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shubhamjain

10,569 karma · joined December 28, 2012

Web geek. Love tinkering, building, and learning.

Currently working on: https://textquery.app/

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Blog: https://shubhamjain.co

Email: hi [at] shubhamjain.co

Twitter: @shubhamjainco

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shubhamjain··on Pico CSS is no longer maintained
> To stay relevant, Pico CSS would need a full rewrite: plain modern CSS instead of Sass, built on features it doesn't use today (OKLCH colors, cascade layers, Popover, anchor positioning) with fallbacks for older browsers

Why? Why? Why? I hate how everyone seems convinced they need to adopt the latest and greatest browser features just to stay relevant. I hate oklch and I hate Tailwind popularized it. I don't care how scientifically accurate it is at representing human color perception. It's a PITA to understand a new type of color system, and learn to tweak it, especially when HSL/RGB just worked fine.

shubhamjain··on If IPv4 were land
India: 47M

China: 358M

Both countries have roughly the same population. The IPv4 problem has been swept under the rug with CGNAT and a normal person doesn't even notice it. But it sucks. Forget having a dedicated IP, even on a broadband connection, you don't get a public IP that's truly yours. According to IPInfo[1], there are around 1,000 users sharing my IP. I get flagged for malicious activity, and online gaming is impossible without a Tailscale relay.

Of course, much of this comes down to the bad luck (+ policies) of developing late, when most IPv4 blocks had already been allocated. But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks they'll probably never fully use, and may never sell. Meanwhile I am sharing a single public IP with a thousand strangers.

[1]: https://ipinfo.io/223.233.77.184

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

shubhamjain··on StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month
Too many harsh words in this thread for Stack Overflow without enough appreciation for what Joel and Jeff built.

Right from the start, the content was as open as possible, and community ownership was a core principle. As a programmer with limited resources back in 2010, I have every reason to be grateful for Stack Overflow because back then Experts Exchange was paywalled, and most other forums were either language-specific or drowning in spam.

Stack Overflow's strict moderation was a direct response to those forums, where you often had to scroll through pages of noise to find one useful answer. Yes, it eventually became a hall-monitor type of clique obsessed with enforcing rules, but that moderation wasn't useless. People here forgot Googling a programming question and clicking StackOverflow link? We did this for years, imagine the time saved not going through manuals.

Obviously, there's much less reason to use it in the age of AI. But let's show a little gratitude for what it gave us instead of just grumbling about what it became.

shubhamjain··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
Not an expert, but explaining the proof and it being independently verifiable as important as just putting a paper of it. Reminds me of 1000 page proof of Goldbach’s conjecture that a Mathematician reached sometime back. He was told plainly that no one is going to invest time in verifying the proof because there’s a good chance there’s an error somewhere in between.
shubhamjain··on “Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically
A very balanced perspective, and the concerns he raises are reasonable. He acknowledges that AI is going to transform mathematics, but simply dumping proofs on the math community and expecting others to do the grunt work of verifying, refining, and expanding on them is hardly a productive way to advance the field.

There seems to be more interest in hitting some arbitrary benchmark (we proved X unsolved problems) than in genuinely contributing to mathematics. But what else is to be expected? It's become a maniacal race with too much money. Too much effort is being invested in proving that the exponential curve is still holding.

shubhamjain··on Clean room implementation of Adobe products
The stark contrast between HN comments and everywhere else makes me think HN may be one of the last places left for grounded technical discussion.

Everyone on Twitter is acting as if Adobe’s software was decompiled, rewritten, and that’s it—game over, without even trying the damn thing. Seeing software engineers themselves espouse this nonsense is particularly annoying.

Yes, AI can recreate photoshop. But Photoshop is the product of thousands of tiny design, engineering, and product decisions. The idea that all of those decisions can simply be “decoded” from compiled binaries is laughable.

shubhamjain··on Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
Linus is one of the last remaining champions of rationality in large-scale software projects. Otherwise, it’s filled with devs who love to leave their brains out when it comes to practical scenarios. Anyone who thinks there is a security issue here is an absolute moron.
shubhamjain··on My Feed, My Way
I talked about this in my blog post [1]. I didn't expect regulators to pay attention to the issue anytime soon—let alone move against it. So kudos to the Australian government. Enough with the free-speech and free-market rhetoric: algorithmic feeds are actively poisoning our minds and should be regulated as strictly as possible.

> The issue is that much of the problematic content doesn’t violate any law but still is poison that shouldn’t be on anyone’s feed. The easiest example is painting feminism as some evil propaganda against men, and how women’s place in the kitchen is natural order of things. Such views have gained steam in the recent times purely because of social media (algorithms).

> The ideal regulation would be to ban or heavily regulate algorithmic feeds. If you don’t follow someone, or a page, or an interest, there’s no reason for you to get that stuff on your timeline. Only things that should be shown is what you explicitly choose. And if it does, it should be easy enough to nuke it from your timeline.

