Hacker News: jcfrei

New comment by jcfrei in "Elevated errors on Claude.ai, API, Claude Code"

jcfrei — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:29:47 +0000

A few hours ago I noticed a considerable decline in code quality. It seemed the model got downgraded so I switched to codex. Anybody else noticed this? It starts to switch from deep reasoning and trying to fully grasp architectural changes to trying to solve things on a very adhoc basis. Maybe that's just my imagination or maybe that's Anthropic trying to balance the load before being fully overloaded.

New comment by jcfrei in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

jcfrei — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:39:19 +0000

Another commenter explained it: It's about working on multiple branches in parallel. You can only check out one branch at a time currently in git - but with "but" you have all the changes just in memory so different agents can work on different branches at the same time.

New comment by jcfrei in "European alternatives to Google, Apple, Dropbox and 120 US apps"

jcfrei — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:30:43 +0000

I'm still looking for a viable alternative to AWS or Azure. A European provider that can be managed through Terraform and can spin up all the services a standard web application needs: K8s, DNS, Mail Service, Blob Storage, etc.

New comment by jcfrei in "Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft"

jcfrei — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:44:24 +0000

The war in Iran proves the opposite: It is actually the future. The US could easily establish air dominance over Iran, yet it can't stop their military from launching smaller drones both in the air and at sea. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and air power alone seems unlikely to fix the situation. If you want to effectively eliminate an opponent nowadays you need an army of drones - the economics don't work out if you are only fielding expensive ships, planes and missiles. And regarding your point that an Apache can easily shoot down a drone: Roughly 9/10 drones in the Russia Ukraine frontline get shot down and the remaining 10% make up for about 80% of the casualties (rest being mostly artillery and mines).

New comment by jcfrei in "Ask HN: Is Claude down again?"

jcfrei — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:29:51 +0000

Quick fixes have tendencies to break other stuff and just make matters worse. Better to leave it offline for a little longer, fix the definitive root issue and make sure it comes online nicely. If the issue was just a quirk in a recent deployment then these probably can be reverted easily on the endpoints where they were just deployed (I'm sure they are using staggered roll-outs). These long term downtime things are probably not issues related to a recent release.

New comment by jcfrei in "When the chain becomes the product: Seven years inside a token-funded venture"

jcfrei — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:33:03 +0000

Lots of similarities to the Bitcoin investment thesis. Where the chain itself becomes the product and not any utility derived from it. You have to believe in a future where all fiat money crashes and becomes worthless, evil states confiscate other forms of wealth, like stocks and bonds but for some reason will be powerless to prevent bitcoin transfers. At the same time the hard limit of 21 million BTC will never be revoked despite continuously declining miners revenue. And only within that strict narrative does a long-term investment really make sense.

New comment by jcfrei in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

jcfrei — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:15:24 +0000

Again - poor people, which:

- still drive old cars with lots of CO2 emissions

- live far away from their workplace

- probably have a poorly isolated home with oil or gas heating

will be the ones with higher than average emissions. And the rich people who do will just shrug at this minor extra expense. I feel like this is not mentioned enough in discussions (probably because wealth disparity is such a touchy subject) but your ability to reduce your carbon footprint is also directly tied to your wealth.

New comment by jcfrei in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

jcfrei — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:45:33 +0000

Not sharing your take of the electorate's powerlessness at all. It's not an overwhelming majority (only 57% of voters in the US: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54124-nearly-half-american...) which thinks they need to do more about climate change. I think most politicians are in tune with their voters - you need to change the people's minds if you want stricter policies. Refine the question a bit more and ask people if they still want to do more against climate change if some basic necessities in their life will get more expensive and you will likely even drop below 50%.

New comment by jcfrei in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

jcfrei — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:38:09 +0000

Same reply to you as the other commentator: Fully agree that not doing anything will hurt more. The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right now. The conservatives basically everywhere around the world are against redistribution - so they ideologically oppose anything that looks like it. At the same time if we just enact policies that limit CO2 the rich people won't really care that flying, heating, driving and some foods have gotten a bit more expensive. But the poor people will. And of the ones who would get hurt by the higher prices a lot of them are ideologically opposed to any kind of redistributing policies. So you are kind of stuck in a catch-22 for now.

