Hacker News: jhonof

New comment by jhonof in "Eight European countries face 10% tariff for opposing US control of Greenland"

jhonof — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 03:07:16 +0000

The US had elections during their civil war in the 1800s, They had elections during WW2, major wars cannot even stop US elections legally. Doesn't mean he won't try, but it's not something he can do AFAIK.

New comment by jhonof in "Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege"

jhonof — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:43:15 +0000

This shows profound ignorance of elderly people.

New comment by jhonof in "Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]"

jhonof — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:13:51 +0000

I use the newer claudes and letting them work for 1 hour leads to horrible code over 50% of the time that does not work. Maybe I am not the target person for agentic tasks, all I use agents for is to do product searches for me on the internet when I have specific constraints and I don't want to waste an hour looking for something.

New comment by jhonof in "Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]"

jhonof — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:12:36 +0000

Maybe I am just using them wrong, but I don't know how my knowledge can be out of date considering I use the tools every day and pay for Clause and Gemini. I genuinely think GPT 5 was worse than previous models for reference. They are for sure marginally better, but I don't even think 2x better let alone 10x better.

New comment by jhonof in "Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]"

jhonof — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:04:20 +0000

Claude 3.5 came out in June of last year, and it is imo marginally worse than the AI models currently available for coding. I do not think models are 10x better than 1 year ago, that seems extremely hyperbolic or you are working in a super niche area where that is true.

New comment by jhonof in "Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure"

jhonof — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:56:48 +0000

Sure but pensioners care about consistency vs. gross returns. You really don't want your pension to lose a ton of value in a downturn because people are constantly drawing from it, it's a risk off investment. Bonds are also poor investments compared to an index fund from a gross return perspective, but that's not why people/funds buy them, they buy them to lower risk.

New comment by jhonof in "Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure"

jhonof — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 15:28:44 +0000

> There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder.

Interestingly, Quebec in Canada has been loosely following this model recently and it's working great. Long video but interesting if you like infrastructure stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlHqqA0onn0&t=532s

TLDR: CDPQ invests on behalf of the Quebec Pension Plan, and has been building infra on behalf of the pension plan across Quebec (and Canada) to great success comparatively.

New comment by jhonof in "Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure"

jhonof — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 14:13:41 +0000

CDPQ has been good at making transit in Canada, but they are working on behalf of the Quebec Pension Plan so it's kind of a weird situation. I largely agree with you.

New comment by jhonof in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

jhonof — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 02:13:32 +0000

The difference in quality between model versions has slowed down imo, I know the benchmarks don't say that but as a person who uses LLMs everyday, the difference between Claude 3.5 and the cutting edge today is not very large at all, and that model came out a year ago. The jumps are getting smaller I think, unless the stuff in house is just way ahead of what is public at the moment.

New comment by jhonof in "Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?"

jhonof — Mon, 12 May 2025 13:15:54 +0000

Not OP but for autocomplete I am running Qwen2.5-Coder-7B and I quantized it using Q2_K. I followed this guide:

https://blog.steelph0enix.dev/posts/llama-cpp-guide/#quantiz...

And I get fast enough autcomplete results for it to be useful. I have and NVIDIA 4060 RTX in a laptop with 8 gigs of dedicated memory that I use for it. I still use claude for chat (pair programming) though, and I don't really use agents.

New comment by jhonof in "Which countries would benefit most from an American brain drain?"

jhonof — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 16:17:23 +0000

Oppenheimer was considered to be a left wing agitator, there are tons of very smart people who are pro labour organization which the US has historically seen as left wing agitation.

New comment by jhonof in "Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo"

jhonof — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 14:01:44 +0000

> I can think of a couple who were absolute nightmares. I can think of a couple others who were an absolute dream. The worst small-time landlord was WAY worse than the worst big property management firm, but the best small-time landlord was far better than the best big property management firm I've been a tenant of.

This is basically my experience I wrote about above, the downside risk for mom and pop landlords is way way worse than corp landlords in my experience (and pretty much everyone else I know).

