<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: jacobn</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacobn</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:09:12 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=jacobn" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "How to earn a billion dollars"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Make a billion / deserve a billion. Ok.<p>Given how tech has gone from nerdy underdog to Orwellian, Machiavellian, dopamine-peddling overlord, I’m actually a bit surprised people aren’t more angry / upset.<p>Over the last 40 years there has been two career paths with “disproportionate leverage”: tech and finance.<p>I believe in capitalism, contracts and the rule of law. A founder starting a company and attracting capital, employees and customers and generating tremendous wealth I see as an opportunity, not a bug.<p>But if I were in a normal career the wealth generated by tech & finance would certainly <i>look & feel</i> like some form of cheat code.<p>The last forty years have been a huge transient. Massive. AI will probably push it even further.<p>I hope we as a society and democracy can survive the strain.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 04:15:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48536520</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48536520</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48536520</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So far it seems like AI is helping the little guy fight the bills more?<p>(That can of course change very quickly, yes)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 03:19:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188800</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188800</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188800</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Who will buy your services if you fire us all?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Historically it has fit reality, but yes, this time may well actually be different...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 22:06:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186411</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186411</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48186411</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "GenCAD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I just ask it for what I’m looking for (doing very simple “spare part” level at home 3d printing, nothing fancy or elaborate) and it gives me a starting point. Then I sometimes just edit the scad code by hand, and some times I ask the AI to revise, sometimes a mix (many iterations).<p>For very simple geometries it works great, but it very quickly becomes apparent that there’s a bit of a disconnect between “LLM views image” and “LLM emits scad that looks like that image” when it comes to anything non-trivial.<p>Still gives me a starting point I can mess with, which is great since I have zero CAD training or experience.<p>(I’m not the commenter you replied to)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 05:30:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175877</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175877</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175877</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Amazonbot is finally respecting robots.txt"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I just complained to them the other day! They were scraping our weather website to no end, very much including the disallowed path prefixes.<p>Did end up just adding them to our WAF blocklist, which is weirdly ironic - hosting on their infra & using their services to block their AI scraper...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 14 May 2026 21:25:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48141476</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48141476</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48141476</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And <a href="https://www.x402.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.x402.org/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:03:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427463</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427463</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427463</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> MPP provides a specification for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically, enabling microtransactions, *recurring payments*, and more.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:02:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427453</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427453</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427453</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "NRC issues first commercial reactor construction approval in 10 years [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Are there any nuclear alternatives that don't include strapping low grade bombs to the reactor core (PRW/BWR: water separation -> hydrogen + oxygen -> boom, like happened @ Fukushima) or using coolants that instantly start violently combusting when exposed to air or moisture (sodium)?<p>I love the promise of nuclear energy, and I understand that every single engineering decision has tradeoffs, but these tradeoffs just seem <i>so bad</i>? Are there really no better options?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 05:56:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47258048</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47258048</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47258048</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Tensor Spy: inspect NumPy and PyTorch tensors in the browser, no upload]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We needed a side project to give agentic coding a try, and created tensorspy.com together with Junie and ChatGPT 5.2.<p>Tensor Spy lets you quickly inspect the contents of numpy & pytorch tensors locally (your tensors are not uploaded to any servers).<p>This is useful to validate your deep learning data pipelines, to check which layers in your diverging model are actually going haywire, and just because it's kind of cool & a lot more convenient for one-off inspections than loading things up in python.<p>If you work with diffusion models, inspecting the latent space can be quite informative: you want <i>some</i> "noise" in there but it should probably be fairly smooth for your LDM (Latent Diffusion Model) to be able to target it well.<p>Also, if you haven't looked at your data, it's probably not what you think it is ;)<p>Basic stats are auto-computed, and any inf/nan values are both counted and rendered with contrasting colors, to help you quickly identify issue hotspots.<p>The site is free, and our broad intention is to keep it that way (we run a bunch of pro-bono little utility sites in addition to our commercial ones, they're all linked on the about page).<p>Would love to hear your thoughts, I'm sure there are some stats or utility features we missed, so please give it a spin and let us know!<p>---<p>Agentic coding is a brave new world. Three years ago, after the initial rush of ChatGPT's launch, I commented to some friends that "we're standing on the beach and the water just receded". The tsunami is really hitting now. As in: this project took about 2 weeks, and not only would we not have done it without agentic coding, it would have taken <i>months</i> using "traditional methods". With agentic coding, adding .pt/.pth support was basically a single request. And it just worked. Time to adapt yet again.</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47221645">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47221645</a></p>
<p>Points: 22</p>
<p># Comments: 1</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:05:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://tensorspy.com/</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47221645</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47221645</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Show HN: AxonML – A PyTorch-equivalent ML framework written in Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Cool! How do you actually implement “Reverse-mode automatic differentiation with a tape-based computational graph” in rust?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:26:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201628</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201628</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201628</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Dissecting the CPU-memory relationship in garbage collection (OpenJDK 26)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Most web request cases where you care about performance probably have multiple parallel web requests, so there’s no clean separation possible?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Feb 2026 01:51:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160783</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160783</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160783</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Don't the models typically train on their input too? I.e. submitting the question also carries a risk/chance of it getting picked up?<p>I guess they get such a large input of queries that they can only realistically check and therefore use a small fraction? Though maybe they've come up with some clever trick to make use of it anyway?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2025 23:17:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306965</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306965</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306965</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Bill Gates-Backed 345 MWe Advanced Nuclear Reactor Secures Crucial US Approval"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If there’s an issue with the core then the salt tank can act as a heat sink in a way a battery can’t?<p>The boiling / pressure water reactors all have requirements on active cooling being maintained in emergencies - I’m not familiar with this design nor to what extent the salt is intended to fulfill such a function, but it’s plausible that it could buffer things for idk 1h-3d maybe?<p>The holy grail is the “walk away safe” reactor, I would hope / presume all the novel / modern ones fulfill that?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 04:23:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45717372</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45717372</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45717372</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Gen AI for fonts, 1M free fonts organized by "vibe"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hi HN, we've taken a stab at reimagining fonts in the world of Gen AI.<p>Rather than using prompts (slow, and how do you even describe a font?) we've pre-generated a large catalog, and organized it into "vibe" folders for easy exploration.<p>For those not familiar, typical font sites show you 10-20 crippled specimens in seemingly random order, have limited & inconsistent catalogs, are slow to load, and use complicated licensing terms that make it hard to know what you're allowed to do.<p>Font Hero solves these problems: hundreds of instantly updating custom specimens organized by "vibe", more than a million fonts with consistent & broad character sets, blazingly fast load times, and simple licensing:<p><pre><code>  All fonts are free for commercial use while in beta.
