Hacker News: jdross

New comment by jdross in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

jdross — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:37:12 +0000

I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there

New comment by jdross in "A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses"

jdross — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:42:38 +0000

It was 1T post merger with xAI being 250B of it, SpaceX being 750B

New comment by jdross in "AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying"

jdross — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:03:43 +0000

I'm pretty sure this is the school that was on the corner of a military base, and the school building hit was previously part of the military base.

New comment by jdross in "The 49MB web page"

jdross — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 20:33:08 +0000

“I’m going to either steal your work in a way you don’t consent to, or not consume it” isn’t really great. The alternative is paywalls

New comment by jdross in "Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job"

jdross — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:55:10 +0000

The steelman is that this issue is politically loaded, and there is not yet proven public evidence for the most explosive version of the claim. That makes it an easy target for partisan amplification, especially because it maps perfectly onto an existing fear people were already primed for. It is emotionally potent by design.

New comment by jdross in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

jdross — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:54:42 +0000

The opposite of this has been my experience.

HN comments bias far more negative towards technology, tech companies, and current politics than the people I know in real life. People who mostly don’t work as professional software engineers, at least not anymore. And the (employed) engineers I know are all having a lot of fun too.

New comment by jdross in "US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters"

jdross — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:50:31 +0000

We usually just call this collective extraction “taxes”

New comment by jdross in "Palantir and other tech companies are stocking offices with tobacco products"

jdross — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:39:36 +0000

“While the pouches are considered a tobacco product, they don’t contain any tobacco, and are instead made from the plant fiber cellulose”

It’s just Zyn, which doesn’t seem that dramatically different than coffee. But maybe that’s because I don’t drink coffee or use nicotine

New comment by jdross in "Layoffs at Block"

jdross — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:34:00 +0000

As you know, this is a subjective take. (I enjoy my experience there more now, for example, with less social politics in my feed.)

And their head of product claimed that X only has around 30 FT employees apparently working on it, so it's much more than 80% since then.

https://www.ndtv.com/feature/x-head-of-product-claims-compan...

New comment by jdross in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

jdross — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:15:05 +0000

Would nuclear energy research be a good analogy then? Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons. So we got the weapons but not the humanity saving parts (infinite clean energy)

New comment by jdross in "Banned in California"

jdross — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:13:19 +0000

I’m married to a Brit and she is constantly in awe of how much better our healthcare is here in the US. And she paid for private insurance there too.

Quality of facilities, low wait times, quality of staff interactions, organization, etc.

She even freaks out about how we have free parking at our doctors and hospitals here!

We’re on corporate insurance.

New comment by jdross in "AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations"

jdross — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:34:31 +0000

I think the consensus is the biggest danger of a nuclear weapon being used is that it will result in way more nuclear weapons being used.

The specific damage of a single nuclear weapon is far outweighed by thousands of them hitting population centers in an escalation of force

New comment by jdross in "IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup"

jdross — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:16:11 +0000

Is there a single private sector more removed from market incentives than healthcare?

New comment by jdross in "IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup"

jdross — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:13:14 +0000

I'm not saying we shouldn't have an IRS, and I think IRS agents are probably one of the best ROI gov't employees possible, but 8,500 IT engineers and managers (who I have heard literally didn't even know how to code) makes no sense at all

New comment by jdross in "IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup"

jdross — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:11:04 +0000

Do you know how many people 8,500 employees in IT alone is? Google, all of it, has 60,000 engineers

IRS direct file is just not that complex, I promise you, and are you sure it was even built in house vs contracted?

New comment by jdross in "IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup"

jdross — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:48:16 +0000

8,500 IT workers in the IRS is insane.

They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work

New comment by jdross in "DOGE Track"

jdross — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:37:32 +0000

Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization

New comment by jdross in "Tesla Sales Down 55% UK, 58% Spain, 59% Germany, 81% Netherlands, 93% Norway"

jdross — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 06:08:51 +0000

I am so confused when I read things like this because my Tesla model 3 is effectively self driving for me for months now. Hundreds of miles without intervention. No other car I can buy can do this yet

New comment by jdross in "AI optimism is a class privilege"

jdross — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:54:12 +0000

The new robot demos from Unitree make me wonder how many classes of unskilled labor are about to be automated (garbage collection, laundry & dishes, pothole repairs, last mile delivery, simple food preparation…)

Skilled labor still has some legs.

New comment by jdross in "AI optimism is a class privilege"

jdross — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:50:05 +0000

The set of people who believe the automobile (or the Internet) are net negatives taken as a whole for society is extremely small, for good reason