Hacker News: J8K357R

New comment by J8K357R in "Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)"

J8K357R — Sat, 02 May 2026 12:26:41 +0000

A great example of a decision that likely received little to no thought from an early developer but that has long legs and will stick around forever.

New comment by J8K357R in "Credit cards are vulnerable to brute force kind attacks"

J8K357R — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:12:36 +0000

I once had a person that was hired by my company and then started bragging about finding a way to add stored value to gift cards. Then come to find out they were under investigation by the FBI. This was a government contractor mind you, so the biggest security guard I’ve ever seen showed up to escort them out.

Show HN: CyberChef Payment Cryptography Extensions

J8K357R — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:44:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.jacobmarks.com/2026/04/cyberchef-payment-cryptography.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977704

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The AI Revolution – Hype, Probability, and the Illusion of Thinking

J8K357R — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:30:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.jacobmarks.com/2026/04/the-ai-revolution-hype-probability-and-the-illusion-of-thinking.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47949818

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Good Engineering Managers Don't Leave the Technology Behind

J8K357R — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:07:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.jacobmarks.com/2026/02/managing-vs-developing-software.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46877308

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by J8K357R in "Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"

J8K357R — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 11:55:04 +0000

My personal experience, agentic coding produces brittle code. Often it works but it violates every opinionated fiber of coding style in me as a developer, even when tuned to my style. It does not give me code that I want to maintain long term. But did I mention it often works. If you treat it like code, written by a petulant toddler, that needs review and refactoring then it works well. It’s also pretty good at code reviewing your code, finding subtle mistakes.

New comment by J8K357R in "A glitch in an online survey replaced the word 'yes' with 'forks'"

J8K357R — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 01:59:00 +0000

Did anyone think to ask Google what’s happening? This can be easily reproduced still and n Google Translate. Strongly suggest that some SDE years ago thought this was an unlikely case that someone would ask to translate the word yes from Spanish to English. Boom fun Easter egg.

New comment by J8K357R in "UK air traffic control meltdown"

J8K357R — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 12:03:37 +0000

Poison Pill! Why on earth would the best failure mode be to cease operating? Just don’t accept the new plan being ingested and tell the person uploading that their plan was rejected. Impact one flight not thousands!

New comment by J8K357R in "Installing a payphone in my house"

J8K357R — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 12:14:39 +0000

I’m, not sure admitting to fraud, even if the ISP is probably long gone, is a great idea.

New comment by J8K357R in "Ask HN: Why is there no good open-source LMS?"

J8K357R — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 12:48:29 +0000

I wrote an open source scorn sequencing engine which is really at the center of an LMS and my co-worker wrote a really nice looking content editor. But we were working as government contractors in the ADL office and it got squashed because there was legal concern that the government would be seen as competing with private industry.