Hacker News: romanhn

New comment by romanhn in "Venetian Bridge Brawls in 17th and 18th Century Art"

romanhn — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:50:29 +0000

I don't think we can conclusively say anything like that. Sure, a bunch of modern art is... odd, but that's more to do with the world generally being more ok with experimentation, and there's plenty of more classical work happening around the globe, even if it doesn't get the same recognition as various "clickbait", if you will. For instance, the bronze work of Luo Li Rong channels the art of the past pretty well, I'd say. https://mymodernmet.com/realistic-sculptures-luo-li-rong/

New comment by romanhn in "Napster is now "AI agents you can see, talk to, and create with.""

romanhn — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 17:26:13 +0000

The only thing not AI-generated on their website, as far as I can tell, is the original Napster logo.

Napster is now "AI agents you can see, talk to, and create with."

romanhn — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 17:26:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.napster.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48700041

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by romanhn in "A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage"

romanhn — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:40:53 +0000

I was definitely listening to RealAudio radio stations over a 14.4 connection.

New comment by romanhn in "Ask HN: Conflicted about founding engineer role"

romanhn — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:52:04 +0000

You'd be taking on a founder's risk without a founder's title. If this was an offer to come in as a CTO co-founder in an equal, or close to it, partnership, that would be worth a consideration at least (though I'll be honest, at 2.5 YOE at big tech, you're not exactly the ideal candidate for that role). Given the actual offer, it's mostly downsides as far as I see it.

New comment by romanhn in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

romanhn — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:07:42 +0000

Same experience calling a dental office recently. The voice on the other side introduced itself by name and had this uncanny valley quality where I wasn't quite 100% sure it was a bot and felt weird asking it outright. Made for an awkward conversation. Once it became clear that I was, in fact, talking to AI, I quickly wrapped it up but came away feeling quite negative about the experience. It's not even that it gave bad responses, but pretending to be a human is a step too far.

New comment by romanhn in "'Wow, it really worked ': 70s TV show causing worldwide panic today"

romanhn — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:09:38 +0000

Yup, I remember getting the updates from Slashdot while Yahoo was completely unusable due to overwhelming traffic.

New comment by romanhn in "Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet"

romanhn — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:55:41 +0000

Absolutely. Yahoo started out as directories, long before it added a search engine. They were a much better way to discover new corners of the internet (sorta like looking at a list of subreddits today). Web rings was another one. Internet was new, so it was always fun to surprise yourself with something different. Search engines were crap and would normally be used to look for something specific rather than discovery, which I guess hasn't changed.

New comment by romanhn in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

romanhn — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:32:22 +0000

Promotion culture at work, aka if I ship a feature and no one is using it, did I even drive measurable impact? Mix that with a healthy dose of fear for one's job with senior management pushing for "AI or bust" and you get these outcomes. Today it's AI non-features crowding out useful functionality, yesterday it was Google+, before it was Google Buzz, etc etc. This too shall pass (unless it truly is different this time).

Waymo suspends all freeway rides over safety issues

romanhn — Tue, 26 May 2026 02:57:02 +0000

Article URL: https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/21/waymo-suspends-all-freeway-rides-safety-issues/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274472

Points: 35

# Comments: 8

New comment by romanhn in "Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy"

romanhn — Thu, 21 May 2026 01:43:25 +0000

> the fragment contains lines from Book 2’s epic “catalogue of ships,” which lists all the vessels the Achaean army sends off to Troy

It's been about 30 years since I've read The Iliad, but I remember that chapter as the worst part of the book. Just pages upon pages of names and where they came from. I wonder what significance it held for the buried individual to have been specifically included so.

New comment by romanhn in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

romanhn — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:32:46 +0000

I'm not sure what the point of this exercise is. My prompt to ChatGPT: "Create a new English word with a reasonably sounding definition. That word must not come up in a Google search." Two attempts did come up in a search, the third was "Thaleniq (noun)". Definition: The brief feeling that a conversation has permanently changed your opinion of someone, even if nothing dramatic was said. Nothing in Google. There, a new word, not sure it proves or disproves anything. Or is it time to move the goal posts?

New comment by romanhn in "Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS"

romanhn — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:36:31 +0000

The more experienced Tailwind proponents probably have better things to do than get dragged into yet another online flamewar :) I've done tons of CSS since the 90s before looking into Tailwind. After it clicked, I've mostly tried to avoid raw CSS. In a sense, you exchange one mess for another. Personally, I'd rather deal with a localized class soup than trying to make sense of overlapping, often contradictory, cascades of styles across multiple files. Both can be implemented cleanly, but I'd much rather clean up a Tailwind mess than a CSS one. And I find the development process much more enjoyable overall.

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

romanhn — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:30:34 +0000

Just saw this for the first time. How someone can show up on a major network like this is beyond my understanding. Literally couldn't answer where the money would come from.

New comment by romanhn in "AI slop is killing online communities"

romanhn — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:05:20 +0000

Neither are most humans

New comment by romanhn in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

romanhn — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:50:02 +0000

A bit of a non sequitur, but am I the only one finding the use of "she" to refer to the AI in the post jarring?

New comment by romanhn in "Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions"

romanhn — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:57:37 +0000

I'm guessing one of those agents wrote this post as well? The LinkedIn broetry style is so jarring, I had to quit after a few paragraphs. Probably still spent more effort on reading than the author on generating this.

New comment by romanhn in "EFF is leaving X"

romanhn — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:47:40 +0000

North Idaho specifically has been a hub for white power movements for a while: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/mar/27/north-idaho-an...

New comment by romanhn in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

romanhn — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:27:11 +0000

I always assumed that newer banknotes are always going to be easier to obtain than older ones. But the hyperinflation of late imperial, early Soviet times means a ton of paper money was printed and is still available at cheap prices. On the other hand, Soviet money from between 1922 and before 1961 can be quite rare and sometimes very very expensive.

New comment by romanhn in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

romanhn — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:13:26 +0000

I haven't really had a hobby until last summer, when I took up collecting banknotes. Growing up in the USSR, I had a few imperial notes as a kid and wanted to expand my "collection", but didn't actually start in earnest until decades later. Got a few late 19th / early 20th century pre-revolution notes, and then found myself in the abyss of Russian Civil War, where every city and local municipality were printing their own money. Anyways, it's a journey without an end, and I saw an interviewee describing this hobby as a "sickness, do not start", which sort of resonated.

As a history lover with appreciation for tactile aspects of history (love 100+ year old books), this scratches this itch better than anything else, while leaving me wanting more. I research and write up every banknote I acquire, and the sense of history I get from browsing my album is like nothing else.

For anyone interested, here are the photos of my collection circa end of last year: https://imgur.com/a/zmCXd8l