Hacker News: jaccola

New comment by jaccola in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

jaccola — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:56:14 +0000

But why are you making projects in so many languages? The language is very rarely the barrier to performance, especially if you don't even understand the language.

New comment by jaccola in "A Claude Code skill that makes Claude talk like a caveman, cutting token use"

jaccola — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 11:07:23 +0000

Yes because in most contexts it has seen "caveman" talk the conversations haven't been about rigorously explained maths/science/computing/etc... so it is less likely to predict that output.

New comment by jaccola in "A Claude Code skill that makes Claude talk like a caveman, cutting token use"

jaccola — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 11:04:38 +0000

Do you have any evidence at all of this? I know how LLMs are trained and this makes no sense to me. Otherwise you'd just put filler words in every input

e.g. instead of: "The square root of 256 is" you'd enter "errr The er square um root errr of 256 errr is" and it would miraculously get better? The model can't differentiate between words you entered and words it generated its self...

New comment by jaccola in "NHS staff refusing to use FDP over Palantir ethical concerns"

jaccola — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:26:59 +0000

If only there were some system where the incentives could freely flow through and permeate every level of the sector. Where those organisations that provide sub-standard care die and those that excel receive outsized funding...

New comment by jaccola in "Show HN: European alternatives to Google, Apple, Dropbox and 120 US apps"

jaccola — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:42:15 +0000

I first learned when reading about Steve Jobs, how the Japanese never use "quality" in their advertising. Yet people still view(ed, at least) Japanese manufactured goods as superior quality. It turns out people don't judge quality based on what you tell them but based on their experience.

All this to say: I wouldn't stress about it too much. In the consumer space the best usually does win, and people will simply vote with their feet.

New comment by jaccola in "Cursor 3"

jaccola — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 07:25:45 +0000

Gotta give it to the Cursor team, they must have REALLY good numbers. They raised at a 9.9b valuation less than a year ago and now apparently targeting 50b.

Makes no sense to me, the main driver of codex, Claude code, etc.. seems to be fixed cost plans that offer reduced token cost. Cursor doesn’t have a good model so they can’t offer that (at least not to the same extent).

New comment by jaccola in "SpaceX files to go public"

jaccola — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 05:30:55 +0000

But why? We’ve not colonised either of the poles of our own planet in any real way out of a sense of prestige. Heck there’s huge areas in Canada and Russia uninhabited and these are all a dream to live in compared to Mars.

Turns out the real overpopulation is in places people want to live.

New comment by jaccola in "SpaceX files to go public"

jaccola — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 05:12:38 +0000

Amazon Leo just signed delta as a customer so competition is indeed close behind.

I think SpaceX is an incredible company but at this valuation I’d expect it to have something as pervasive as the iPhone or Nvidia chips. It seems to have only small niches.

New comment by jaccola in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

jaccola — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:38:46 +0000

"Hire" an unfortunately ironic typo!

New comment by jaccola in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

jaccola — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:35:43 +0000

I think this sucks for the people being laid off but what exactly should they be held accountable for?

It's not like over-hiring or laying people off is a crime. The employees presumably knew the deal going in (that they could be laid off). They got compensated for the time they worked.

No one owed them a job at Oracle in the first place. (Again, not to diminish how bad it feels / shocking it can be to be laid off!)

New comment by jaccola in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

jaccola — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:32:09 +0000

Funny thought, but this is just the client-side CLI...

New comment by jaccola in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

jaccola — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:27:52 +0000

I would say not all that ironic. Book publishers, Reddit, Stackoverflow, etc., tried their best to attract customers while not letting others steal their work. Now Anthropic is doing the same.

Unfortunately (for the publishers, at least) it didn't work to stop Anthropic and Anthropic's attempts to prevent others will not work either; there has been much distillation already.

The problem of letting humans read your work but not bots is just impossible to solve perfectly. The more you restrict bots, the more you end up restricting humans, and those humans will go use a competitor when they become pissed off.

New comment by jaccola in "ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state"

jaccola — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:34:01 +0000

There are myriad providers competing to offer this, nicely packaged with all the accoutrements (IP rotation, location spoofing, language settings, prebuilt parsers, etc.) behind an easy to use API.

Honestly it is a very healthy competitive market with reasonably low switching costs which drives prices down. These circumstances make rolling your own a tough sell.

New comment by jaccola in "ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state"

jaccola — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:27:47 +0000

I disagree, a browser can have javascript execution disabled (and this is somewhat common in scraping to save time/resources).

I read it to mean: "A browser that doesn't execute the JavaScript bundle won't have [the rendered React elements]." Which is true.

New comment by jaccola in "Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor"

jaccola — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:33:59 +0000

People regularly pay for software that runs on their machine.

New comment by jaccola in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

jaccola — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:59:59 +0000

I bet that most of their revenue doesn't come from people who want to bet big!

If only there were some kind of market where we could materialise our bets...

New comment by jaccola in "Apple Just Lost Me"

jaccola — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:31:51 +0000

You don't think Apple would suffer any reputational damage if they deleted millions of peoples cherished memories and important work notes/emails?

Also there would be many lawsuits arising from this.

New comment by jaccola in "How to Spot a Liar: Kate White on the Techniques of Deception in Mysteries"

jaccola — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:46:48 +0000

OK but most liars don’t fabricate an entire story.

In the startup world they might claim to have 1.5x the rev they have, or that an impressive logo is trialling their product when really they’re in early talks, etc…

Then it’s much easier to tell the “truth” with one twist and these methods fail.

New comment by jaccola in "404 Deno CEO not found"

jaccola — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 21:08:46 +0000

The author should be the change they want to see in the world. Nothing is stopping them from making an alternative.

    > "I could continue but it would just be cruel to dissect further."

in particular really rubbed me the wrong way for 2 reasons:

1) You acknowledge that you think you've already at least bordered on "cruel", why would you want this? It's not clever.

2) You have the arrogance to think your opinion means this much to the creator when they've achieved far more than you.

New comment by jaccola in "Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex #5"

jaccola — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:51:37 +0000

They are both true. The £'s I give to the NHS I cannot instead take to other healthcare providers.