Hacker News: ronbenton

New comment by ronbenton in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

ronbenton — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 02:25:42 +0000

Maybe they’re agents

New comment by ronbenton in "Deloitte falsified documents to evade tax on Abramovich's wealth"

ronbenton — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:20:42 +0000

For what it’s worth, I’m not so sure there’s much of a difference in delivered value between the hours truthfully billed vs. fraudulently billed

New comment by ronbenton in "Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen"

ronbenton — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:37:50 +0000

Anyone else romanticize going to work at some remote location like the IceCube? Probably some escapism going on

New comment by ronbenton in "When did Google get so weird?"

ronbenton — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:42:53 +0000

I had a similar experience with this that actually concerned me. I can’t remember the quote I was googling, but it was verbatim a quote that someone said. The AI interpreted it as my quote and furthermore interpreted it as me intending harm to someone else. Now I’m worried I’m flagged in a system and waiting for the police to show at my door next time google hands over data to the government.

New comment by ronbenton in "Tells of a Slop UI"

ronbenton — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 14:54:51 +0000

A bunch of these patterns are things that real human designers have been using for a while (with the exception of emojis everywhere). This is like how some people assume an em dash automatically means AI generated text.

New comment by ronbenton in "Nvidia's Jensen Huang rejects AI extinction warnings as "doomsday narratives""

ronbenton — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 01:20:09 +0000

This is uninteresting to me given he has a significant financial interest in keeping AI research going full steam ahead.

Show HN: Pollresults.org – free US election opinion poll API

ronbenton — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 01:02:13 +0000

Not sure if this is even allowed here because of politics, but I made an API for US election poll results. NYT publishes cumulative CSV files with results on their site here (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/latest-polls.html) under a CC by 4.0 license, so my API parses those files every 10 mins and serves an API from cloudflare. I have done a bunch of random election analytics projects before and this is something I had always wanted.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781823

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ronbenton in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

ronbenton — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 01:43:11 +0000

Inertia. It's extremely hard to build a network product and even moreso to dethrone the dominant player in the space

New comment by ronbenton in "OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems"

ronbenton — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 02:47:08 +0000

If an agent under a company’s control commits a crime, the company has committed that crime. If we hold companies directly responsible for the actions of their agents, we may end up seeing companies being more secure with their testing and model development.

New comment by ronbenton in "Lazygit"

ronbenton — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:37:44 +0000

Best case scenario they’ll try to monetize the site. Worse case it’s a malware distribution play (can eventually change legit repo link to malicious repo)

New comment by ronbenton in "Lazygit"

ronbenton — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:32:17 +0000

So this is a landing page made by someone who doesn’t maintain the actual tool? This strikes me as a potential scam—build some domain rep off someone else’s tool then capitalize somehow

New comment by ronbenton in "Ask HN: Anyone increasingly worried after Hugging Face and now collusion.wiki?"

ronbenton — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:21:06 +0000

So you’re giving it about a 10% chance this destroys us in the relatively near term?

Ask HN: Anyone increasingly worried after Hugging Face and now collusion.wiki?

ronbenton — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:07:30 +0000

Or can anyone talk me down from being concerned that “goal seeking behavior at all costs” will not spiral catastrophically?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49576654

Points: 3

# Comments: 6

New comment by ronbenton in "What's in a PowerPoint File?"

ronbenton — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 22:18:18 +0000

I had to programmatically generate PPT files a while back. Don’t recommend. Maybe better with LLMs now

New comment by ronbenton in "Don't Paste the AI, please"

ronbenton — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:19:07 +0000

Verbatim AI responses to my PR review comments drive me up a wall

New comment by ronbenton in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

ronbenton — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:42:51 +0000

> I dreamed of doing something significant and never wanted kids

This wasn’t a sentiment I took away from the post

New comment by ronbenton in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

ronbenton — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:51:34 +0000

Hits hard. I know this is wrong, but I often find myself resentful when I see colleagues burning the midnight oil (or otherwise putting in time that I no longer have) in service of career progression.

I think the author is spot on about ruthlessly optimizing the time you do have, though. That seems to be the only way to keep up.

New comment by ronbenton in "Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit"

ronbenton — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:07:32 +0000

> 600,000 ServiceNow tickets are another element of the collection, along with 13.7 million active emails addresses from Oracle’s Responsys marketing application, and details of 11 million sales of in-flight Wi-Fi services.

I really doubt all this stuff was “de-identified”

New comment by ronbenton in "AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)"

ronbenton — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:45:53 +0000

Anyone else have coworkers responding to your human PR review comments with AI? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, how can anyone find this socially acceptable?

New comment by ronbenton in "The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]"

ronbenton — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:30:51 +0000

I think this is well said but also would have appreciated if you disclosed that you are a government vendor and are susceptible to your own biases. Would be only reasonable given that you call the author out on this. But the difference is she actually discloses her interest.