Hacker News: shubhamjain

New comment by shubhamjain in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

shubhamjain — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:47:16 +0000

What an absurd take on a very reasonable concern. As much as I hate “obviously AI” writing, I don’t understand why we have to handicap the tech and prevent it from improving. This manipulation of word choices virtually guarantees AI will always sound like a robot.

Demographic Dividend, my ass; overpopulation sucks

shubhamjain — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:00:51 +0000

Article URL: https://shubhamjain.co/2026/08/13/demographic-dividend-overpopulation-sucks/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299625

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Demographic Dividend, my ass; overpopulation sucks

shubhamjain — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:32:26 +0000

Article URL: https://shubhamjain.co/2026/08/13/demographic-dividend-overpopulation-sucks/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49268151

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by shubhamjain in "Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal"

shubhamjain — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:35:38 +0000

If these numbers are remotely true, there's either a crucial number missing or investors are utter idiots who forced this sale. Won't be surprised if it's the latter.

Assuming M&A deals take at least a few months to close, this acquisition was probably set in motion around April, when SaaS sentiment was near rock bottom and cash-flow machines like Cloudflare, Adobe, and Snowflake were getting crushed simply because Anthropic announced something.

New comment by shubhamjain in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

shubhamjain — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 04:09:38 +0000

As I have grown older, I have realized dead-honesty is a false ideal to live by, especially when it comes to being rewarded in the capitalistic world. I know someone who reached executive level position in a major company and all of his career progress can be traced back to lying on his resume about a NASA internship he never got, which he conveniently purged later from everywhere.

I wouldn’t go that far, but I think it’s perfectly fine to reverse-engineer the interview game and reap the rewards. There’s no reason to feel guilty about it.

New comment by shubhamjain in "Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite"

shubhamjain — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:42:01 +0000

Despite its obvious advantages, the biggest drawback of DuckDB is its concurrency model [1]. If a process opens a database in read-write mode, it acquires an exclusive lock on the file. This prevents even simple read operations from other processes as long as the writer remains open. Maybe there's a simple workaround I haven't come across, but I found it to be quite a productivity killer.

So yes, all these benchmarks are great, but it wasn't so fun working with DuckDB when I had to close duckdb cli, just so a query in another script could run.

[1]: https://duckdb.org/docs/current/connect/concurrency

Show HN: PDFUnlock - Unlock password-protected PDFs right from Finder

shubhamjain — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:28:58 +0000

Article URL: https://shubhamjain.co/pdf-unlock/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49097997

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by shubhamjain in "ASML's Best Selling Product Isn't What You Think It Is"

shubhamjain — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:15:57 +0000

The kind of garbage that gets to the front-page is mind-boggling. Okay, maybe there's some useful trivia here, but combined with the headline, it's just trash clickbait.

New comment by shubhamjain in "Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return"

shubhamjain — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:47:23 +0000

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon.

It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner or later peak is going to be reached (if that hasn’t happened already)

New comment by shubhamjain in "We spoke to the man making viral Lego-style AI videos for Iran"

shubhamjain — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 03:54:47 +0000

The article sounds like the author is visibly upset why these videos are being shared, which are mere “propaganda” to them. “Slop”, “factually inaccurate”, “Iran, the most repressive country for press freedom.”

“We spoke” is doing a more than necessary work here. Maybe just ask a few things and wrote what we had decided to write. My problem isn’t with those claims, which are true, but setting a narrative where a single country is exploiting social media for propaganda while clearly ignoring the crimes of much worse actors here.

New comment by shubhamjain in "How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home"

shubhamjain — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:47:00 +0000

Probably never. I think it's been at least a decade since the fear over them became mainstream. Yeah, it's possible these things can take time to show up but considering the scale of their presence and how long we have been using them, we would have at least seen some definite relationship between them and some serious health concern. Look at the article itself, the health impact is conveniently buried in the last section, and it just repeats over and over how they can found everywhere in the body but nothing on what can possible happen.

So much of the scare revolves around the same framing, "microplastic" have been found in breast milk/blood whatever, but never seen one mentioning what it can possibly cause. Is it too hard to fathom that the answer is "nothing"?

New comment by shubhamjain in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

shubhamjain — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:43:59 +0000

I think it's a pretty good case. I always wondered why would the inventor would use pseudonym in the first place. Surely, not even the most visionary person could anticipate how hugely popular the thing would become. This is why I was intrigued by Newsweek investigation [1]. However, seeing this article, I am leaning towards the person being someone who had been active in crypto culture for a long while, before creating Bitcoin. The story about Napster, and the paranoia around government going after the inventor ties in nicely towards the motivation to remain anonymous.