[1]: https://shubhamjain.co/2026/02/25/algorithmic-feeds-need-to-...

shubhamjain··on Ask HN: Why don't we bring back old school OkCupid?
It’s in the same vein as saying, “Why don’t we bring forums back?” Vast majority of people 'enjoy' the quick dopamine hit of swiping, matching, and trading cheesy pickup lines, even if they claim otherwise. They may complain, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want to explore alternatives. It doesn’t really matter that the older way may have been saner. Dating apps have been around long enough to become deeply ingrained, which makes it hard for any alternative paradigm to take hold, especially ones that have already faded away.

The only exception I’ve seen work is marriage-focused apps and services. This may be very India-specific, but the dating market felt far more balanced and serious in the matrimony space, provided you’re comfortable being evaluated on things like salary and eating preferences.

shubhamjain··on Doomscrolling ourselves to death
I used to think the same way, that people have always overreacted to new technology.

But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad. Reaching for a calculator to do basic math is a silly habit, a sign of extreme mental laziness. And it's inefficient too.

I’ve noticed something similar in myself with attention. I remember reading The Power Broker, a 1,000+ pages tome, in under a month. Now I struggle to finish books that are a fraction of that length. And if it feels this way for me, I can only imagine what it’s like for teenagers who’ve grown up with smartphones their entire lives. Possibly, being completely engrossed in a book would be an alien experience to them.

shubhamjain··on Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says
It’s surreal how quickly this went from being the most important problem in the world to barely being on anyone’s mind, all in less than a decade. I had plenty of problems with the fear-mongering and doomed-by-2030 predictions, but the current situation, where we seem basically fine with doing nothing, is genuinely scary. Technology has its limits, billions of people still aspire to a European standard of living, and global population isn’t expected to peak until near the end of this century.

I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.

shubhamjain··on Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%
> So this is just delegating certain work to dumber models? I certainly wouldn't use Gemini 2.5 Flash (!!?) for code writing as suggested.

Why not, though? I started using OpenCode + GitHub Copilot, but I burned through my Claude Sonnet quota in just three days. I switched to GPT-5.4-mini, which uses far fewer tokens, and it’s often just as good as Sonnet. I think optimizing token usage is a good exercise. We often assume a model will be terrible, when it really isn’t.

shubhamjain··on 'Idiocracy' Predicted All of This
The source of the problem was misdiagnosed, though. Idiocracy predicted that idiots would eventually outnumber smart people because the latter are supposedly much more ambivalent about having kids. I don’t think that’s actually true—the “smart” aren’t necessarily having fewer kids than the “idiots.” The real problem is idiots have disproportionate political representation simply because of where they live. That’s especially relevant in the United States, where states with tiny populations have the same number of Senators as states with tens of millions of people.

Also, smart people are often less likely to vote when both options seem bad, whereas people driven by propaganda have no such hesitation and will turn out in droves—a problem Bertrand Russell highlighted quite clearly [1].

[1]: https://economicsociology.org/2023/11/30/in-the-modern-world...

shubhamjain··on Nvidia projects $673B in sales as AI demand widens
Every quarter I see a similar analysis, similar projection. Yet, they keep posting these insane numbers. Everyone knows it’s a bubble, the problem is determining the top. Nvidia is continuously showing the top is far far higher than everyone imagines.
shubhamjain··on Maiao: Gerrit-style code review workflow for GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, others
I haven’t used this project but I have used Gerrit. It has its drawbacks (like terrible UX) but its style of code reviews were the most sensible and commit of every PR might not be as bad as it sounds. GitHub’s PR reviews are atrocious and it’s unfortunate they have become the gold standard.

In Gerrit, you commit every review, and the author has to edit individual commits to address them (using git rebase). This may sound PITA but it makes the history absolutely clean, and makes it easier for both reviewers and authors to review and address suggestions.

On Github, on the other hand, reviewing a large PR is just insanely hard. Making sure comment was addressed properly is hard as well, they can get lost in a sea of suggestions. They also become separate commits instead of being part of the commit itself. The commit should always been treated as unit of work rather than the branch.

shubhamjain··on Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
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.
shubhamjain··on Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
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.

shubhamjain··on That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
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.

shubhamjain··on Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite
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

shubhamjain··on ASML's Best Selling Product Isn't What You Think It Is
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.
shubhamjain··on Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return
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)

shubhamjain··on We spoke to the man making viral Lego-style AI videos for Iran
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.

shubhamjain··on How to breathe in fewer microplastics in your home
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"?

shubhamjain··on Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
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...

shubhamjain··on [dead]
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.
shubhamjain··on How the AI Bubble Bursts
> 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.

shubhamjain··on My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary
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.
shubhamjain··on Miscellanea: The War in Iran
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.
shubhamjain··on The future of version control
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.

shubhamjain··on The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ
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?

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