Hacker News: jfoster

New comment by jfoster in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

jfoster — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 04:02:13 +0000

> those days seem so long gone now.

Well, Musk v OpenAI kicks off in one week from now with the objective of forcing them back to their roots. A jury will be deciding whether a nonprofit accepting $50m - $100m of donations and then discarding their mission for an IPO is OK or not. Should be interesting.

New comment by jfoster in "Claude Design"

jfoster — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 07:24:58 +0000

> ... because of how homogenous the internet has become...

Designs have been settling on a local maxima. If you are aware of a better hill to be climbed, please do let everyone know.

New comment by jfoster in "Google Gemma 4 Runs Natively on iPhone with Full Offline AI Inference"

jfoster — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:19:13 +0000

It can write (some) code that works. Just roughly guessing from my use, but I think of it as being a bit like ChatGPT circa-2024 in terms of capability & speed.

Disappointing if you compare it to anything else from 2026, but fairly impressive for something that can run locally at an OK speed.

New comment by jfoster in "Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp"

jfoster — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:06:02 +0000

These are speed bumps for you but they make it nearly impossible for something to go mainstream, so rest assured they work extremely well on others.

New comment by jfoster in "Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp"

jfoster — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:04:19 +0000

Suspicion is in the eye of the beholder.

New comment by jfoster in "Every plane you see in the sky – you can now follow it from the cockpit in 3D"

jfoster — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 02:34:33 +0000

Really cool! Is this using a Google API? How is it not costing a small fortune?

New comment by jfoster in "Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters"

jfoster — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:24:20 +0000

Really nice. Bookmarked it. Thank you for making it!

New comment by jfoster in "Gemma 4 on iPhone"

jfoster — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:16:46 +0000

They will always be training new models, so if training is expensive, that's just part of the business they are in.

Vast amounts of capital have been poured in, but they continue to raise more. Presumably because they need more.

Is the capital being invested without any expectation of ROI?

Starlink satellite breaks apart into "objects" SpaceX confirms "anomaly"

jfoster — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 08:01:25 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/starlink-satellite-breaks-apart-into-tens-of-objects-spacex-confirms-anomaly/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598137

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jfoster in "Goodbye to Sora"

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:20:03 +0000

Reminds me of Facebook's memories feature which used to say: ", we care about you and the memories you share here."

For an app to suggest a personal relationship with you is ridiculous.

New comment by jfoster in "FSF Threatens Anthropic over Infringed Copyright: Share Your LLMs Freel"

jfoster — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 07:41:38 +0000

Is harm necessary to show in a copyright infringement case?

New comment by jfoster in "Waymo Safety Impact"

jfoster — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:25:57 +0000

> Self-driving vehicles need aircraft-type maintenance.

That's a hyperbolic false equivalence.

Aircraft typically carry hundreds of people and can crash to the ground. As long as a self-driving car can detect when it is degraded, it can just stop with the blinkers on. Usually with 0 - 2 people inside.

New comment by jfoster in "Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access June 15"

jfoster — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:24:00 +0000

I don't think it's anywhere near peaking yet.

It's probably already far more popular than the 3DTV of the 2010s.

New comment by jfoster in "Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access June 15"

jfoster — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:17:19 +0000

I think VR gaming can easily grow 10x - 100x by having cheaper, better fidelity, less bulky hardware and a better games library.

I bet plenty of gamers haven't bought their first headset yet despite being interested.

New comment by jfoster in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

jfoster — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:10:19 +0000

When the problem is particularly exacerbated, it's not even "I got mine", but rather, "I already went into eye-watering levels of debt and I'm still paying off the roof over my head."

New comment by jfoster in "Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?"

jfoster — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:06:51 +0000

I think this approach gets the whole industry to adopt it.

Consider the opposite approach. If they let airlines charge any amount for it, the airlines that installed it would make it expensive. No one would use it. Other airlines would feel no pressure to offer it.

By making it free, it gets used, and eventually depended upon. SpaceX are making free wifi the expectation from consumers on flights.

New comment by jfoster in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

jfoster — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:55:59 +0000

> Crazy that the reason we can't have an order-of-magnitude reduction in the cost of the most important thing people need (shelter) is not due to resource constraints, but man-made ones.

You say that as though reduction in cost of housing is a universal desire, but it isn't.

Suppose a couple of years ago you took a $500,000 loan to buy a $700,000 house, which you'll be paying off for the next 10 years. Would you like the market value of your house to decline substantially during that time?

If there's enough of the population bought into property, it won't be politically feasible to allow the value of homes to decline.

New comment by jfoster in "Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access June 15"

jfoster — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:49:47 +0000

You're not wrong, but it also seems the most plausible use of VR for now. Those shortcomings also apply to Horizon Worlds.

New comment by jfoster in "Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access June 15"

jfoster — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:59:57 +0000

Meta essentially made a sequel to Second Life.

I've always been blown away by the fact that they didn't more fully pursue VR gaming. I think they could have found a more enthusiastic audience.

New comment by jfoster in "JPEG Compression"

jfoster — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:51:24 +0000

Except compatibility, but the biggest gap is browser support, which is in the process of getting closed. Chrome has shipped JXL support behind a flag. Firefox are in the process of implementing support.

In Chrome you can enable JXL from here: chrome://flags/#enable-jxl-image-format

You can track Firefox progress from here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1539075