New comment by jcfrei in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

jcfrei — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:28:42 +0000

Not disputing that it will hurt everyone's pocket. But politically it is very fraught to push for policies that will benefit a new group of people (wind turbine engineers, solar cell installers) at the expense of an established group (gas turbine mechanics, fuel truck drivers). And for the home owners: It's not hurting them on a broad enough level - people who oppose climate change policies probably just don't care about homes in the coastal areas getting flooded - maybe because most of the opposition lives further inland.

New comment by jcfrei in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

jcfrei — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:09:50 +0000

I have a different take: Things will change once a big part of the electorate no longer feels like climate change policies will hurt their pocket. A lot of the opposition to the policies are from people who aren't in the richer percentiles and probably work in a field that's related to fossil fuels (like heating engineers, car mechanics, etc.). They fear job losses and that their commute and heating bills go up.

New comment by jcfrei in "How will OpenAI compete?"

jcfrei — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:36:55 +0000

It's one of those super easy things that 90% of the users just never do - like changing their default search engine, export their social graph, install ad blockers, etc.

New comment by jcfrei in "xAI joins SpaceX"

jcfrei — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:09:45 +0000

Kind of a bad look - but I can't precisely say why. Maybe he thinks he can raise more capital this way than he could for each company separately? Especially raising more money for X might be quite hard - they seem to be quite a bit behind on the revenue side compared to OpenAI / Anthropic. With both companies merged he might just find enough retail investors willing to buy at sky high valuations.

New comment by jcfrei in "EU launches government satcom program in sovereignty push"

jcfrei — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:21:31 +0000

Not sure why you are getting downvoted - I'm wondering the same thing. Catching up is inherently more expensive than just maintaining a lead. And on top of that the EU pensioners will oppose any reallocation of resources outside of their retirement / pension schemes. The EU does have more fiscal headroom than the US, ie. lower debt per GDP and lower debt per capita - so through borrowing they could mobilize some more funds. But that's about it and I'm doubtful that's going to be enough.

New comment by jcfrei in "Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018"

jcfrei — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 19:14:47 +0000

BTC failed to live up to it's own prophecy by not doubling from the last height of ca. 69420 to at least 140k in 2025. There was a last chance in October of last year, where it seemed to get close but ultimately it just didn't find enough buyers. Now with the narrative broken (bitcoin always goes up over the long term) one sell off will lead to the next as more and more people lose trust.

New comment by jcfrei in "Tesla is committing automotive suicide"

jcfrei — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:52:19 +0000

Yup, they pivoted to making robots and subsidizing X/Grok.

New comment by jcfrei in "EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity"

jcfrei — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 11:33:59 +0000

This is exactly how its going to go. But the reason is not lazy bureaucrats but that a lot of countries fear they will lose out on taxes from corporations currently domiciled in their country. Of course another big source of friction is different labour laws in different countries. And there's no way these are going to be touched. And of course banks will also oppose the unified capital market because they fear losing fees from their domestic customers to better banks in other countries.

OpenAI will start testing ads in ChatGPT free and Go tiers

jcfrei — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 17:34:25 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/2012223373489614951

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46659990

Points: 21

# Comments: 13

New comment by jcfrei in "America could have $4 lunch bowls like Japan but for zoning laws"

jcfrei — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:01:29 +0000

UK is famous for having extremely tough zoning laws, with many, many buildings being listed / landmarked. Something that does run very well in the UK are stores like Greggs which are usually classified as small shops (cat. E) without a kitchen. So the analysis applies there as well.

New comment by jcfrei in "Scaling long-running autonomous coding"

jcfrei — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:51:12 +0000

Surely a smart implementation would just find the chromium source on github, do some cosmetic rewrites and strip out all none-essential features?