Hansen Qian

@streamstraight (YC W23) @lightskis @statusrope @affinity

[Hansen Qian @Hansenq]

2026 June Election Endorsements, by me

https://t.co/Vmjsw5WE3t

[Lee Edwards @terronk]

I’m sorry but you need to pay attention to Insurance Commissioner now.

The only far leftist to have a good night on Tuesday is one of the most disastrous. Jane Kim, with no experience in insurance herself, would plunge California even deeper into an insurance crisis.

[Hansen Qian @Hansenq]

@profplum99 Can’t customize the sugar level in the drinks

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

Wait so in California a 17-year-old can drive a car but can't be a passenger in a Waymo by herself?

[Hansen Qian @Hansenq]

Is anyone else's Codex erroring out on `gpt-image-2` not found when trying to run it using `gpt-5.5`?
Mine is pretty consistently doing this as of 5 minutes ago

[evan conrad @evanjconrad]

today is election day in SF, you should vote! you can walk into any polling place. There's a bunch, just take a walk and you'll run into one.

SF elections are won by only a few votes, so you can meaningfully shift things.

[Swann Marcus @SwannMarcus89]

People seem to be misinterpreting why Seattle is fucked. Seattle is not fucked because they over-regulate big business or because of the “millionaire’s tax.” They’re fucked because they overregulate small and mid-sized businesses which caused a massive localized inflationary spiral that is forcing out big businesses because labor costs are too high

Seattle massively over regulated the service sector by imposing gargantuan minimum wages on restaurants and delivery apps + implementing a zillion other regulations that caused service sector costs to soar. Seattle’s housing prices are actually *declining* but their inflation rate has been 1-1.5 points higher than the national average despite reduced housing costs. This is caused mainly by food service prices rising at 7% a year due to Seattle’s minimum wage policies and excessive service sector regulations. Inflation in Seattle is now 5% and nominal wage growth is 3%, meaning real wages fell 2% in the last twelve months

High local inflation forced big companies to pay artificially high wages because highly paid corporate workers expect wages to keep up with living costs. On top of that, Seattle has a payroll tax that almost exclusively applies to huge companies. Those big companies are therefore paying insane wages to do business in Seattle, whereas if they relocated, they could pay people the same real wages relative to local cost of living and save tens of millions a year in corporate labor costs alone

But here’s the thing: Because Seattle overregulated their small and midsize businesses, those businesses are now operating on razor thin margins and are reliant on highly paid corporate workers who can pay exorbitant prices in order to stay in business. So when a corporate office relocates out of Seattle, all of the local restaurants collapse because they no longer have a customer base who can afford the prices they have to charge due to Seattle’s regulatory environment

What this means is that as corporations cut payroll in Seattle the entire city’s service sector is imploding, which has resulted in localized stagflation. Their whole labor market is quickly evaporating and now they have 5.5% unemployment, 5% inflation, and -2% real wage growth.

None of this has anything to do with the “millionaire’s tax” because the companies are leaving before the people do. Why would companies care about a tax on ultra high incomes that doesn’t impact their cost of doing business?

[Hansen Qian @Hansenq]

@united You can do the same search on your website and select the same flight--that's what's showing up!

[Hansen Qian @Hansenq]

$400 per checked bag on a cash business class Polaris ticket?

@united you've got to be kidding me; there must be a bug here

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Americans really, really, REALLY don't like progressive ideology.

[Sam D'Amico @sdamico]

We systematically priced out food and beverage industry workers and our affordable housing approach favors seniority.

We will need to lower market-rate rents to fix this.

[Hansen Qian @Hansenq]

Credit where credit is due: Claude is terrible at following my directions and constantly skips things that I tell it to do. I took this for granted with Codex!!

[Hansen Qian @Hansenq]

Gotta give credit where credit is due: Opus 4.7 is faaaaaar better than GPT-5.5 at building high quality sales decks

Turns out being #1 at coding does not yet mean you’re #1 at other knowledge work!

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

"Zohran Mamdani agrees with Scott Wiener more on housing than he does with Connie Chan" is kind of an insane statement to make and yet is 100% true

[Hansen Qian @Hansenq]

Gotta give credit where credit is due: Opus 4.7 is faaaaaar better than GPT-5.5 at building high quality sales decks

Turns out being #1 at coding does not yet mean you’re #1 at other knowledge work!

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Yes, the national debt is really becoming a problem. At this point the idea that debt doesn't matter is an economic zombie.

https://t.co/pgZYmv27lW

[Kushal Byatnal @kushalbyatnal]

Over 1 billion PDFs are created every day, but your agents still can’t read them reliably.

Today we’re releasing Parse 2.0, the most accurate document parsing API in the world.

Extend already processes millions of pages daily for leading AI teams like Brex, Mercury, Opendoor, Flatiron Health, and hundreds of others. Now, its even better.

Parse 2.0 is SOTA quality on RealDoc-Bench, our open source benchmark that measures agent success rate on real world docs that agents actually encounter in production.

We trained Parse 2.0 on 1M+ pages of the hardest documents seen in production. Here’s how it stacks up:

- #1 in healthcare, real estate, logistics, and financial services
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Give it a try today and build production-ready document agents with Extend.

[Niels Hoven 🐮 @NielsHoven]

This is such an interesting insight

When I read my old favorite books with my kids, I'm struck by how independent the kids are.

They're exploring woods, picnicking in rowboats, exploring woods, having adventures on secret islands, all without a grownup in sight

But books today would never condone such dangerous behavior! The kids must be kept safe!

But kids want to read about danger and excitement, so books have to portray everyday life as extremely high stakes.

It's like a recipe for neuroticism

[Hansen Qian @Hansenq]

@benhylak Between Stainless, Fern, and Speakeasy it really seems like Speakeasy is the last surviving one (and pivoting)!

Was a great idea, but the space was likely too small--mad props to everyone I know who worked at those companies though! SDK generators were insanely useful

[sam @sam_d_1995]

oh my god, this is unbelievable: the striking LIRR worker complaining that Hochul “has money for everything except our salaries” LITERALLY MADE MORE MONEY THAN HOCHUL DID LAST YEAR

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

My endorsements in SF elections:

Congress: @Scott_Wiener
Judge: Phoebe Maffei
Board of Education: Phil Kim
District 2 Supervisor: @scsherrill
District 4 Supervisor: @alankennywong
Propositions
A: Yes
B: Yes
C: Yes
D: No

[Daniel Golliher 🗽 @danielgolliher]

In general, my view on public sector unions is that they should be regarded, suspiciously, as a special interest group likely to put itself ahead of the common weal. That is my default assumption for all of them until proven otherwise.