Hacker News: shostack

New comment by shostack in "OpenRouter raises $113M Series B"

shostack — Sat, 30 May 2026 21:30:38 +0000

Yes. Happy for the team but I do not like that this likely means for the future growth expectations as a customer. Hint: probably higher costs and being squeezed more.

New comment by shostack in "OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid"

shostack — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:29:00 +0000

BMO offered the ability to link plaid and some other company to automate it vs me sending updated statements manually. I chose manual. I hate that this is the only option for convenience.

New comment by shostack in "Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era"

shostack — Wed, 13 May 2026 03:41:05 +0000

I am moving full remote because dictation is such a better input mechanism for most of my AI interactions that I have become less efficient sitting in my open floorplan desk at the office because I cannot dictate there and the latency adds up. Typing is just achingly slow these days.

New comment by shostack in "Ti-84 Evo"

shostack — Sat, 02 May 2026 02:54:24 +0000

My ti-82/83 got me into programming because I hated math so much that I taught myself to code an app that would help walk me through how to do various problems. I got in trouble but it was worth it.

Also, drug wars, x wing vs tie fighter, and all sorts of other awesome games were definitely the fun thing to do with these.

New comment by shostack in "Claude Opus 4.7"

shostack — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:13:12 +0000

Looks like they are adding Peter Thiel backed ID verification too.

https://reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1smr9vs/claude_is_abo...

New comment by shostack in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

shostack — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:09:55 +0000

Facial recognition scan for ICE

New comment by shostack in "AI isn't killing jobs, it's 'unbundling' them into lower-paid chunks"

shostack — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 03:57:46 +0000

I get into the same flow state as any fast paced strategy game like StarCraft.

New comment by shostack in "Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model"

shostack — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:14:24 +0000

The pricing changes are interesting. I wonder if at some point they will deprecate the less expensive model to increase their margins.

Original Nano Banana (gemini-2.5-flash-image): $0.039 per image (up to 1024×1024px)

Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview): $0.045 per 512px image $0.067 per 1K (1024×1024) image $0.101 per 2K image $0.151 per 4K image

Nano Banana Pro (gemini-3-pro-image-preview): $0.134 per 1K/2K image $0.240 per 4K image

So at the most common 1K resolution, NB2 is ~72% more expensive than the original NB ($0.067 vs $0.039), but still half the price of NB Pro ($0.134).

New comment by shostack in "Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model"

shostack — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:02:48 +0000

What tooling are you using to use this and manage it?

New comment by shostack in "Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue"

shostack — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 03:16:38 +0000

Tried to use it, installed, enabled permissions, downloaded the parakeet model for English and then it crashed every time I released the button after dictating. Completely unusable.

New comment by shostack in "The Codex App"

shostack — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:16:05 +0000

I did a whole feature in a game I'm building while riding in a car to dinner in Claude this weekend. It could do everything itself except the PR (kicked me over to the GitHub app for that).

I do wonder how that impacted my usage vs doing it locally, and I do with usage were more visible in the mobile app (at least give me my statusline). But it worked.

New comment by shostack in "The Codex App"

shostack — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:09:28 +0000

So much this. I'm eagerly waiting to see what anthropic and OpenAI do to make dictation-first interaction a first class citizen instead of requiring me to use a separate app like Super Whisper. It would dramatically improve complex, flow-breaking interactions when adding files, referencing users or commands, etc.

Importantly I want full voice control over the app and interactions not just dictating prompts.

New comment by shostack in "Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge"

shostack — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:09:27 +0000

That feels like a feature and not a bug given the way some of this stuff is heading.

New comment by shostack in "Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI"

shostack — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:56:17 +0000

But... They are testing ads.

New comment by shostack in "McDonald's is losing its low-income customers"

shostack — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 04:57:53 +0000

You can easily reduce the cost of coffee and drink much better coffee. A relatively inexpensive home setup can easily get you to $.75-.50/cup and that's using good beans.

New comment by shostack in "Work from Home in Skyrim VR [video]"

shostack — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 04:42:13 +0000

Love his channel in general. I actually tried something similar and attended team meetings while sitting in a private jet in VR in Microsoft Flight Simulator. It was such a cool experience and totally immersive. Especially pulling up pinned windows for the work like a laptop on a plane.

There is something to be said for a change in scenery to somewhere stunning. Staring off somewhere beautiful while listening to what people are saying actually helped me stay focused on the content of the meeting.

New comment by shostack in "Nano Banana Pro"

shostack — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 04:45:35 +0000

Hopefully the mobile version of AI Studio gets some improvement. There are some pretty awful UI bugs that make it really difficult to use in a mobile first manner.

Though I still managed to vibe code an app using nanobanana. Now I just need to sort API billing with it so I can actually use my app.

New comment by shostack in "ICE and CBP agents are scanning faces on the street to verify citizenship"

shostack — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 02:00:21 +0000

Do they partner with Clearview or Flock or anyone else? "Collect" seems like a weasel word that still leaves lots of options on the table.

New comment by shostack in "How to rig elections [video]"

shostack — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 20:13:40 +0000

This. The fact that democracy is up against an extremely organized, centralized, and well resourced effort decades in the making with seemingly nothing comparable to combat it has those opposing this on completely reactive footing.

It is hard to see how a reactive group can come out on top in such a case.

New comment by shostack in "GPT-5"

shostack — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 15:43:35 +0000

This behavior should be an early warning sign of future potential enshitification and a reason to consider open weight models you can host elsewhere.

If you are building on models that could disappear tomorrow when a company needs to juice the launch of a new model (or increase prices), you are introducing avoidable risk.