Hacker News: pell

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

pell — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:57:26 +0000

> IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems.

Yet typically 95% of software developers mainly work on CRUD-type apps. Coding agents are not perfect there either but they’re really a lot more reliable than they were a few months ago.

New comment by pell in "Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes"

pell — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:02:05 +0000

Have you checked the Don Hopkins archive yet?

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/

New comment by pell in "Claude Flags Hantavirus Vaccine Questions as Security Risk"

pell — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:17:50 +0000

I tried that afterwards in a new session. Asking about the virus itself was fine but as soon as I asked about developing a vaccine, the chat got flagged again.

Claude Flags Hantavirus Vaccine Questions as Security Risk

pell — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:05:42 +0000

Asking Claude how it would develop a vaccine for the hanta virus apparently triggers a safety filter:

Prompt: How would you develop a vaccine for the hanta virus?

No response, instead this modal: “Chat paused Opus 4.7's safety filters flagged this chat. Due to its advanced capabilities, Opus 4.7 has additional safety measures that occasionally pause normal, safe chats. We're working to improve this. Continue your chat with Sonnet 4, send feedback, or learn more.”

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060572

Points: 12

# Comments: 9

New comment by pell in "Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?"

pell — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:33:36 +0000

While I agree with you that agentic coding still has quite a way to go and is not always producing the quality that I would want from it, I can say quite confidently that its baseline is way above some of the production code in many applications many people use today. It really isn’t that code before agents was primarily written with taste and beautiful structure in mind. Your average code base is a messy hell full of quick fixes that turned into all kinds of debt over the years.

New comment by pell in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

pell — Sat, 02 May 2026 12:01:04 +0000

If you're traveling via Europe, you could finish US border control in Ireland directly before departure and won't be checked again.

New comment by pell in "DeepSeek v4"

pell — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:36:46 +0000

Very much. Try to start a union in China and see how communist that country is. China is essentially a right-wing hypercapitalist country run by a dictatorship.

New comment by pell in "The Zettelkasten method in Obsidian"

pell — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:56:24 +0000

AI will also just run some query or grep commands against it for the most part and has no magical way of finding connections that a human can’t.

New comment by pell in "Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics"

pell — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:03:06 +0000

Interestingly, contamination of the forensic equipment was considered early on already. However, due to the geographic area of the findings and initial negative control tests using fresh swabs, they ruled it out.

New comment by pell in "Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?"

pell — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:38:44 +0000

The way you describe the alternative option seems not very good faith.

New comment by pell in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

pell — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:09:14 +0000

So far, the EU's track record on privacy is definitely a lot better though. Not saying it'd always stay that way of course.

New comment by pell in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

pell — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:08:12 +0000

The emphasis of "domestic" surveillance is definitely concerning.

New comment by pell in "Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment"

pell — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 13:18:58 +0000

That's true but OpenAI also isn't introducing ads to the Plus accounts as far as I'm aware.

New comment by pell in "Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment"

pell — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 13:51:04 +0000

>Not Google.

Google's main revenue source (~ 75%) is advertising. They will absolutely try to shove in ads into their AI offerings. They simply don't have to do it this quickly.

New comment by pell in "Gemini 3 Deep Think"

pell — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:43:12 +0000

I find the quality is not consistent at all and of all the LLMs I use Gemini is the one most likely to just verge off and ignore my instructions.

New comment by pell in "Software Pump and Dump"

pell — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 09:00:34 +0000

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780065 (2 days ago, 70+ comments)

New comment by pell in "Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities"

pell — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:07:09 +0000

I think Kagi buys search engine results from SERP vendors who typically scrape Google’s results and offer an API experience on top of it.

New comment by pell in "Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B"

pell — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:22:21 +0000

I find your critique not very sensible. Point-of-sale systems are not necessarily tied to the payment terminal just because they communicate to each other. If companies choose to use Stripe they do have to set up their own invoicing and tax handling. Your comment makes it sound like Stripe hides this fact and thus users end up not handling tax or invoices because they were mislead. But if you run any kind of businesses being on top of taxes is obviously paramount. I don’t quite get your gripe here.

New comment by pell in "Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B"

pell — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 05:30:28 +0000

Stripe never claimed to handle tax however. Merchants have to handle tax on their own. This is no different than accepting cash or using a card terminal in your shop. The payment processor does not handle your tax for you.

New comment by pell in "EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity"

pell — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:24:56 +0000

The SE has a minimum capital requirement of 120k € so is not within reach for most people. I think this EU-Inc would be a simple structure with a lower threshold.

I am absolutely for it. There are too many different types of company structures in the individual EU countries and they don’t work well when you move and come with all sorts of different risks. Obviously many are also just cumbersome to start and dissolve. You could start five US LLCs within ten minutes of filling out some online forms whereas to start one European entity depending on the country you might have to make a notary appointment, register with the national registry and the tax authority. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement which can take days to weeks.