Hacker News: themanmaran

New comment by themanmaran in "A map of every lighthouse"

themanmaran — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:17:13 +0000

Fun fact, there is a .gov effort to sell (or give away) a lot of old lighthouses in exchange for agreed maintenance. It's sort of a terrible deal, since you can't live in them or use them for commercial purposes, but you do still have to maintain it to a certain standard. But I'm sure someone is out there with the desire.

https://realestatesales.gov/our-listing/

New comment by themanmaran in "How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it"

themanmaran — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:15:45 +0000

> do you get laid off?

> Neither has anything to do with your skills at the actual job.

I hate to break it to you. But it definitely does...

New comment by themanmaran in "I made a visual workspace for AI Automations"

themanmaran — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:55:25 +0000

Great to hear. A philosophy to keep in mind:

LLMs give back nothing but mountains of text. To provide value, you must provide something other than text.

New comment by themanmaran in "I made a visual workspace for AI Automations"

themanmaran — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:54:31 +0000

Agreed! Clicked the link because I was excited. This is a real gap especially when you have like 10 different agent providers and no idea what they are doing. But the UI here is just bad.

IMO the correct UI for this like gather.town. Give me a top down pokemon view of all my agents running and a leaderboard for activity / most recently run.

New comment by themanmaran in "Plan mode is dead"

themanmaran — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 02:26:37 +0000

I don't think me giving the model bad instructions is something a smarter model can solve. I use plan mode constantly (with opus/fable), and at least once a day I'll say something too vague or just dumb and it will sketch out the "wrong" solution in it's plan.

Which is fine because it just put together a plan and didn't spend 10 minutes rearchitecting everything.

New comment by themanmaran in "Plan mode is dead"

themanmaran — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:28:43 +0000

I likewise don't understand this push. Surely it's a trivial feature to keep enabled. It mostly seems like advertising that "our models are so smart you don't need to plan". But I find it to be a great mental review process for my workflow.

It sounds like the Ant perspective is "you can just ask claude to plan", but at the same time that's a little more tedious than shift+tab

New comment by themanmaran in "Chopping up books when they're physically too big"

themanmaran — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:20:45 +0000

I have very fond memories of reading hitchhikers guide to the galaxy with a friend in highschool. The book was old and had already started falling apart, and so we just broke it up into chapters and would pass it to the next person one chapter at a time.

New comment by themanmaran in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2026)"

themanmaran — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:53:20 +0000

We’re building the Voice AI infrastructure layer for financial services. Banks and fintechs use Monumint agent to automate loan origination, account opening, servicing and customer engagement.

You’ll work on:

1. Driving down voice latency to human-conversation levels while scaling to thousands of concurrent calls

2. Deploying agents that run durable workflows across days or weeks, maintaining state across calls, tools, documents, and human handoffs

3. Making AI agents reliable and observable in a financial workflows: tool calling, evals, guardrails, and deterministic fallbacks

We’re early, you’ll have a huge impact. Email me (my name at the URL) or apply here: https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/monumint

New comment by themanmaran in "WebMCP Challenge – OpenAI"

themanmaran — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:14:04 +0000

I don't think it's that binary. For the majority of websites, adding programatic access didn't make sense because it would primarily have been for scraping data. No financial incentive for them to support this.

The dream today is that agents might prefer your website due to it's MCP and actually purchase something. i.e. 'hey claude go find me the cheapest places I can buy these headphones'

New comment by themanmaran in "Qwen 3.0 Image Pro"

themanmaran — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:18:29 +0000

Pretty annoying user experience trying to test out the model on the official Qwen site. You get an immediate popup with "Security Notice: For security purposes, please add a payment method" that blocks you from clicking anywhere.

Honestly if you're launching a new model, you should probably just make it free for the 24 hours after launch so people can test it out. Otherwise just wait till it's on openrouter.

New comment by themanmaran in "The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder"

themanmaran — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:16:39 +0000

I've just been reading The Making of Prince of Persia (highly recommend [1]) and it's amazing how the journal feels exactly like today's startup scene. But everything is dated 1989.

[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-making-of-prince-of-persia

New comment by themanmaran in "Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub"

themanmaran — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:25:33 +0000

My lord people accept a little bit of whimsey in your lives.

New comment by themanmaran in "Launch HN: Prized (YC S26) – Let non-engineer staff build secure internal tools"

themanmaran — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:41:36 +0000

TBH I was a retool power user for years, but I feel like they completely missed the vibe code train.

It's so much more annoying to go drag boxes around and type out little JS snippits in every chart as opposed to just telling claude to make the chart.

New comment by themanmaran in "Launch HN: Unlayer (YC W22) – Add email and document builders to your app"

themanmaran — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:15:40 +0000

FYI we've built this internally and it was a pain, so I was excited to check out what you've built to see if it was a good fit for us.

But your landing page + video was just slop city. Removes 100% of credibility for me.

I know the advice is launch early and often, but honestly I would just point people to the github until you have something better.

New comment by themanmaran in "Vulnerability reports are not special anymore"

themanmaran — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 02:56:31 +0000

Seriously. We got 116 github dependabot alerts this week. Half of them for dev dependencies.

New comment by themanmaran in "Vulnerability reports are not special anymore"

themanmaran — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:54:12 +0000

I feel like it's also been overrun by a lot of spam. As someone running a company, I get 2-5 unsolicited "vulnerability reports" per week. Half of them are an LLM finding some bad CSS on our framer splash page. The other half I assume are an extortion attempt so we just mark as spam.

Occasionally I see real security researchers on HN complaining that no one takes the disclosure seriously, or that people reply immediately with a cease and desist. But from the receiving end it's just because the spam is unmanageable.

New comment by themanmaran in "Mistral OCR 4"

themanmaran — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:27:56 +0000

It's cheap at $4/1k, but I'm hesitant to even benchmark this one again since the previous versions were all "98% accurate based on internal benchmarks of 4 pdfs" and ended up falling short of almost everything else on the market [1].

Even in this one, they just report that OlmOCRBench and OmniDocBench have "known limitations" and that's why they report flagship numbers from their internal benchmark.

https://getomni.ai/blog/benchmarking-open-source-models-for-...

New comment by themanmaran in "Developers don't understand CORS (2019)"

themanmaran — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 19:21:42 +0000

The fact that the top comment [1] sparks a thread debating how CORS does / doesn't work is a great argument in favor of the original title.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48616086

New comment by themanmaran in "Waymo Premier"

themanmaran — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:21:02 +0000

Agreed! If you're a 20+ company in SF you're required to offer commuter benefits (up to $340 / month).

That's usually things like caltrain / muni. But I would definitely sponsor a $300/mo waymo subscription if it was like 20 rides a month.

New comment by themanmaran in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

themanmaran — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:55:20 +0000

That's literally not what he said. He's saying the majority of people supporting border controls are not racist, but the vocal minority are the ones who "boast about arrests" / "make up stories about crime or eating cats and dogs"