Hacker News: JambalayaJimbo

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

JambalayaJimbo — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:12:49 +0000

As a car driver, you should understand a little about how your car works. What if you get a flat tire? At the very least, you should know not to drive on that flat tire.

Software is full of leaky abstractions

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

JambalayaJimbo — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:26:34 +0000

So first of all, usability features are security features. There is the classic example of an uncrackable 18 character random password string that only results in frequent password reset attempts and the bank’s support staff getting totally overwhelmed.

We can have a discussion about FaceID specifically, but “convenience” is not considered trivial within the security sphere.

Second, I work for a (very large) bank, and you actually do not want to trust them with your biometric data directly. You can be absolutely assured of the privacy of your biometric data with the bank, better than with a Silicon Valley tech company. But I would not trust the bank’s data scientists to come up with a model that will not have an extremely high rate of false positives and negatives.

The reality is, if such an initiative was started at a bank, it would be shuttered after years of delays.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise"

JambalayaJimbo — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:11:24 +0000

All the senior developers I have worked with are absolutely allergic to coming into the office, working closely with junior developers, and in general talking to people.

Whereas juniors are eager to chat, have lunch with you , and share what they’re working on, the seniors are guarded and solitary.

Maybe that’s just my workplace though!

And yes, the office is important.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

JambalayaJimbo — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:22:34 +0000

This just sounds like a bug. Haven’t delved too deep into it technically though.

Anyway flawed implementation doesn’t mean that hardware attestation is a fundamentally useless primitive. Apple Wallet is responsible for millions of transactions a day.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

JambalayaJimbo — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:18:42 +0000

My banking app already trusts Face ID right now!

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left"

JambalayaJimbo — Mon, 11 May 2026 06:53:39 +0000

I mean it’s a free country either way then. Elastic can change the licensing and Amazon is then free to compete with a fork of the software pre-licensing change.

Amazon doesn’t really have a leg to stand on in objection here. Building a platform to re-sell an open source project may end up fracturing that open source community’s user base, that’s a consequence of their own actions.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

JambalayaJimbo — Mon, 11 May 2026 06:07:56 +0000

What about Apple Wallet?

The reality is that there is software dependent on the user being unable to modify it. This safeguards the server against fraudulent users.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision..."

JambalayaJimbo — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:20:12 +0000

The whole point of UUIDv4 is that you don't need to check if it's conflicting and can just use them right away. This falls apart if you let untrusted sources of UUIDv4's enter your system IMO

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

JambalayaJimbo — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:26:17 +0000

>Competition. If I ask my OS-level AI assistant to find a social media reel about a elephant dancing, the social media app that exposes a set of APIs for an AI agent might get used more.

This is the exact opposite of what will happen (and in fact what has happened). Reddit is suing Perplexity right now for scraping.

Meta will not serve content to some other app for free - for what benefit? They will not see advertising data.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)"

JambalayaJimbo — Tue, 05 May 2026 06:33:47 +0000

If you’re a manager you have people under you that care about the code they write and the direction of the company, not typewriter monkeys.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Maladaptive Frugality"

JambalayaJimbo — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:24:28 +0000

"Miserable" is subjective obviously. If you're regularly working evenings and weekends at your high paying law firm, I'd characterize that as miserable. If you're living cheaply in some exurban place but can only see your friends or family twice a week, I'd characterize that as miserable. But I can't speak to anyone else's state of mind.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "A playable DOOM MCP app"

JambalayaJimbo — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 04:35:14 +0000

This is cool! I'd love if you could explain the issues you had with CSP and serving content.

I was just tinkering around with MCP Apps the other day, and I had a really hard time serving images (this is for rendering in VSCode Copilot). Did you serve static resources through resource endpoints in the mcp server, or via another mechanism?

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "YC as a Service"

JambalayaJimbo — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:33:30 +0000

Pricing is way too good to be true? If they’re claiming a 4 month engagement, this would be much more believable if they actually charged a reasonable price for those 4 months.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

JambalayaJimbo — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 04:37:51 +0000

Didn’t got 5.5 just come out lol. Am I just reading slop on this website?

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Opus 4.7 to 4.6 Inflation is ~45%"

JambalayaJimbo — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:31:18 +0000

If the business doesn’t grow then you shed costs like employees

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

JambalayaJimbo — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:53:31 +0000

I absolutely feel like there has been an explosion of software since the release of AI tools. This is a subjective assessment anyway…

My company for example has gotten 500% better at creating productivity tools.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

JambalayaJimbo — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:20:12 +0000

Claude Code allows subsidized access to Anthropic's models! The product quality doesn't really matter, which is an argument FOR vibe coding sure, but only in cases where software quality does not matter.

You cannot extrapolate from Claude Code that software quality does not matter in all cases.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

JambalayaJimbo — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:14:13 +0000

I guess they weren't expecting a leak of the source code? It's very handy to have as much as possible available in the codebase itself.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

JambalayaJimbo — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:04:08 +0000

You need both to be a great software engineer. The "means to an end" people will happily slop out PRs and let the "craft" people worry about it.

New comment by JambalayaJimbo in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

JambalayaJimbo — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:47:25 +0000

How do you even converge on the right data model without refining code? Elegant code and elegant data model are the exact same thing!