<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>Fri, 13 Nov 2026 09:17:32 +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 "I toured Unitree's factory. I'm more bullish on the West"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>He has photos of him inside of different factories inside of China, including a Unitree one.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Nov 2026 13:23:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50404362</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50404362</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50404362</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "The AI sell-off compared to well-known stock market crashes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think that's just you noticing smaller blips in the market as you pay more attention. Markets are random walks so they exhibit a fairly fixed distribution of different sized crashes. If they deviated, someone could notice that pattern and trade on it, returning the market back to a random walk.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Nov 2026 05:12:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50401827</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50401827</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50401827</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "I toured Unitree's factory. I'm more bullish on the West"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, it's baffling to me that someone who did a bunch of original reporting would then be fine pushing it all through a Claude slop machine that makes everything so much harder to read and adds redundancy on redundancy into the text. The same points are made 5 or 6 times evenly spaced through the piece because the AI writing is doing local optimization at the expense of global organization.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Nov 2026 05:10:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50401815</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50401815</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50401815</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Firstly, the cost of fixing a bug once you know it exists is usually minimal compared to the cost of discovering that bug.<p>Boy, I wish!<p>> Like you say, you typically only die of one thing, so if you know the patient won't die of a particular diagnosis because something else is more likely to kill them, then it might not be worth making that diagnosis.<p>You can't know someone didn't die of X until after they died, that's the entire point of this dilemma.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2026 07:54:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50334188</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50334188</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50334188</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Same as we do medical tests: We define some bar a test must meet and then the population, if any, it is applicable for and especially the population it is not applicable for because the curse of knowledge exceeds the benefit (eg: breast cancer screenings not recommended for people under 40 or over 74).<p>This isn't an argument against all automated bug detection, just that it needs to exceed a threshold beyond just "It has found at least one real bug not found via other means" which is the seductive threshold people want it to be.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2026 07:25:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50334025</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50334025</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50334025</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The percentage of software that is even in theory provable to be bug free is a miniscule proportion of the software we use on a day to day basis. In many cases, simply the act of writing a proof becomes largely idempotent to building bug free software which is impractical.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2026 06:49:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333832</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333832</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333832</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You don't want to fix them all because every fix has an opportunity cost. This was the big shift of switching language from "bug" to "defect".<p>Logically, a bug that prevents someone from doing something and a missing feature that prevents someone from doing something are equivalent, they shouldn't be thought of as two separate activities but should be evaluated via the same framework. The list of all defects in a piece of software is infinite so it becomes impossible to erase all defects. It's about prioritizing with finite resources.<p>> You can't predict the harm from a small bug when AI can chain complex exploits and when your software is used in mission critical applications as a data store.<p>Yes, any bug can theoretically be part of an exploit chain, just like any tumor detected can theoretically be the tumor that kills you. This is why the detection paradox exists. Once you become aware of the tumor, you face a duty to try and mitigate it. But we know from autopsies that people die with all sorts of tumors that didn't kill them.<p>Similarly, if we bothered to do autopsies of software products after sunsetting to discover a comprehensive list of CVEs, we'd discover a ton of bugs we were better off not knowing about because they ended up not making an impact but we would have diverted resources if we knew about them.<p>This is not an argument that we should remain totally ignorant of all bugs, but a refutation of the "common sense" belief that more knowledge is <i>always</i> better.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2026 06:46:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333813</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333813</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333813</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> This seems…good?<p>You would think so but medicine has faced this paradox since the development of modern testing technology.<p>You would naively think more testing is always better. More sophisticated practitioners then talk about Type I vs Type II errors and the problem of false positives.<p>But even if you were able to come up with tests that had 100% accuracy, there are times when you don't want to run that test on someone. The key distinction is that people only ever die of one thing and having a tumor that doesn't kill them is often better than risking the surgery to remove the tumor.<p>Similarly, there are some bugs you don't want to find since the harm from the people it affects is smaller than the opportunity cost of fixing it. Ignorance of the bug is better than knowing about it and having to make an affirmative decision not to fix it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:28:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333440</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333440</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50333440</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Tesla takes on $30B in credit as it approaches unprofitability"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Tesla does not have CarPlay/AA support.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:34:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49912617</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49912617</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49912617</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Why AI Cannot Save an Enterprise That Doesn't Understand Its Data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It would have been much more useful if the authors just shared the prompts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 02:06:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771898</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771898</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49771898</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Waymo in Singapore"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A lot of people get a car when they have kids as taking grab with a car seat can be unwieldy. Also, COE wasn’t always $100K, many people are still on legacy COE when it was $30-$50K</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 18 Sep 2026 05:13:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750409</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750409</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750409</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shalmanese in "Remember Hong Kong"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We don’t have to rely on polling as the 2019 district elections happened in HK that November and the message was extremely clear that the bulk of the population was pro-protestors and anti-the HK government: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Hong_Kong_local_elections" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Hong_Kong_local_elections</a><p>> Nearly three million people voted, equivalent to 71 per cent of registered voters, an unprecedented turnout in the electoral history of Hong Kong. The election was widely viewed as a de facto referendum on the concurrent anti-extradition protests.[3]<p>> All pro-Beijing parties suffered major setbacks and losses, including the flagship pro-Beijing party Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), which received its largest defeat in history, losing 96 seats. Executive Councillor Regina Ip's New People's Party failed to obtain a single seat, and was ousted from all District Councils as a result.[4][5] Dozens of prominent pro-Beijing heavyweights lost their campaigns for re-election, including Junius Ho, a controversial anti-protest figure who had expressed support for the triads behind the mob attack in Yuen Long on 21 July.[4][5]<p>> In contrast, the pro-democracy camp in conjunction with the localist camp achieved its biggest landslide victory in the history of Hong Kong, gaining absolute majority in votes and electoral seats in all of the 18 District Councils and tripling their seats from around 124 to about 388.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 20:48:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665154</link><dc:creator>shalmanese</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665154</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665154</guid></item><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></channel></rss>