</code></pre>
(After the beta, we will offer simple and reasonable terms for future use.)<p>About the AI: we have trained a custom generative AI model from scratch using a dataset of non-copyrighted raster specimens. As with most first stabs at Gen AI, the results are on the one hand amazing (there are a lot of good-to-great fonts in the collection), but of course the error rate is non-zero, so if you dig around you'll soon find some "six fingered" glyphs too ;)<p>Please check it out, and we'd love to hear your thoughts!</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609080">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609080</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Oct 2025 18:39:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://fonthero.com/</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609080</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609080</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Message Me Now QR Codes, easiest way to digitally connect with people]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Create "Message Me Now" SMS / Email / WhatsApp QR Codes to easily digitally connect with people you meet: have them scan a QR code to immediately send you a message.<p>Great for conferences and networking events.<p>Free, works on any modern phone, no app installation, and no frustrating typos.<p>---<p>I'm experimenting with vibe coding, and literal SPAs are a really good fit: the entire page, CSS, HTML & plain vanilla javascript all fit into the AI's context, so even with "just ChatGPT" I can paste the entire thing in, ask it to make some changes, and it spits out an entire result (or sometimes diffs).<p>(Yes, I should try Cursor et al, all in due time...)<p>It's quite neat, and while this particular app is super-simple, it is still a meaningful nugget of utility (I hope) that the AI can do all the (not particularly) heavy lifting on.<p>Basically no more excuses when it comes to shipping micro-SPAs ;)<p>Thanks for checking it out, would love to hear your thoughts & comments!</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071537">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071537</a></p>
<p>Points: 4</p>
<p># Comments: 1</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 30 Aug 2025 02:54:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://qr.clv.ws/</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071537</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071537</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Web Bot Auth"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't that how most web standards got their start? One of the interested parties pushed something, then things evolved through the standards process?<p>(And then it can of course get derailed, but that's a separate story)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2025 22:11:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45057629</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45057629</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45057629</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: 'Message Me Now' QR Codes to easily share contact info]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Create "Message Me Now" QR Codes to conveniently connect with people you meet: have them scan a QR code to immediately send you a message (SMS, email, WhatsApp) without having to go through the typo-prone verbal exchange.<p>Free, works on any modern phone, no app installation, and no more messages going to the wrong number / email.<p><a href="https://qr.clv.ws/" rel="nofollow">https://qr.clv.ws/</a></p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45015594">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45015594</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 Aug 2025 16:25:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://qr.clv.ws/</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45015594</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45015594</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn’t it more of an “all of the above”?<p>A lot of employees at successful startups & FAANG make most of their money from the stock, no? And they need to buy houses and send their kids to fancy schools too, no? So sure, we can reduce it to stock holders, but I’d bet dollars to donuts the 90% of employees who aren’t posting on hn are at least passively ok with “improving metrics”, and some ambitious ones are driving the enshittification initiatives hard.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2025 02:08:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44418519</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44418519</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44418519</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Why I find diffusion models interesting?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The animation on the page looks an awful lot like autoregressive inference in that virtually all of the tokens are predicted in order? But I guess it doesn't have to do that in the general case?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:08:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43286329</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43286329</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43286329</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jacobn in "Scientists solve the mystery of sea turtles' 'lost years'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Scientists long thought that tiny turtles drifted passively with ocean currents, literally going with the flow.<p>> "What we've uncovered is that the turtles are actually swimming,"<p>> the trick was developing flexible solar-powered tags that could hang onto shells long enough to send back data.<p>> Eventually the GPS tags slough off because "the outside of a young turtle's shell sheds as they grow very quickly,"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Feb 2025 06:44:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42988954</link><dc:creator>jacobn</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42988954</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42988954</guid></item></channel></rss>