Hacker News: woah

New comment by woah in "Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI"

woah — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:11:07 +0000

Just gotta make it a few more months now to the IPO

New comment by woah in "Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation falls to lowest in 50 years"

woah — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:52:28 +0000

Man rebels against capitalist system by living off of proceeds of ownership shares of capitalist system

New comment by woah in "AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules"

woah — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:28:37 +0000

This is a news article about a dumb publicity stunt where a crank put his "AI" on a patent application, and the court said "you have to put your own name on it". It has no bearing whatsoever on debates about whether AI is good or bad, or whether it's ok that OpenAI looked at your Github, whether your coworker Gary is committing too much slop with Claude Code, or whatever else people want to make it about.

New comment by woah in "Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing"

woah — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 21:18:11 +0000

> Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively?

Are you suggesting that changes to new production technologies are always driven bottom up by line workers? I'm guessing that historically that's rare.

New comment by woah in "Incident CVE-2026-LGTM"

woah — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:27:05 +0000

Previous piece from this genre: https://short-edition.com/en/classic/story/mark-twain/a-tele...

New comment by woah in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

woah — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:52:42 +0000

Is that why it's so hard to get capital, credit, loans, and investment in the USA?

New comment by woah in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

woah — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:51:04 +0000

This is a core difference between common law and civil law. In common law systems, things tend to get sorted out after the fact, with a judge's discretion, only if things go really wrong. In civil law systems they try to design a perfect system of laws that makes problems impossible.

New comment by woah in "Bain tests software takeover targets by vibecoding AI replicas"

woah — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:08:23 +0000

I did some software consulting years ago. Were we overpriced? Probably. But I also saw why we were brought in:

- A TDD loop where the Indian QA team played the role of the tests. The engineers would yeet some broken code at the end of the day, the poor QA testers would click through all the broken interfaces, and then the engineers would fix it the next day.

- A release process that was so slow and hellish that everyone just went to the DBA to have him add a stored procedure to implement their feature. He could get it in for you the next day.

- A frontend framework discussed in hushed tones, being built by a mysterious monk-like engineer, which was going to be the client's big secret weapon. In reality it was a terrible version of React built on top of jQuery.

- A core in-group of backend devs (most of these guys had advanced degrees for some reason), who would stay late every Friday, going through heroics to do a release of the client's email-templating app. There would be then be lots of back-slapping and congratulations the next Monday for these geniuses who were keeping the business afloat.

- "when in doubt, set timeout". They didn't know about callbacks

Usually consultants are brought in when upper management can tell that there is something very wrong and they can't fix it within the chain of command of their full-time staff.

New comment by woah in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

woah — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:21:51 +0000

This is less insightful than what people might want to read into it. The democratic party has adopted an anti-ai stance as a position in the partisan football game. NPR tote bag carriers read with great concern about AI's terrible water usage (in reality a tiny fraction of that used in things such as lawns), and about the fact that it can do a better job than amateur artists.

On the other side, you don't see a similar upswell in support from the right. AI companies are from San Francisco, and their CEOs are weird, awkward, and probably gay abortion lovers.

New comment by woah in "'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York"

woah — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:38:08 +0000

Wait... are you saying that talking about an ex-colleague with anyone (without filing a bunch of paperwork or something) is a "giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act"?

New comment by woah in "πFS"

woah — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:27:03 +0000

I've simplified it and made it more flexible

3._1_415926535897932384626433832795_0_288419716939

New comment by woah in "Policy on the AI Exponential"

woah — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:52:38 +0000

In terms of aeronautics, went from the Wright brothers to the moon in 40 years. After that, everyone understandably thought that we'd be living in space and flying everywhere with personal jet packs in another couple years. Little did they know, it was the top of the S-curve, not the middle.

In the 60 years since, we've barely been able to adapt the 737 to fly longer routes.

New comment by woah in "GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)"

woah — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:10:28 +0000

Lol I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not

New comment by woah in "The iPhone's Last Stand?"

woah — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:23:18 +0000

At the same time, the only things that get built and sold are the things that someone is capable of building and selling

New comment by woah in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

woah — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:28:33 +0000

I believe that the issue was that the EU wanted Apple to open up their new AI agent interface (the ability to control every app on your phone so Siri can call you an Uber or whatever), and Apple thought that it was too risky of a capability to give to any random AI app right out of the gate.

New comment by woah in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

woah — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:11:43 +0000

> There are 2 potential outcomes: either the sky really does fall, and there's a meaningful uptick in bad things happening to iPhone users, in which Apple can easily point the finger at the EC and say "they made us do this". Apple looks like the good guys who put up a good fight for their users, but ultimately their hands were tied, and they'll probably get the revisions to EU law they're so desperately fighting for.

I'd prefer they focus on safeguarding my data instead of playing a ridiculous game of brinksmanship with regulators to make a point.

New comment by woah in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

woah — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:27:02 +0000

> I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp.

Why would someone else's unrealistic assessment affect your assessment of the actual abilities you see?

Seems like your opinion is mostly politics-based

New comment by woah in "Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots"

woah — Fri, 29 May 2026 23:46:46 +0000

These guys may actually just be angling to sell off the training data. diverse training data is more valuable

New comment by woah in "Protestware for coding agents"

woah — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:28:50 +0000

does it even work?

New comment by woah in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

woah — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:16:11 +0000

From my back of the envelope analysis for my own projects, paying per token on OpenRouter is competitive if not cheaper than running the same open weight model on a rented GPU. Per-token pricing is in the same ballpark (although more expensive) for closed frontier models and open weight models (cents to dollars per million). To me this says that the pricing is somewhat grounded in reality.