Hacker News: jacobsenscott

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

jacobsenscott — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 03:38:17 +0000

The upside will mostly be the schadenfreude we'll get when, coming in Q4 of this year, the managerial class is finally called on to show ROI for the $100,000+ (depending on company size) per employee they shunted to anthropic and openai.

Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Stop the Apple Music app from launching"

jacobsenscott — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:05:32 +0000

It cannot be uninstalled

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:05:40 +0000

You never need to write "fix", or "prevent" if you write a good message. Nobody says "fixed the car by changing the flat tire" or "Go prevent engine wear by getting an oil change today. You say "Change the flat tire", or "Change the oil".

You can do the same when you write commit messages. "Wrap user and account update in a transaction" - "Delete temp files after use".

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:01:44 +0000

None of this is as good as "free array memory before it goes out of scope". This is better than `fix: memory leak` - which is what most people would do. It's also better than `fix: free array memory...` because `fix:` is redundant when you have a good message. I get people want to build automation around this stuff, but just do that in a footer of a commit message where humans don't need to see it.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Stop Using Conventional Commits"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:54:30 +0000

This is what a changelog is for

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:35:15 +0000

There's no benefit to any of this. Just write like human. It will be clear if it's a fix, or a refactor, or ?. Typically it isn't just one of those things.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon"

jacobsenscott — Wed, 27 May 2026 05:52:01 +0000

The "Just Say No" engineer is a person who knows what existing tools can do, while more junior people don't know what their tools can do. So junior people are constantly proposing new types of yak shaving (new architecture, new storage backend, new framework, etc) that must be done before solving the problem at hand. This is all wasted resources and time, even if LLMs let you shave yaks faster. A good JSNE focuses your resources on solving problems straight away, not pouring them all into a bottomless pit of busy work.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

jacobsenscott — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:03:06 +0000

Reading a well written programming book will put you ahead of 99% of other programmers using that language. Most programmers learn some subset of a language to get things working, and never learn more than that.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"

jacobsenscott — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:18:34 +0000

When a cop does millions of dollars of damage they only choice is for tax payers to pay, or for the victims to get nothing. Definitely the cops should also face consequences though.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"

jacobsenscott — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:16:04 +0000

Many (most? idk) governments that employ the cops (city, county, whatever) do have insurance for this, and grant police qualified immunity. There are some attempts to hold cops liable as well - https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb20-217. The City Council in my town immediately restored qualified immunity for their police. Don't underestimate the level of absolute blind support for cops that exists among the US population.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Zed 1.0"

jacobsenscott — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:19:42 +0000

Can't you just build the source and run it without giving them any information? Or does the editor itself require information and phone home while running?

New comment by jacobsenscott in "I am building a cloud"

jacobsenscott — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:25:02 +0000

These are called co-los (co-location facilities). Probably any medium to large city has a few.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics"

jacobsenscott — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:59:16 +0000

> technology, ai, screentime

Significant parts of our society and government are actively hostile to education. Blaming the students is convenient, but probably not accurate.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:05:02 +0000

> They'll never accept intentionally "slower" development for the greater good.

That comes post Chernobyl.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "NASA Force"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:49:11 +0000

> ...for a few days, access is granted to this work. The number is extremely limited. The window only lasts four days. Will you answer the call?...

What? This sounds like a phishing email from before phishing emails got good.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "NASA Force"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:47:28 +0000

> Highly skilled early- to mid- career engineers, technologists, and innovators join NASA for focused term appointments, typically 1–2 years with the possibility of extension, to solve complex...

is somewhere in that word salad. I think it's an internship?

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Claude Opus 4.7"

jacobsenscott — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:57:52 +0000

Given the list of very large companies in the "glasswing" project - it is likely every competent state actor and criminal organization already has access to Mythos in one way or another. Meanwhile the opensource volunteers responsible for the security of the entire internet don't have access.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:15:22 +0000

> t just sounds like a giant scheme to burn through tokens and give money to the AI corps, and tech directors are falling for it immediately.

This is exactly what's happening. The top 5 or 6 companies in the s&p 500 are running a very sophisticated marketing/pressure campaign to convince every c-suite down stream that they need to force AI on their entire organization or die. It's working great. CEOs don't get fired for following the herd.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:35:19 +0000

If you're a billionaire there's no risk to "sticking to principles", so there's nothing to admire. Also that's not what they're doing. These are calculated moves in a negotiation and the trump regime only has 3 years left. Even a CEO can think 4 years ahead.

It's probably in Anthropic's interest to throw grok to these clowns and watch them fail to build anything with it for 3 years.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Layoffs at Block"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:33:48 +0000

I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time. I've definitely seen whole teams grind to a halt in pursuit of someone's idealized vision of the "perfect way to organize code" though. They always couch it in the language of tech debt, but really it's just the loudest person's preferred way to shuffle files around - and usually in the direction of more complexity and not less.