<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: jasonkester</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jasonkester</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:51:19 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=jasonkester" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Show HN: Are You in the Weights?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, that went about as well as I would have expected.<p>It dug up a bunch of what can only be my information, then made up a bunch of confidently wrong things to say about me.<p>I'm a Software Engineer and SaaS guy, known for running the company "[random word from my blog] Software" and his [different word from my blog] Blog.  Founder of three separate startups I've never heard of and may not exist, and well known contributor to Open Source (because that's something that software people often do, so it makes for pretty words to put into a paragraph, despite me not contributing to open source).<p>Overall, it's like watching a really bad sight reader doing his act.  It suggests something that's likely true about you given your background, then keeps tweaking those suggestions until you go "yeah, that's it! you nailed me!".<p>Sadly, this is pretty par for the course watching AI try to do stuff.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:14:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48595391</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48595391</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48595391</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "I hacked into the worst e-bike and fixed it [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you're not familiar with this channel, do yourself a favor and watch your way through his backyard trail build videos:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsuk8OndHs&list=PL5S7V5NhM8JSmKkteLJqCSj2jHaDAt1tx" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsuk8OndHs&list=PL5S7V5NhM8...</a><p>They're so well done.  Sadly, he doesn't do them anymore because Youtube's algorithm doesn't make it worth his while.  Evidently, he gets the same traffic & revenue from a 10 minute video reviewing "stupid bike gadgets" into the camera as he does for spending a month building a cool bike jump and editing together one of those amazing videos on the playlist.<p>If youtube rewarded evergreen stuff like that instead of cheap "reaction" videos, it'd be a much cooler place.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 05:12:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550874</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550874</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550874</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, I'm still waiting for Ken Arnold to get in touch to offer to compose me a soundtrack.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:51:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542164</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542164</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542164</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm building a video game.  It's a Retro Survival Crafting RPG that crams the gameplay of Valheim into the tile-based UI of Ultima IV.<p><a href="https://stravaeger.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stravaeger.com/</a><p>It's all vanilla Javascript, running in the browser, so you can wreck today's productivity right this minute if you like.  It has multiplayer support, so I'll stand up a server in case anybody wants to jump in.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 05:56:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48537122</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48537122</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48537122</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Software is made between commits"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I guess the difference between the parent and me is that I’ve been around long enough to see my share of “fix typo “ and “remove logging “ commits that accidentally removed the line above or below.<p>That’s the commit I want to find six months later when the SVG text is blurry because we’re no longer forcing opacity to 1.0 at the end of a transition.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:38:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514094</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514094</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514094</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Software is made between commits"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is the response I expected to see here.<p>Reading through the article, I'm reminded of my dismay reading this exact sentiment every time version control is discussed.  So many people are so quick to throw away their history so that things look "tidy".  It makes no sense, but somehow it fits a certain programmer-brain logic that is surprisingly common.<p>My style is to commit often.  Like dozens of times per day.  Commits are the record of what happened, and I want as much of that record to exist as possible.  I've been saved so many times by a git bisect that landed pointing at a tiny commit to a single line that looks completely innocuous, yet broke something in a subtle way that only got discovered way later.<p>That's what source control is for, in my opinion.  Finding stuff like that.  So many of these things would have been really painful to find if I'd had to sift through every line of a big commit.<p>So to watch people intentionally balling up an entire PR's worth of commits and squashing them together to throw away the only (in my mind) thing that version control is good for, is truly baffling.<p>But yeah, there are plenty of people like the parent in that camp, so the author's plan to add even more granularity will be an uphill battle.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:16:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500874</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500874</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500874</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, of course. I’ve only ever been disappointed by ai, so I don’t use it.<p>I run my own shop, so I can do what I want, but I’m happy with my pace (which I’ve noticed is quite fast compared to folks I’ve worked with), and I don’t find “speed of writing code “ to be a bottleneck.<p>When and if it gets good, I’ll hop in. But for the time being I don’t get the sense that I’m missing out on anything.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 15:20:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324261</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324261</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324261</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "GitHub Compromised"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It’s the big advantage that small companies have over big ones.<p>I’ve ridden startups through the phase where they transition to “responsible adults”, and start putting in policies and locking things down and generally behaving like the giant corporations they expect to be one day (and that the locker downers came from and are used to).<p>You can feel the deceleration, like taking your foot off the gas on the freeway. I’ve sat through all hands meetings where the ceo asked why we don’t ship as fast anymore, and since by that time most of the fast moving folk have moved on, nobody has an explanation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 06:29:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203857</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203857</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203857</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Google changes its search box"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You need to compensate for not adding it though.  The recipe without was literally the same ingredient list as the site it copied, just missing a line.<p>And almond flour does its thing by carmelizing in combination with butter and sugar, turning your whole cake into a sort of giant macaron. You can’t pull it off without any one of those things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 06:06:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203694</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203694</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203694</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Google changes its search box"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake.