Hacker News: jacobjjacob

New comment by jacobjjacob in "The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging"

jacobjjacob — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:45:45 +0000

Fair would mean everyone gets the same price or that it’s based on somewhat transparent factors, especially when those factors have no impact on the seller. But in many of these cases, it is not disclosed at all and we have no idea what factors they are using.

Compare that to car insurance where many of the factors are well known and have a clear impact on risk.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "The software group Palantir paid just £2M in corporation tax in the UK in 2024"

jacobjjacob — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:39:50 +0000

Over what timescale do you amortize your investment by pricing it in? Do you earn back your $100k by selling $20 coffee? That wouldn’t be sustainable. So, this is where the loss comes in. You can’t realistically sell at a profit considering your capital investment if you aren’t carrying it over longer periods of time.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects"

jacobjjacob — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:23:50 +0000

The value of air conditioning is much more than 20x the value of bitcoin. It might be more than 20,000,000x the value.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

jacobjjacob — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:06:22 +0000

I don’t think that my career has been eroded by even 1%. The areas of erosion listed by the author feel like reverse order to me. The domain is knowing what questions to ask. That’s the last thing to be replaced.

I think that if you are a skilled software engineer and can adapt, you will be amplified in all aspects. If you just like writing artisanal code, you might have a bad time.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

jacobjjacob — Sat, 16 May 2026 17:27:39 +0000

AI is currently, actively getting better. That might stop in a year, and you can argue whether it’s linear or exponential, but it’s very difficult to argue that it won’t get better in the near term. On the other hand, arguing that we hit a plateau at this time is just ignoring reality.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran"

jacobjjacob — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:21:13 +0000

It’s 100% trackable. It’s anonymous but there are many datapoints that could be used to deanonymize if the transaction parties are not extremely careful

New comment by jacobjjacob in "Warren Buffett dumps $1.7B of Amazon stock"

jacobjjacob — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:43:18 +0000

Markets can’t see the product quality of a monopoly. It won’t be reflected in the metrics because there’s no competition to anchor the earnings to the real consumer value. But that doesn’t mean quality isn’t a factor- it makes them vulnerable to disruption.

Warren Buffett is known to trade on product quality (he buys what he uses). So his sale could be based on that.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "AI is going to kill app subscriptions"

jacobjjacob — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:11:56 +0000

No one should be charging $10/month for a local PDF editor anyways… but I don’t think AI will solve that

New comment by jacobjjacob in "Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan launches dark-money group to influence CA politics"

jacobjjacob — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:22:03 +0000

What does this have to do with Garry Tan and CA, it happened in Georgia?

New comment by jacobjjacob in "ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair"

jacobjjacob — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:40:06 +0000

He wasn’t claiming that he is. He was pointing out that people were scrambling to label him as being from “the other side”. The reality isn’t so binary.

I agree it could have been worded better but I think it’s clear if you watch it in context.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "Nano Banana image examples"

jacobjjacob — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 16:36:50 +0000

Yes, I think it was the right call if they want the post to be taken seriously by a broad audience.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "Nano Banana image examples"

jacobjjacob — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 03:19:09 +0000

Does the first example really need to be some softcore weeb p*rn?

New comment by jacobjjacob in "AirPods live translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts"

jacobjjacob — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 03:15:12 +0000

It’s not breaking the law in this case as far as I know.

The law requires Apple to provide equal access to the iPhone hardware and software in marketplaces that it competes in.

That can be done in a manner that is either additive, by providing access to third parties (which is potentially a significant expense and liability) or subtractive, by choosing not to engage in the regulated activities at all, in that jurisdiction.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "AirPods live translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts"

jacobjjacob — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 02:11:47 +0000

As far as I understand, the act can’t control what Apple decides to do outside of the EU. Whether Apple has products or features available outside that market means nothing because it’s scoped to that jurisdiction.

I think that whether or not they built the thing does not matter.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "AirPods live translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts"

jacobjjacob — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 02:06:33 +0000

If the consumers in EU don’t like the legal and predictable effects of the DMA in this case, how is Apple subverting the democratic process? If the act isn’t having the intended effect, then either voters will change their minds or it will need to be reformed. But this sounds like a successful outcome of the law insofar as preventing anticompetitive behavior.

Subverting democracy, to me, would involve things like dark money campaigns and lobbying.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale"

jacobjjacob — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 22:24:00 +0000

Saying the Waymo was even involved in the crash is misleading. It was a victim along with most of the other vehicles.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "How Tesla is proving doubters right on why its robotaxi service cannot scale"

jacobjjacob — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 22:21:41 +0000

They only have ten cars on the road? What a farce, the stock is inflated with hopes and dreams and hot air.

Only needs a little bit of work to not drive into trains.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "Game over Tesla (and, maybe, Western car industry)"

jacobjjacob — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 11:26:37 +0000

They claim to have delivered L4 autonomous parking, not full L4.

New comment by jacobjjacob in "Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express"

jacobjjacob — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 05:41:16 +0000

Was just there a couple weeks ago and didn’t get to ride, they were doing engine repairs :(

New comment by jacobjjacob in "Just Fucking Use React"

jacobjjacob — Sat, 17 May 2025 14:10:59 +0000

This example just sounds like it was coded poorly. I would assume that experienced React developers would know to avoid something like this.

For inexperienced developers, you don’t need a framework to do something dumb.