Hacker News: wan23

New comment by wan23 in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

wan23 — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:37:00 +0000

My elderly uncle is completely addicted to these. We can barely complete a conversation without him getting bored and pulling out his phone to watch these nonsense videos. I don't even understand what the point is. The ones he watches are these clearly procedurally generated stories. It'd be one thing if the content was actually interesting, but ugh.

New comment by wan23 in "New York to tax luxury second homes in NYC"

wan23 — Mon, 18 May 2026 20:50:43 +0000

You're comparing the wrong numbers. The question is what 1% of the purchase price does to the amount you need for your down payment and fees. On a 10% down payment an extra 1% increases the amount you need by 10%. Remember that while a million dollar home sounds extravagant, it's first time buyers who often have just barely enough who are trying to buy these.

New comment by wan23 in "AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise"

wan23 — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:06:15 +0000

I tried out Gemini in Google Sheets the other day. I asked a pretty simple question and the agent ran for like two minutes trying to answer it until I stopped it. I can't imagine these agentic features are cheap to run for what they get you.

New comment by wan23 in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

wan23 — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:38:03 +0000

Things besides writing code that you might be doing:

- Meetings

- Code reviews

- Manual testing

- Deployments and more testing

- Triaging issues

- WTF how did this bug happen?

- JIRA in general

- Whiteboarding sessions / Design docs

- Interviews

- 1:1s (mandatory ones)

- 1:1s (networking / problem solving / political alignment)

- Whatever your company's version of corporate extracurriculars is

New comment by wan23 in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

wan23 — Wed, 06 May 2026 18:00:55 +0000

Have you ever encountered the very common real life situation where there's some software that works, and you have a binary for it but you either don't have the source code or it doesn't compile for whatever reason? This is the pre-LLM world. Now, do you think LLMs make this situation better or worse? You may not know what's wrong with your software or how to fix it, but unlike in the past you can throw compute at trying to figure it out, or replicating a subset of it, or even replicating all of it depending on what it is. I think LLMs are making this situation better not worse.

New comment by wan23 in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

wan23 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:28:36 +0000

The simulacrum of a thing is a simulacrum of the thing though. LLMs are trained to simulate human thinking, and while their thought process is not the same, you can't say for sure that the thinking output is not necessary for their thought process to end up in the place where a human thought process would end up. If the "Interesting!" token(s) wasn't there, for all you know it would have gone down a completely different path.

New comment by wan23 in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

wan23 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:49:45 +0000

Why would you want to live in a free-standing house instead of a nice apartment given the choice? There are pros and cons sure, but unless you can hire someone to do all the house things I don't see it being a clear win.

New comment by wan23 in "Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing"

wan23 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:02:39 +0000

The day I picked up the first iPhone I was carrying a Blackberry, a flip phone and an mp3 player. Really interested to hear what you're thinking of that was an equivalent product.

New comment by wan23 in "Your Backpack Got Worse on Purpose"

wan23 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:55:09 +0000

When I was a kid everyone knew that JanSport was the one to get if you actually wanted your bag to survive. Absolutely one of those things where you'd spend more replacing the cheaper bags over and over compared to buying the JanSport once.

New comment by wan23 in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

wan23 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:09:10 +0000

You wouldn't want to live there because it's too safe?

New comment by wan23 in "Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week"

wan23 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:17:43 +0000

The last time I was on jury duty in New York, any time someone tried any of these, the judge just reassigned the person to the jury pool for civil cases which, he claimed, are usually longer trials and likely to be more of an inconvenience.

New comment by wan23 in "Animated 'Firefly' Reboot in Development from Nathan Fillion, 20th TV"

wan23 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:09:14 +0000

Without getting involved in the flame war, SNW and SFA are good shows. Strange New Worlds is the closest to one of the classic shows out of the new ones, though it has some quality issues in the more recent season which Trek show didn't? And Academy is just something different, but that doesn't make it bad. It should be okay for a property to have a show or two that is a different genre than the others. And for what it's worth, the themes are classic Trek at their core.

New comment by wan23 in "My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)"

wan23 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:01:45 +0000

Many homes have a bunch of lights with their own switches, like lamps. Also there are rooms with multiple entrances, like a living room with a bedroom on the other side from the from the front door entrance, which would involve walking to the side of the room with the switch then walking back through a dark room after you turn it off. Being able to just get into bed and say "Alexa, turn off all of the lights" is way more convenient than checking 14 light switches around my home.

New comment by wan23 in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

wan23 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:35:20 +0000

https://hobbybot.net

I'm trying to see how far I can get using AI to help me track pre-owned items for sale, starting with watches. I started with an OpenClaw agent that was looking for specific things I wanted to buy, and then I figured might as well make a whole site for it so I can share with others.

New comment by wan23 in "The Brand Age"

wan23 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:29:40 +0000

With the exception of a few brands that have the artificial scarcity that PG wrote about here, pre-owned watches have the same kind of value decline that pre-owned cars do. If you are ever in the market for a nice watch that is actually available at retail, you should probably buy it used instead.

New comment by wan23 in "The Pentagon threatens Anthropic"

wan23 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:21:34 +0000

In America, the military isn't supposed to be in charge. They fought a revolution about it.

New comment by wan23 in "Pebble Production: February Update"

wan23 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:32:42 +0000

I think it's made for those people as well as people who want a hackable customizable wearable.

New comment by wan23 in "Pebble Production: February Update"

wan23 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:14:58 +0000

I pre-ordered a round one which is going to be my third Pebble and I'm excited for it, but there is some really good competition nowadays. Casio makes a watch with similar display technology, solar power so the battery life is basically infinite (it doesn't even have a way to charge with a wire) and bluetooth time sync to your phone. It's not a smart watch so it doesn't have apps or notifications or customizable watch faces - the things that make the Pebble really fun - but as a watch it's hard to beat a GW-BX5600 if all you need is time-related functions like stop watch, timer, multiple time zones etc.

New comment by wan23 in "The only moat left is money?"

wan23 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:53:53 +0000

It's absolutely wild to see how unevenly distributed the future we're living in is.

New comment by wan23 in "Disney trip turned into immigration detention"

wan23 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:24:56 +0000

So basically you're okay with the trains and the camps, just not the showers and incinerators?