 is a much larger model at 397B parameters vs. Gemma's 31B. Gemma will be better at answering simple questions and doing basic automation, and codegen won't be it's strong suit.

New comment by nkohari in "Microsoft BitNet: 100B Param 1-Bit model for local CPUs"

nkohari — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:03:02 +0000

I would love to understand the thought process behind this. I'm sure it's a fun experiment, to see if it's possible and so on... but what tangible benefit could there be to burning tokens to spam comments on every post?

New comment by nkohari in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2026)"

nkohari — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:49:31 +0000

Update: we've filled the position for now! Thanks to everyone who applied.

New comment by nkohari in "Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk"

nkohari — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:54:06 +0000

> The president holds all the cards, he is above the law

This is provably not true. The fastest way for this to become true is to believe it, or at least to parrot it, even in a facetious way.