New comment by jhonof in "Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo"

jhonof — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:59:20 +0000

I (and most of the people I know), have had the opposite experience as you. Essentially everyone I know has moved into corp landlord situations because the downside risk is a lot lower and there is a paper trail if you need to dispute anything. I have like a 50% hit rate on mom and pop landlords being awful, I can give three examples off the top of my head:

1. New landlords bought a place I was living in and wanted to do in their words "minor upgrades to the house", but during the construction they would "keep it livable" and not require me to move. I came back after work one day to my water being off (and a toilet removed), and they didn't turn it on for two weeks after that (and kept the toilet removed). I had to get a lawyer involved for rent reimbursement.

2. My water heater broke and flooded my house in the middle of the night. The landlord took 1 month to start fixing the completely flooded apartment, and then the landlord tried for a year (threatened legal action as a bluff) to get me to pay for the new water heater despite it being their property, and maintenance being in the lease as their problem. I obv never paid because it was basically just a shakedown.

3. My landlord tried to just not pay me a month of rent owed after they sold the property with me living in it. He called me several times trying to "make a deal", and I told him that it was a cost associated with him selling the house and that I would not leave until he paid me the month owed. He waited until literally the last possible day to pay me and yelled at me on the phone that I was being unfair despite it just being money he owed me.

Every corp landlord I have had has been by the book. Yes my rent has gone up marginally, but at least there is a paper trail and they do not try to do any of the crazy stuff I just described.

That being said, I did have one mom/pop landlord who built me a deck with a bike locker over the course of a summer once, that guy was great.

New comment by jhonof in "DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data"

jhonof — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:47:34 +0000

> What makes you think DOGE is being blasé with personal data?

Why should a government agency run by a random unelected tech ceo even have the option to be blasé with personal data? Like I thought this website was pretty vehemently against things like the Patriot Act giving the NSA granular personal data and backdoors into communication, that at least had the guise of "national security" backstopping it. Giving a new department personal data access for no reason other than "government efficiency" (no actionable goals given by the department btw) is significantly more tenuous than "national security".

New comment by jhonof in "Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find"

jhonof — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 16:15:15 +0000

100%, I was talking specifically about just tree planting. Trees are great capture tech, but horrible storage tech, so tree planting alone is not a good carbon capture solution. Biomass burial is (imo) a great and relatively simple solution at the moment because we have a bunch of empty mines to use. There is also research being done on putting biomass in a chemical bath that turns it's CO2 into some form of storable liquid and then storing that, but I can't find a link for it at the moment.

New comment by jhonof in "Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find"

jhonof — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 16:12:34 +0000

As you add more trees (and the globe continues to get hotter), the risk of forest fires increases. In theory you are correct that we could just keep increasing tree amount, but in practice that will be difficult in a lot of the world as it gets hotter. Trees (and algae) are great capture tech, but horrible long term storage tech. There are currently interesting proposals on how to long term store wood and other biomass for sequestration but I'm unsure if any company is doing them at scale yet. Off the top of my head there is burying the biomass in mines, and putting biomass in a chemical bath that turns it's CO2 into some form of storable liquid and then storing that. I can only find a link for one of the two after quick googling.

https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...

New comment by jhonof in "Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find"

jhonof — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:58:12 +0000

Trees need to be cut and stored to actually capture the carbon otherwise there is a risk they burn or die and release the carbon they captured back into the atmosphere

New comment by jhonof in "DeepSeek-R1"

jhonof — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 02:40:39 +0000

If you are worried about security or IP at all, it's preferable to run locally, or spin up your own box that you can query running one of these models.

New comment by jhonof in "Camus, Albert and the Anarchists (2007)"

jhonof — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 22:29:10 +0000

He also was Algerian so meant that quote literally rather than figuratively, and consequently he had a lot more skin in the game when compared to Parisians like Sartre.

New comment by jhonof in "Tesla's 'nightmare' year continues as a big drop in deliveries sends stock down"

jhonof — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 12:28:52 +0000

Anecdotally this is mostly correct, but I also have heard non tech people acknowledge how hard it is to get parts/repair the cars as a downside as well.