<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: shalmanese</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shalmanese</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:07:02 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=shalmanese" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Maybe we shouldn't be reviewing all this code"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But that's the entire point. Pair programming isn't for producing more working code in this session faster. It's that it empirically is the fastest way to erase knowledge gaps because the two of you are working on a shared artifact.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:35:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544513</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544513</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544513</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Except OpenRouter sees all your prompts, sends your requests to different providers with pinky promises that they dont use your data, and is therefore a non starter for any company who cares about compliance.<p>OpenRouter provides a Zero Data Retention option and is SOC 2 Type II compliant which means there's real penalties involved if they don't do what they say.<p><a href="https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/zdr" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/zdr</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:55:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340193</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340193</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340193</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Probably. But I like reading a lot of articles I'm not the target audience for, because I like learning things.<p>OK, but the definition of not being the target audience is <i>you</i> bear that burden, not the author. If the author bore that burden, you'd be the target audience!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:58:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270466</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270466</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270466</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "I'll be stepping back from leading product for X"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’ve been caught in a bug the last month where every day, it will ask me to complete a captcha, it tells me my account is banned, I click a button and it says congrats, I’m unbanned now and the first five likes I click tell me about how I’m improving the timeline.<p>I enjoy it now as a daily ritual of how incompetent the everything app is.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 05:26:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192819</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192819</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49192819</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "The Shape of Things to Come"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created some absurd token burning architectures.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:01:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157554</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157554</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49157554</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They don't need to care, they just need to learn to tune it out, after which it becomes ineffective.<p>Characteristic of this style of AI art is pseudo-detail: the artwork looks busy but when you inspect the detail, it contains no informational value. How could it, you cannot extract more detail from a prompt than what was put in.<p>Contrast with a Where's Waldo picture, for example that is equally information dense but contains actually delightful jokes and variation that makes it interesting to look at.<p>Good design doesn't work because people notice the clear information hierarchy. Good design works because good information hierarchy means people don't have friction trying to interpret it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:35:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149885</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149885</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149885</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I had an amazing AI system that did this and worked well for me.<p>What you did was you started off with the high level vision of the story, you'd figure out the characters in detail, supply their motivation, think about how those things might conflict with each other etc. Then you'd think about how to add various plot points into it so different characters with motivation might find productive tension with each other. You map it out chapter by chapter, what beats go where, what things happen to push interesting conflict.<p>But the amazing thing about this AI system was it let you go deeper, you could go into individual conversations and actually place the <i>words</i> people said to each other, add color to the words by appending it with stuff like "she said, hesitatingly". Entire descriptions of scenes could be vibe generated by you imagining in your head exactly what it would look like and finding perfect words such that the image in your head would be transmitted over to the reader.<p>Finally, the AI system had a way to inspect the psychological state of people who might want to read your work by recruiting people who are friends of yours to read each work in progress and you can interrogate them just like a chatbot over what worked well, what didn't, did you understand what was going on over here? Did you feel invested in the characters? You can use this feedback to spin up a brand new version.<p>Anyway, all this stuff is a lot of work but don't believe the people who say you can just press a button and get a good story out. If you put in the effort, this AI program called notepad.exe can have you generating genuinely human sounding prose!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:51:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145655</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145655</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145655</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I feel like there's this one random comment on HN that should be adopted on its merits alone, but everyone will ignore for no good reason.<p>Because it's populist slop, just like how every long enough discussion about government incompetence will lead to someone proposing all political leaders should be paid minimum wage to fix the problem.<p>Don't forget, the entire Web 2.0 winner ecosystem of companies that make up our modern Internet <i>was</i> founded by Engineer GodKings who leveraged their product prowess to gain a distribution advantage: Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Stripe, Github, Whatsapp, Instagram etc. They were also the ones who transformed their companies to what they are today, nobody forced them to do this. Contrary to populist opinion, it's not because they were stupid or brainwashed, it's because the proposed scheme has known, predictable downsides that a leader actually has to reckon with while internet commenters only have to worry about preserving their egos.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:19:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045268</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045268</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045268</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I think there’s a lot of social media influence from nation state competitors going on to try and slow SOTA development in the US.<p>No sign of datacenter activity at the local 4-H club either. Am I so out of touch? No, it's the commie brainwashed American citizens who are wrong.