The word, phrasing use is a good evidence. I do wonder though why didn't the author try to analyze the source code similarly? Did it prove something to the contrary?

Also, Satoshi jumping in to defend block-size out of the blue sounds too reckless for someone so careful about anonymity. Possible explanation might be that he let his guard down seeing an attempt to "butcher" his creation.

In any case, I am convinced that it was most likely a single person and if not Adam, I think there are no more than 3-4 people who are possible candidates.

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-2479...

New comment by shubhamjain in "[dead]"

shubhamjain — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:45:00 +0000

Was expecting to learn how SMSes work on the cellular side. Nothing of that sort. This is probably the worst AI slop article I have ever seen with the same thing repeated multiple times, short stupid sentences, which I can only assume is a product of someone pushing his tool/prompts to rank well in search engines.

New comment by shubhamjain in "How the AI Bubble Bursts"

shubhamjain — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:04:19 +0000

> OpenAI is struggling to monetize. They turned to showing ads in ChatGPT, something Sam Altman once called a “last resort”, while Anthropic is crushing them with the more profitable corporate customers and software engineers. Their shopping feature flopped and they shut down Sora, both supposed to be revenue drivers.

I don't think Sora ever thought of as a "revenue driver" considering how notoriously expensive and unpredictable video generation via inference is. OpenAI is just a repeat of Uber—minus the scandals—in a different decade. Uber got itself into tons of businesses related to transportation on the assumption that it would all be viable "one day." Same stuff that OpenAI is going.

I would say, once the bubble bursts—which is likely, considering the geopolitical environment—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet are likely to be the winners, with a lot of small players at the tail end. Anthropic won over programmers and OpenAI on everyone else. For millions of people, AI = ChatGPT, so I would bet that OpenAI can still become profitable, once they cut down their expenses.

New comment by shubhamjain in "My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary"

shubhamjain — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:44:33 +0000

Amazing! Kudos to Hollywood, for going to this length to license the work, credit the author, involve him in the project. To respect realism as a goal for its own, even though "no one will notice" and a similar image might be "just a prompt away." I know how common is the latter these days.

New comment by shubhamjain in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

shubhamjain — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:50:44 +0000

I always wondered what alternative reality are people supporting the administration are living in and this right here is the answer. As someone put it, Americans love to fool themselves in believing they are the ones 'winning' because they killed more people even if it means completely failing at the original objective.

New comment by shubhamjain in "The future of version control"

shubhamjain — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:45:46 +0000

I would like to point out that Bram Cohen seems to be obsessed with “better merges” and had a verbal spat with Linus on Git when it was just taking off (2007).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8118817

It’s pretty weird that he has gone back to the same idea without understanding why Git’s approach is better. I would say VCS is largely a solved problem. You can simplify a few things here and there, maybe improve support for binaries and few other things, but that’s almost on the top of existing systems. The foundation is rock solid, so it doesn’t sound very sensible to attempt something from ground up.

Total fertility rate doesn't tell the number of births women eventually have

shubhamjain — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 11:45:01 +0000

Article URL: https://ourworldindata.org/total-fertility-rate-births-per-woman

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476519

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by shubhamjain in "The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ"

shubhamjain — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 10:00:51 +0000

I haven't tried AI DJ, so I can't comment on that, but I find it hard to empathize with the author. Not because the criticism lacks merits, but because there is no real attempt to explore the pro/cons of the tech. I see this pattern often with people who complain about AI. They pick a narrow case where it isn't good at and use it to dismiss the whole thing. AI isn't a human, it's going to have its limits.

Same thing I saw in AI-assisted coding. People complaining how AI- enabled some XYZ security risk, it's bad, it's crap. This could be true, but why ignore the fact that you create a full blown native Mac app, with a single sentence? That should be good for at least a few things. Right?

New comment by shubhamjain in "Oil hits $100 a barrel despite deal to release record amount of reserves"

shubhamjain — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 04:41:08 +0000

You might expect events like this to fundamentally change the global order or bring some sanity to U.S. policymaking. But nothing is going to change. It will be chaotic few years, but soon enough, everything will be conveniently forgotten. Iranian/Syrian/Afganian threat will reappear, the war-mongers and Israel-lobby will once more push for pre-emptive strikes, assassinations of leaders or generals. Rinse and repeat.

At its core, the problem is a militarized, propaganda-driven state masquareding itself as a necessary guarantor of global order, while its sole objective is nothing more than letting no other nation threaten its supremacy. And much of the world continuing to accept that narrative either because of lack of alternatives or out of necessity.