Hacker News: jes5199

New comment by jes5199 in "Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig"

jes5199 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:20:25 +0000

I’m building a heavily parallel dataflow system. I thought Rust might be good for concurrency.

New comment by jes5199 in "Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig"

jes5199 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:18:55 +0000

what’s the difference

New comment by jes5199 in "Modern Decor May Be Straining People's Brains"

jes5199 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:18:27 +0000

this is the same thing we said about offices in the fluorescent era

New comment by jes5199 in "Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig"

jes5199 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 06:34:05 +0000

I tried that, but the Rust build process was too painful, and agents seemed to burn a lot of tokens guessing how to get the code to compile. I rewrote my project in Elixir and it’s been going much more smoothly

New comment by jes5199 in "Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)"

jes5199 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:06:34 +0000

a tmux session where every window is a claude code instance in a different checkout of the repo

and then an MCP+Channels system that let’s the claudes DM each other

plus the Telegram channel so one of the claudes can talk to me over text message

New comment by jes5199 in "The dead economy theory"

jes5199 — Sat, 30 May 2026 04:11:31 +0000

I think this article underestimates how weird things could get if we had low employment but a vast surplus of material goods. I don’t think a society has ever really been in that position

New comment by jes5199 in "The dead economy theory"

jes5199 — Sat, 30 May 2026 01:53:10 +0000

no, but they weren’t exactly churning out new features in the 2010s either

New comment by jes5199 in "Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell"

jes5199 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:49:32 +0000

I could not agree less. People used to call Python “executable pseudocode” - in that spirit, Haskell is executable pseudo-math. If you’ve done enough higher math that a professor’s whiteboard notation feels natural to you, then Haskell might feel like a reasonable approximation of that style. Otherwise: it’s line noise.

(I write Haskell professionally)

New comment by jes5199 in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

jes5199 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 04:33:22 +0000

it was kind of a miracle that it held together as well as it did pre-Microsoft. I think to some degree, they got lucky, and were able to coast on being in the right place at the right time. And then because they were so central they attracted some amazing talent who managed to keep the thing scaling up _despite_ the culture.

New comment by jes5199 in "OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic"

jes5199 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:50:12 +0000

somewhat better leadership, I think

New comment by jes5199 in "The future of version control"

jes5199 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 05:15:32 +0000

This is just CRDT merges and better diffs?? I think the future of version control is much, much weirder than this. Like if you have CRDTs why not have ephemeral branches with real-time collaborative editing and live CI as you type

New comment by jes5199 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

jes5199 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:37:29 +0000

one of the other head-exploding experiences from that startup was when a major cell-phone company sat down with us and said, we have an idea: the ad-free cell phone. What if, every time a website would normally show an ad, we just paid them not to, at about the same rate the ads are paying. How much would that cost?

and the answer is: not much money at all. we ran the numbers and a typical user’s browsing was worth something like $20/month total across every site and every app combined

but no one can figure out the logistics, so we’re stuck with ads

New comment by jes5199 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

jes5199 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:30:07 +0000

it was a single monthly subscription to a bundle, and the clever part is we would measure time spent on each site and divide up the money proportionally, so the site you spent the most time reading would get paid the most. Our founder had the idea that this would incentivize higher-quality content. We never got enough paying subscribers to really pull it off

New comment by jes5199 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

jes5199 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:25:18 +0000

yes perhaps only the big players have this problem

New comment by jes5199 in "“Your frustration is the product”"

jes5199 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:53:00 +0000

I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously)

but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try

we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop

New comment by jes5199 in "A sufficiently detailed spec is code"

jes5199 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:48:40 +0000

anything can be reliable if you have good tests

New comment by jes5199 in "If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?"

jes5199 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 07:43:51 +0000

instead of committing code, we should just save videos of all of the zoom meetings about the code

New comment by jes5199 in "Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use"

jes5199 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 03:55:24 +0000

there’s a million small scale AI apps that just aren’t worth building because there’s no way to do the billing that makes sense. If anthropic wanted to own that market, they could introduce a bring-your-own-Claude metaphor, where you login with Claude and token costs get billed to your personal account (after some reasonable monthly freebies from your subscription).

But the big guys don’t seem interested in this, maybe some lesser known model will carve out this space

New comment by jes5199 in "Show HN: I wrapped the Zorks with an LLM"

jes5199 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 23:10:57 +0000

I was wondering when I’d see someone try this! I started work on a very similar idea last year but kept getting distracted by weirder and weirder ideas along the way, and never shipped anything. So, bravo!

New comment by jes5199 in "A Brief History of Ralph"

jes5199 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 01:04:39 +0000

I asked Claude a few days ago and it said it didn’t have access to the /clear command? maybe it was wrong or maybe that has changed