<p>But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 05:30:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203465</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203465</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203465</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Railway Blocked by Google Cloud"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, compared to the AWS experience:<p>I had a toy Free Tier account that managed to overstep a limit one month and rack up $0.0038 in charges.<p>AWS hounded me about it for an entire year before finally putting the account on hold. Then kept at it for months more before finally deleting it.<p>It’s pike the paperboy from Better off Dead, if he were to continue delivering newspapers while hounding you for his two dollars.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 05:16:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203377</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203377</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203377</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Hindenburg’s Smoking Room"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are good overnight ferries from England to France, Ireland and the Netherlands. Cheap too.<p>We live in France and often spend the summer visiting family in the north of England. For a family of four, it works out about the same price to take the Rotterdam to Hull night ferry (outside cabin, meals and all) as it would to go through Calais and spend the night in a hotel instead.<p>And then it’s 2 hours of driving instead of 8 at the end.<p>Even when plans take us south, we’ll often take a night ferry from Portsmouth instead of the tunnel, just because it’s a better experience for roughly the same price.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 05:17:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175813</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175813</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175813</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Show HN: I Built a Retro Survival RPG in Vanilla JavaScript"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Everybody gets killed by the goat.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 09 May 2026 13:31:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48074825</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48074825</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48074825</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: I Built a Retro Survival RPG in Vanilla JavaScript]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm working on the Survival Crafting RPG that you would have played on your Apple II back in the '80s. You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based UI of the old Ultima games.
It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot.<p>I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. It's complete up through the Bronze Age (in Valheim terms). Let me know what you think!<p><a href="https://stravaeger.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stravaeger.com/</a></p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073042">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073042</a></p>
<p>Points: 5</p>
<p># Comments: 3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 09 May 2026 08:16:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073042</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073042</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073042</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Show HN: I Built a Retro Survival RPG in Vanilla JavaScript"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks!  Yeah, all the tiles are hand drawn, though I took a lot of inspiration from the original Ultima graphics.<p>Early on, I actually used a bunch of tiles that I had lifted straight from Ultima V, but I swapped them all out for my own work once it looked like the game was fun and I might want to actually show it in public one day.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 06:35:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032995</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032995</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032995</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: I Built a Retro Survival RPG in Vanilla JavaScript]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm working on the Survival Crafting RPG that you would have played on your Apple II back in the '80s. You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based UI of the old Ultima games.<p>It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot.<p>I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. It's complete up through the Bronze Age (in Valheim terms). Let me know what you think!<p><a href="https://stravaeger.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stravaeger.com/</a></p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032624">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032624</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 05:35:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032624</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032624</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032624</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The json thing is what makes it particularly surprising.<p>It’s literally ’gameconstants.js’ with an item list that has a .name string and a .armor value that it could look up. But when I pointed it to the file and told it which row to read from, still chose to make something up instead of read the data designed to be read by computers.<p>I do like how your ai tries to cover for its buddies with lies about there not being any documentation online.  Because pointing AIs to a specific page and asking them to read the numbers there is a known trap.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 05:25:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032553</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032553</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032553</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Update on "Co-authored-by: Copilot" in commit messages"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah. I wasn’t angry about this a couple days ago, but I am now.<p>So the thing that’s on by default and makes autocomplete worse (plain intelligence never changed my s.x = 0 to s.xVInputRadiusDetectionThreshold = 0 if I happened to take my eyes off the screen for a moment) is now stealing credit for my work?<p>I’m speechless.<p>Also glad I use a standalone git client.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 05:07:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032416</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032416</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032416</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jasonkester in "Show HN: I Built a Retro Survival RPG in Vanilla JavaScript"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's the plan.  A game for all seven of us old enough to remember when games looked like this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 13:30:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022310</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022310</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022310</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: I Built a Retro Survival RPG in Vanilla JavaScript]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm working on the Survival Crafting RPG that you would have played on your Apple II back in the '80s. You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based UI of the old Ultima games.<p>It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot.<p>I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. It's complete up through the Bronze Age (in Valheim terms). Let me know what you think!<p><a href="https://stravaeger.com" rel="nofollow">https://stravaeger.com</a></p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022192">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022192</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 2</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 13:20:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://stravaeger.com/</link><dc:creator>jasonkester</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022192</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48022192</guid></item></channel></rss>