Hacker News: jacobsenscott

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.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Show HN: PgDog – Scale Postgres without changing the app"

jacobsenscott — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:58:39 +0000

I've been watching PgDog for a while now. Great progress!

New comment by jacobsenscott in "AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:24:32 +0000

It wasn't that long ago that email servers just trusted all input, and we saw what happened there. Right now the entire internet is wide open to LLM bots and the same thing will happen. But rather than just happening to one thing (email) it will happen to everything everywhere all at once.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

jacobsenscott — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:18:08 +0000

It's not so bad over here in android world. If you don't like the keyboard you can just pick a different keyboard.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

jacobsenscott — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:48:43 +0000

YC has always been about cashing in on the latest grift, and nothing more.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

jacobsenscott — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:10:01 +0000

FB/Discord/etc were never the internet. They were walled gardens you could enter via the internet. This could be a revitalization of the internet - pushing people back to decentralized ways of communications.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

jacobsenscott — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:06:29 +0000

Remember when businesses ran on cobbled together access databases and vb? It was easier than building something ny prompting an llm.I made a good living just rewriting those things for them when they fell apart.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Claude's new constitution"

jacobsenscott — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 02:37:49 +0000

The second footnote makes it clear, if it wasn't clear from the start, that this is just a marketing document. Sticking the word "constitution" on it doesn't change that.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?"

jacobsenscott — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:36:18 +0000

Governments and corporations are never interested in protecting children - they don't vote, and they don't have money. So making it "easier for predators to find victims" is not a failure of the policy.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Oh My Zsh adds bloat"

jacobsenscott — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 07:51:17 +0000

mise has more features - it is a super set of asdf. For example it can set your env vars when you cd into a directory (like direnv). It also has tasks (which I haven't used) - they appear to be similar to what a Makefile does. So you can potentially replace three tools (asdf, direnv, make) with one.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods"

jacobsenscott — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:59:07 +0000

Trump watched the video in front of a bunch of reporters and said "meh". Nothing will change for 3.5 years minimum. 40% of the country thinks he's doing great, and a greater percentage of those 40% vote vs the people who vote from the other group.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Linux kernel security work"

jacobsenscott — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:25:44 +0000

Classifying bugs as security bugs is just theater - and any company or organization that tries to classify bugs that way is immature and hasn't put any thought into it.

First of all "security" is undefined. Second, nearly every bug can be be exploited in a malicious way, but that way is usually not easy to find. So should every bug be classified as a security bug?

Or should only bugs where a person can think of a way on the spot during triage to exploit that bug as a security bug? In that case only a small subset of your "security" bugs are classified as such.

It is meaningless in all cases.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Please just try HTMX"

jacobsenscott — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 15:55:50 +0000

I haven't used htmx, but I've given turbo a fair shake. I've only worked on server side rendered apps for my whole career, and they are generally they way to go. But just like react, or anything else, you throw enough engineers at it and it becomes a mess. But also you'll only find a handful of engineers who understand it compared to react, so that makes it worse. I think the bottom line is creating web UI is just as unsolved today as it was 20+ years ago, and nobody can make any headway - it suggests the fundamentals are totally wrong - after all - this isn't what http and html were even built for.

Given sufficient time and money (20+ years, and billions (trillions?) of dollars - which is what we've thrown at web apps) you could build GUI apps using the IRC protocol, but it will never work well.

LLM generated code probably tips the scales toward using react though. You can have the bots churn through all that boiler plate, it won't be any worse than what human react devs write, and keep the bots away from your mission critical code because it isn't all munged together like in a SSR app.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?"

jacobsenscott — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:23:42 +0000

AI can't pay taxes - but there's a fairly short list of names of people who should be paying taxes to offset the costs of AI.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

jacobsenscott — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:09:36 +0000

Yeah - they don't work well at all. And work from home is definitely incompatible with roombas. Those things are loud and run for a long time. Both ours are in the storage room collecting dust.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden"

jacobsenscott — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 01:51:08 +0000

Whenever I try and use a "state of the art" LLM to generate code it takes longer to get a worse result than if I just wrote the code myself from the start. That's the experience of every good dev I know. So that's my benchmark. AI benchmarks are BS marketing gimmicks designed to give the appearance of progress - there are tremendous perverse financial incentives.

This will never change because you can only use an LLM to generate code (or any other type of output) you already know how to produce and are expert at - because you can never trust the output.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude"

jacobsenscott — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 19:40:06 +0000

> here's no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot

And

> I'm an engineering manager

I can't tell if this is an intentional or unintentional satire of the current state of AI mandates from management.

New comment by jacobsenscott in "Paris had a moving sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison film captured it (2020)"

jacobsenscott — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 23:38:35 +0000

Some guy smacks the kid with a light left hook at about 1:14.