Hacker News: jbjbjbjb

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "The sigmoids won't save you"

jbjbjbjb — Sat, 16 May 2026 12:19:39 +0000

Is it not the case that a lot of the recent gains are just the coding harness that directs the LLM? That coding harness isn’t all that intelligent, simple pattern matching that maps to well defined tasks a programmer might do.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Googlebook"

jbjbjbjb — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:13:12 +0000

I don’t think there is. People who care will go out and try the clothes on in the fitting room or just order online and return. That’s a much nicer experience and more foolproof.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML"

jbjbjbjb — Sun, 03 May 2026 08:29:37 +0000

Which takes us back to this:

https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-sp...

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Two-thirds of babies watch screens – some for eight hours a day"

jbjbjbjb — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:41:42 +0000

sitting in a stroller doesn’t mean the kid can’t walk

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Show HN: Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things"

jbjbjbjb — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:42:04 +0000

My parents got me one in 1999 after years of me asking. It was such a disappointment when mp3 players like iRiver came out soon after (that should have a page on the graveyard) and then iPod came out. The iRiver and similar product used flash memory too.

Also I disagree with the minidisc distribution being an issue. They were less popular but, in the U.K. at least, album releases in minidisc format were available in supermarkets as well as music and electronic retailers.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Show HN: A Karpathy-style LLM wiki your agents maintain (Markdown and Git)"

jbjbjbjb — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 11:34:47 +0000

I remember the personal wiki was a bit of trend 5 years ago but it kind of died because it had an unclear purpose for the most part. I kept one but never really referred to any of the notes and then just went back to a paper and to do list. I’m sure this is useful for those who kept up the habit.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Amiga Graphics Archive"

jbjbjbjb — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:08:05 +0000

There’s something about the Amiga era font and graphic style that I love and I always feel is unique to the Amiga but had trouble pinning it down to a particular developer or graphics artist. Ruff n Tumble is a good example, with like chunky futuristic font, the strong gradients all over everything and even the colours. It’s not common to all games though.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

jbjbjbjb — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:30:45 +0000

It’s a bit reductive to call it poking holes. The author shared his valuable knowledge and I shared mine.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

jbjbjbjb — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:08:18 +0000

Not really strong enough in a post about what to do in a codebase you’re not familiar with. In that situation you’re probably new to the team and organisation and likely to get off on the wrong foot with people if you assume their code “hurts”.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code"

jbjbjbjb — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:44:09 +0000

It’s easy enough to filter those out with grep. It still is relatively meaningless. If the team incrementally adds things then it’s just going to show what additions were made. It isn’t churn at all.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

jbjbjbjb — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:36:47 +0000

This command needs a warning. Using this command and drawing too many conclusions from it, especially if you’re new, will make you look stupid in front of your team mates.

I ran this on the repo I have open and after I filtered out the non code files it really can only tell me which features we worked on in the last year. It says more about how we decided to split up the features into increments than anything to do with bugs and “churn”.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Nvidia NemoClaw"

jbjbjbjb — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:04:49 +0000

Can you talk us through that a bit more? I suspect it would need more access than the permissions you mentioned to be more useful than a simple rules based automation.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Show HN: Quantifying opportunity cost with a deliberately "simple" web app"

jbjbjbjb — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:22:53 +0000

It is sort of brilliant (thanks btw) but also stupid to think about. It is easy for people to simply put a sensible monthly amount in a low cost fund and given enough time and steady contributions make life changing amounts of money (early retirement, house upgrade, child’s school or college paid for etc). And all without needing to take a big bet at any point.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Show HN: Quantifying opportunity cost with a deliberately "simple" web app"

jbjbjbjb — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:47:41 +0000

Most reasonable people will not have enough conviction to make a serious amount of money even if they’re right. I think a better question is how much would you have invested to make $500k/ $1mn (or whatever a life changing sum is for you) on the investment then you can consider whether you had the stomach to do that.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts"

jbjbjbjb — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:47:31 +0000

I use Brave to watch YouTube. I was pleasantly surprised that they had so many YouTube related features, blocking shorts is one of them.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Claude’s C Compiler vs. GCC"

jbjbjbjb — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 08:11:04 +0000

> a simple English prompt

And that’s where my suspicion stems from.

An equivalent original human piece of work from an expert level programmer wouldn’t be able to do this without all the context. By that I mean all the all the shared insights, discussion and design that happened when making the compiler.

So to do this without any of that context is likely just very elaborate copy pasta.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler"

jbjbjbjb — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 23:20:13 +0000

It’s cool but there’s a good chance it’s just copying someone else’s homework albeit in an elaborate round about way.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "UK government launches fuel forecourt price API"

jbjbjbjb — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 23:15:46 +0000

I think you’re overstating the effect. The most volume is sold at supermarkets which have the best location for throughout but they also have the cheapest prices.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "Why software stocks are getting pummelled"

jbjbjbjb — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:52:26 +0000

There’s only so much investable capital available, if it is going to hardware stocks it’s got to be coming from somewhere else. It’s just a substitution toward hardware tech stocks. Economics 101.

New comment by jbjbjbjb in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

jbjbjbjb — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:21:13 +0000

> do generalists outperform specialists?

Depends what we mean by specialist. If it frontend vs backend then maybe. If it general dev vs some specialist scientific programmer or other field where a generalist won’t have a clue then this seems like a recipe for disaster (literal disasters included).