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:17:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008183</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008183</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008183</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>ICE was a reshuffle of the INS and a few ancillary departments but the core functions are continuous. It's like saying Meta has only been around for 5 years, most of the engineers were doing their previous job unchanged by the rebrand.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:41:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005868</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005868</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005868</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Mickey Mouse Sells a Bundle"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why not submit with ?utm_source=hn instead which is far better understood by indexers etc. and is generally supported inside of CRMs to allow for paywall free access.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:22:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002557</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002557</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002557</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Nuclear war survival guide reveals seven everyday items if disaster strikes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Survival", as conceptualized as an industry, is that you're holed up in a secure location with adequate food, ammunition and other essentials to last months to years. Plenty of preppers who diligently prepared bunkers for the end of the world emerged from those bunkers, not because they ran out of food or ammo, but because their hair got too annoying to deal with and cosplaying survival did not extend to actually learning how to cut their own hair vs giving up the pretense and having a professional do it..</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:16:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48893107</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48893107</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48893107</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in ""Stop Cutting Down Flock Cameras " (Mass Surveillance Is Good) [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The Youtuber AwakeWithJP has constantly shifted his apparent political beliefs over time in a cynical attempt to find new audiences. He started off as a crunchy granola hippy, then an "anti-woke" activist before going full Trumper during COVID. Now he's moving away from Trumpism and becoming a privacy/civil liberties activist persona.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 01:48:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886896</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886896</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886896</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Young women are identifying as less straight; young men, not so much"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think it's impossible to grapple with this without fully reckoning with the impact of porn.<p>One thing I like to ask people is if they can name me an openly straight female pornstar. That is, a female porn star that has never appeared in scenes where they have sex with both men and women and have stated or it can be inferred from a long enough career that they refuse to be booked for those scenes. Then I ask them if they can name me an openly bisexual male porn star That is, one that has opened appeared in scenes where they have sex with both men and women.<p>The disparity of how hard it is to name either category reflects back onto our social beliefs of the acceptability and commonness of each.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 01:20:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886715</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886715</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886715</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Nuclear war survival guide reveals seven everyday items if disaster strikes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One test I now use on survival related material, especially ones written pre-COVID, is how long does it take them before they start talking about how to cut hair.<p>One thing we learned during COVID was a significant limitation in people's willingness to stay isolated was their hair was getting out of control. It's the exact, boring, unsexy topic that you omit if you're selling the fantasy of survival and you include if you want to cover the boring, day to day logistics.<p>The entire survival industry is not acquitted well in being revealed as how much the industry is an aesthetic movement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 01:07:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886646</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886646</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886646</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, by far the most parsimonious explanation is they got slapped by a capricious US government so they went overboard on caution in an attempt not to generate any more controversy. A predictable response of chaotic government regulation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:52:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838436</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838436</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48838436</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Schizo founder story (terrorist to tech exit)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Whatever else it is, it definitely isn’t AI written.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:33:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48814342</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48814342</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48814342</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Software owner learns that posting blog posts about their support woes also doesn't lead to an outpouring of love.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Jul 2026 04:19:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48800597</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48800597</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48800597</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Hackers shoveled snow for company, were rewarded with network admin access"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Why can't my password be a 5KB long<p>Because that opens you up to an entirely new class of attack. You have to set the limit somewhere and if you set it at INT_MAX, then a malicious user could find a O(n^2) path in your password validator and input a 4GB password that locks up the machine. Or they could create 1000 users in a row with 4GB passwords and fill up your storage.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 01:55:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781992</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781992</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781992</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The purpose of a system is what it does. You're never going to have success optimizing a system towards goals that are not the goals of the system. You need to first assess what the system is optimizing towards in the first place and now to change the incentives, otherwise you're going to misdiagnose competence as incompetence.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 22:54:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48768439</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48768439</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48768439</guid></item></channel></rss>