Hacker News: vvpan

New comment by vvpan in "San Francisco institution 'heartbroken and furious' after erasure of public art"

vvpan — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:24:00 +0000

Seeing the world through property rights is so one-dimensional and devoid of any creative thought it makes me sad as well. Eventually this is the SV ethos - own, conquer, extract, no space for externalities like simple urban pleasures.

New comment by vvpan in "San Francisco institution 'heartbroken and furious' after erasure of public art"

vvpan — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:44:39 +0000

Hero.

New comment by vvpan in "San Francisco institution 'heartbroken and furious' after erasure of public art"

vvpan — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:19:04 +0000

Or jerk's boss or their boss or shareholders.

New comment by vvpan in "I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer"

vvpan — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:06:31 +0000

Downgrading from Opus 5 to Opus 4.8 was the biggest improvement with readability. I do use the skill under the link and with Opus 5 the improvement felt marginal.

New comment by vvpan in "I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer"

vvpan — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:05:29 +0000

Opus 5 writes absolute garbage, I do have the skill in question installed and it did not help much. Me and everybody on my team downgraded to 4.8 - instant improvement.

New comment by vvpan in "Bluesky Protocol Services"

vvpan — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 03:53:27 +0000

What is the problem?

New comment by vvpan in "Bluesky Protocol Services"

vvpan — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 03:52:01 +0000

Blockchain has some solid properties, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

New comment by vvpan in "Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation"

vvpan — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:53:34 +0000

Not hotdog.

New comment by vvpan in "Brazilian farmers tokenized dairy cows to get loans, bypassing bank limits"

vvpan — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:38:17 +0000

Well eventually consumers don't really know how the system they are using works. Prediction markets run on blockchain but few people know this. Robinhood is offering trading in perpetuals of companies that haven't IPOed yet and you would not know.

New comment by vvpan in "German Peasants' War"

vvpan — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:30:52 +0000

Pentiment is a Peabody award winning video game that covers this period. It's terribly engaging and well written. I'd use the word "educational" but that might make it sound dry, which it is not.

New comment by vvpan in "German Peasants' War"

vvpan — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:27:02 +0000

Curtis Yarvin in a New York Times interview said that there were no wars under monarchy in Europe. Imagine that.

New comment by vvpan in "Brazilian farmers tokenized dairy cows to get loans, bypassing bank limits"

vvpan — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:06:00 +0000

Real World Assets (RWA) is the hot stuff these days. While it is still early the mega-banks are starting to pile on.

One of the reasons is that any infrastructure built on blockchain is reusable for free by everybody (minus transaction free). Uniswap and Aave have been chugging along for years and are starting to acquire reputation beyond retail. Privacy is moving along as well where you can tokenize, say, bonds and hide the in/out flows with ZK proofs.

You can track RWA issuance here https://app.rwa.xyz/

New comment by vvpan in "Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)"

vvpan — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:00:50 +0000

Except Pavel Durov has been caught lying before and in general is not a great source of information.

New comment by vvpan in "Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)"

vvpan — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:57:58 +0000

Somebody already posted it but I wanted to mention it again, investigations that Telegram has not been able to dispute have revealed that Telegram's infrastructure is managed by a person who is also managing infra for FSB. And this is happening unbeknownst to Telegram employees.

https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/06/10/telegram-fsb/

New comment by vvpan in "Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)"

vvpan — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:50:42 +0000

The Insider also did an investigation disproving his claims that he "fled". He consistently visited Russia afterwards.

Edit: it's another iStories piece, not Insider, Insider only re-reported it.

https://storage.googleapis.com/istories/en/news/2024/08/27/p...

New comment by vvpan in "Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers"

vvpan — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:42:55 +0000

It's a great an telling investigation. Dropped in to share it as well. Telegram deserves no trust from us.

New comment by vvpan in "I'm a USB-C Maximalist"

vvpan — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:31:23 +0000

I think one thing that we have come to think as electronic consumers, or just consumers in general, is to expect the absolute best modern version of everything (plug, AI model, car...). I think it is pure conditioning and we forgot the simplicity and convenience of things just working even with apparent downsides relative to acme version. Could USB-C be better? Probably. Is just settling on a standard so you don't have to think about it preferable? I think so. Consider USB-C standardization as an expression of a specific system of values.

New comment by vvpan in "New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices"

vvpan — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:25:23 +0000

A complimentary complaint is that payments are a "pull" operation with subscriptions. You can't decide who gets your money. How retro is that!

New comment by vvpan in "The US ambassador had Belgian police stop our reporting"

vvpan — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:01:01 +0000

Free speech for them, "woke propaganda" for you.

New comment by vvpan in "Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors"

vvpan — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:23:39 +0000

Do we have any hard data about AI improving any business metrics yet? I am not skeptical that it might, but I have yet to see anything.