Hacker News: jcheng

New comment by jcheng in "404 Deno CEO not found"

jcheng — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 21:26:06 +0000

Open core can work, but you really have to find very strong product market fit on the proprietary side--ideally with features that discriminate between users who are relatively happy to pay and users who are not. (There's a reason "SSO tax" is so common.)

And you really have to believe in open source and have the discipline to keep investing in it, otherwise the temptation is ever present to throw more and more effort and resources into the proprietary parts.

New comment by jcheng in "(Media over QUIC) on a Boat"

jcheng — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:50:59 +0000

Quaid Army?

New comment by jcheng in "Pyodide: a Python distribution based on WebAssembly"

jcheng — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 03:17:38 +0000

For that purpose I think most people are using bubblewrap or seatbelt/sandbox-exec with CPython.

New comment by jcheng in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

jcheng — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:03:25 +0000

> A percentage taken from the increase of an amount every year, is more than the same percentage taken at the end

It sounds like you're describing a hypothetical tax on unrealized gains? Do you have a link to the Buffet letter?

New comment by jcheng in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

jcheng — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:58:23 +0000

You're thinking of realized capital gains, not tax on the exercise/grant. I don't think there is a way to dodge the latter, and you can't take out a loan or pass down options you never exercised or stocks you were never granted.

New comment by jcheng in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

jcheng — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:02:35 +0000

Details: $2MM/year in salary, the rest in performance based incentives. The $692MM figure is based on hitting all of the maximums (200% of a few different targets) and is the total for three years.

New comment by jcheng in "I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over"

jcheng — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:00:00 +0000

Can you say more? Why isn't it neutral or slightly positive? I would assume that a KYC provider would want to protect their reputation more than the average company. If I were choosing a KYC provider I would definitely want to choose the one that had not been subject to any privacy scandals, and there are no network effects or monopoly power to protect them.

New comment by jcheng in "Cord: Coordinating Trees of AI Agents"

jcheng — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:58:43 +0000

That’s what this is. It’s just defining two types of subagent relationship (spawned and forked) and providing the minimal MCP API for controlling them. It’s up to the LLMs when and how to use subagents.

New comment by jcheng in "Warren Buffett dumps $1.7B of Amazon stock"

jcheng — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:57:58 +0000

The revenue curves do indeed look a bit different:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=revenu...

Even more so if you compare EBITDA:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/stock-comparison?s=ebitda...

New comment by jcheng in "AGENTS.md outperforms skills in our agent evals"

jcheng — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 04:32:30 +0000

Would’ve been perfectly readable and no larger if they had used newline instead of pipe.

New comment by jcheng in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

jcheng — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:00:01 +0000

Yeah... and besides managerial skills, also product (using the word loosely) sense, user empathy, clarity of vision, communication skills. They've always been multipliers for programmers, even more so in this moment.

New comment by jcheng in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

jcheng — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:09:36 +0000

> 95% of Claude and 5% of you, while still better than me (and your average Joe), is nowhere near the same jump from 95% Claude and 5% me.

I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure it is true. Take simonw and tymscar, put them each in charge of a team of 19 engineers (of identical capabilities). Is the result "nowhere near the same jump" as simonw vs. tymscar alone? I think it's potentially a much bigger jump, if there are differences in who has better ideas and not just who can code the fastest.

New comment by jcheng in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

jcheng — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 17:37:35 +0000

> For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them.

Anecdotally, I’ve had a few coworkers go from putting themselves firmly in this category to saying “this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my career” in the last two months. The recent improvement in models and coding agents (Claude Code with Opus 4.5 in our case) is changing a lot of minds.

New comment by jcheng in "Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions"

jcheng — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 23:31:03 +0000

An engineer on my team who is working on TUI stuff said that avoiding the flicker is difficult without affecting the ability to copy/paste using the mouse (something to do with "alternate screen mode"). I haven't used OpenCode (yet) but Google does turn up some questions (and suggested workarounds) around copy/paste.

New comment by jcheng in "Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions"

jcheng — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 23:20:39 +0000

Arguably since 3.5, at least for coding and tool calling

New comment by jcheng in "Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole"

jcheng — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 23:07:39 +0000

To make this right they’d just have to amend the first part to “secondary transaction with shareholders at some price that implies a 20b valuation”.

Has there been any evidence yet that the VCs got paid for their shares but the left behind employees didn’t?

New comment by jcheng in "A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash"

jcheng — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 21:38:59 +0000

And text figures! And proper small caps!!

New comment by jcheng in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

jcheng — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 15:58:42 +0000

That’s exactly what it does, I’ve found it completely un-confuses Claude Sonnet 4.5.

New comment by jcheng in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

jcheng — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:58 +0000

That makes so much sense, it would make a great MCP. Maybe something similar for DOM manipulation; extracting text out of big, noisy HTML pages using a combination of Find Text with selector return values, and a DSL for picking and filtering DOM trees.

New comment by jcheng in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

jcheng — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 23:57:48 +0000

I take these early reports (less than a week or two after a major model release) with a grain of salt. It takes time to get to know a model, and maybe there's some selection bias in who's posting within 1-2 days of getting access.

(Although in this particular case, the very different knowledge cutoff makes it a lot easier to believe)