Hacker News: jimmont

New comment by jimmont in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

jimmont — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:28:46 +0000

Clearly that article shipped to production without QA. Having no testable definition of good, it must be bad. Fired.

New comment by jimmont in "What I'm Finding About LLM Code Style and Token Costs"

jimmont — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:39:19 +0000

That's an excellent idea I plan to try, thanks—re using structured JSON with schema. The most success I've had is saying "be brief" or an explicit size, like one line, or do not explain, etc. I haven't measured other instructions so extensively. They do work but the more specific the better. Other strategies around outputs that are more natural language seem to be hands-down the direction to take, and get away from the machine language habits we've used in the past. It's super interesting seeing this new practice emerging and more or less inventing parts of it along the way. Right now I'm at the place where my brute force and elaborate explanations were reaching their limit and in the frustration just realized I need to take a few days and try to figure out the tool. Across all these the pattern seems entirely that the constraints bound the probability space, whether it's the format like you suggested, or the instruction we give, including the space we point it toward (Web APIs, runtime, schema, etc). In all instances where it's not working the solution seems to be what does the pattern reduce to, and what specifics are the do/don't to go with that, and most of the time the results improve immediately. Your tip seems excellent for this. An easy-button.

New comment by jimmont in "What I'm Finding About LLM Code Style and Token Costs"

jimmont — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:52:40 +0000

Reviewing my experience using LLMs, to improve results, reduce churn and token usage. Discovering the gap between what they produce and what I'd normally do is a significant source of output cost, regressions and surfacing a bit of why and how to fix it. Notably Claude is remarkably bad at/about this, producing errors even when directed toward modern Web solutions—that cut token use a lot, like toward 90% occasionally, which together with the frustrating churn led me to review how I'm working, what is happening and generate this article.

What I'm Finding About LLM Code Style and Token Costs

jimmont — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:52:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.jimmont.com/llm-style-token-costs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667409

Points: 38

# Comments: 17

Show HN: HWT (Hash Web Tokens) – minimalist protocol for auth state

jimmont — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:24:26 +0000

My frustration solving auth with JWTs led to reinventing the wheel for more predictable token integrity and transparency, while improving flexibility. The mix of features separates concerns more cleanly than what's been available, allowing higher throughput, custom codecs, delegation to both services and domains while easing key rotation and other practicalities.

The design is focused on the token as state guarantee, not creation, revocation and the range of other separate concerns and application responsibilities. The spec conventions attempts to ease development with jurisdiction/data sovereignty and authorization in the authz field. It also enables and eases delegation between services and domains without centralized service exposure. The implementation is standalone and has demos for Deno, Cloudflare, etc in https://github.com/hwt-protocol

Feedback and critique of the security logic and approach appreciated.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778646

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jimmont in "Ask HN: What can we do about explosion of self promotion in HN comments"

jimmont — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:32:56 +0000

Turn off the ability to add hyperlinks and use words instead? Is that what comments were intended for anyway? Seems a bit convoluted, but limiting comments, to comments, would be fairly natural. It'll get subverted anyway, but likely affects. A policy could say don't use hyperlinks, feel free to say where to go. Which would be an interesting policy to technically enforce, and still have the discretion to operate on.

The Org Chart Is the Product: Software as Case Study for Intellectual Work

jimmont — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:23:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.jimmont.com/org-chart-is-the-product

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47425504

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jimmont in "Ask HN: How does one build large front end apps without a framework like React?"

jimmont — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 11:41:29 +0000

MDN has your answer, built into the browser, ready to go: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/API/Web_components

If that's not enough, Lit enhances it a bit such that either LitElement and/or litHtml can accommodate whichever style you want: https://lit.dev/

New comment by jimmont in "AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study"

jimmont — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 02:54:54 +0000

Organizations are choosing to eliminate workers rather than amplify them with AI because they'd rather own 100% of diminished capacity than share proceeds from exponentially increased capacity. That's the rent extraction model consuming its own productive infrastructure. The Stanford study documents organizations systematically choosing inferior economic strategies because their rent-extraction frameworks cannot conceptualize workers as productive assets to amplify. This reveals that these organizations are economic rent-seekers that happen to have productive workers, not production companies that happen to extract rents. When forced to choose between preserving rent extraction structures or maximizing value creation, they preserve extraction even at the cost of destroying productive capacity. So what comes next?

New comment by jimmont in "Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy"

jimmont — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 18:47:05 +0000

I think it's just general lack of awareness of the effect, or in many instances having alternate economic incentives, like academics who want to commoditize their intellectual outputs to all available distribution channels. Tyler Cowen for example. The AI companies are in a race to the bottom.

New comment by jimmont in "Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy"

jimmont — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 17:46:30 +0000

For those that use AI/LLM's that retrain on your input, I assume you realize this commoditizes your intellectual work? And effectively makes use of it like they already used copyrighted intellectual property. This is effectively the same as the commons appropriations made for railroad development, reinterpreting fair use, etc.

