Hacker News: shostack

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.

New comment by shostack in "Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary is in results"

shostack — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 03:44:35 +0000

I am curious if this will drive them to do more visual heavy formats like images, gifs, and video with AI content.

In many cases for big brands, the click is nice but not needed if you have proper measurement and incrementality experiments running.

New comment by shostack in "A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages"

shostack — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 02:07:04 +0000

Eh, depending on the stress of the work, how much I enjoyed it, etc, $250M can buy a lot of convenience in life that lets you do it for as long as you want and that can be truly transformational generational wealth.

New comment by shostack in "Sign in with Google in Chrome"

shostack — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 05:38:24 +0000

I would be shocked if that timing was not intentional and thoroughly tested for maximizing sign ups.

New comment by shostack in "Developing with Kiro: Amazon's New Agentic IDE"

shostack — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 15:50:33 +0000

Roo Code has had Orchestrator mode doing this for a while with your models of choice. And you can tweak the modes or add new ones.

What I have noticed is the forcing function of needing to think through technical and business considerations of ones work up front, which can be tedious if you are the type that likes to jump in and hack at it.

For many types of coding needs, that is likely the smarter and ultimately more efficient approach. Measure twice, cut once.

What I have not yet figured out is how to reduce the friction in the UX of that process to make it more enjoyable. Perhaps sprinkling in some dopamine triggering gamification to answering questions.

New comment by shostack in "EverQuest"

shostack — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 01:03:50 +0000

Unfortunately as an early NMS player with hundreds of hours, I have seen nothing that gives me hope that LNF will have the depth that is needed for the world to feel like that. Mile wide, inch deep.

What made EQ an experience was those areas were static and took real skill to uncover how to do things.

New comment by shostack in "Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion"

shostack — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 01:10:01 +0000

I am curious if, with the number and quality of signals they can capture from this, how uniquely they can identify individuals and determine things like age, gender, weight, etc. Particularly when analyzed probabalistically with other household level data they likely have.