New comment by jimmont in "Google Being Forced to Sell Chrome Is Not Good for the Web"

jimmont — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 06:17:58 +0000

It's interesting to see where the economics align with software. Web advertising paired with search and a browser. And it worked. I can't recall a better outcome supporting modern communication than Chrome and all it contains. The harmony between the business, software and market need was very well aligned. That's falling apart now due to LLM's taking over much of what previously was search, and Google's innovator's dilemma between AI/LLM and traditional search. While the revenues are stronger than ever this seems unlikely to continue long term. So the dynamic is changing naturally. Reminds me of how a strange contemporary religion where believers families take over a planet, resulted in this group building an amazing genealogy web service (familysearch.org). Or how US hegemony naturally leads to it's military, or how the theocratic monarchy of ancient Egypt was good for the masonry industry--even affecting modern tourism, or how Roman roads form the paths leading to today's major European cities.

New comment by jimmont in "Apple's Siri Chief Calls AI Delays Ugly and Embarrassing, Promises Fixes"

jimmont — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 04:54:54 +0000

It's a demonstration of what an entity can do, and will do. The only innovation from Apple since Job's died were unfinished efforts that completed under Cook. There will be no future innovation from Apple. There maybe acquisitions and optimizations around current and existing positions, nothing more. Apple is IBM now and has been for some time. Apple doesn't know how to develop software or deliver it to market. It has no leadership, only management, and managers are not known for relinquishing their position so I don't see any reason this will ever change. This pattern is endemic in Silicon Valley as old products have run their course. It's like the automobile from the 1900s just playing itself out. Phones and computers are a commodity I don't expect any differentiation within anymore. As to Siri and AI it's an emerging space that Apple can't even deliver on a strategic partnership for within 2 complete phone and iOS release cycles. I'm not sure how an institution like Apple can or will ever overcome its own misaligned culture. Which brings me back to it being IBM.

New comment by jimmont in "Bosses Are Finding Ways to Pay Workers Less"

jimmont — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 07:38:54 +0000

the article is consistent with sticky cpi, as can be seen in the transient and sticky cpi and wage tracking, in fact we appear to be in deflationary territory but I'm not an economist so my interpretation might be off https://www.atlantafed.org/research/inflationproject/stickyp... https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker

New comment by jimmont in "Bosses Are Finding Ways to Pay Workers Less"

jimmont — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 05:08:04 +0000

prelude to recession, as visible in Sahm rule trends at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release?rid=456 as well as when the 10 2 yield curve approaches +0.5 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y with near term interest rate cuts, along with other indicators; guessing arrives early next year;

New comment by jimmont in "Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React"

jimmont — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:06:52 +0000

captain obvious here, Polymer became LitElement which became the invisible Lit.dev (branding direction on par with twitter becoming x); pretty much state of the art on top of web components; not that anyone noticed, as I said--meetup.com keeps prompting me to take over one of the web component meetups where the (or one of) lead of the project can't seem to muster the effort. a bit frustrating when the lack of awareness is so profound and extensive--as evidenced by many of these comments, over many years. I'm sure many more projects will make the mistake of choosing React and Svelte before the conclusion mentioned here bubbles up.

New comment by jimmont in "Modules, not microservices"

jimmont — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 18:01:13 +0000

Layers, Not Modules, Not Microservices Like donkeys, onions, caching, networking, my feelings and perceptions.

New comment by jimmont in "Breaking up with JavaScript front ends"

jimmont — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:11:22 +0000

the primary solution to all this is to remove technologies which are not required and especially those that duplicate what the web as a platform provides (ie works in browsers/runtime directly); for example React has been technically obsolete a few years, yet that doesn't mean anyone understands what to do instead, regardless of whether those technical implementations were ubiquitous 1 year ago or 15 years ago; I find it remarkable to read job listings for up and coming concerns (eg Anduril, BioNTech, etc) basing their platforms on long outdated notions and implementations, which bring with them multiple vectors for risk to security and more (unnecessary) costs to developer productivity, complexity; SASS and npm/yarn are other obvious examples of tech that costs more than it benefits in modern work.

New comment by jimmont in "Cloud.gov"

jimmont — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 18:24:13 +0000

if that were true it would have already happened in healthcare, so they can extract more from sick people in the States; these existing systems optimize around different problems, goals and bounds

New comment by jimmont in "Do data-driven companies win?"

jimmont — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 16:28:09 +0000

Intuition and judgement come from changing the context of the analysis--the time range/history, the details included. Geopolitical and economic forecasting appear to fit this pattern. The question posed about whether data-driven companies win seems simplistic and formulaic to me personally. Often outcomes can be better fortunes and circumstantial than from over analyzing and using the right approach. Of course both together tend to be where we'd see success looking backward.