Hacker News: jimmont

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.

New comment by jimmont in "SMS phishing is way too easy"

jimmont — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 02:38:47 +0000

The remedy for this lies with Apple and Google to compete over. They’re naturally incentivized in various ways. Mozilla too but Mozilla can’t seem to figure out what to do until it’s passed by, even when the opportunity is still there. Imagine paying it forward to not have calls and text and voicemails related to your expiring warranty, reliable messages, etc. I don’t think even slack can touch this. Otherwise they would have already. Allow me to point out the planet has been networked for over 100 years and this is the best our lawmakers and tech companies can muster. It’s as though everyone has lost sight of doing something practical (for money).

New comment by jimmont in "SMS phishing is way too easy"

jimmont — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 02:33:59 +0000

Werewithal (or werwithal) forthcoming dictionary definition: transformational withal, typically during a full moon, though it regularly manifests in Hacker News posts, causes not yet fully determined. The withals can be complex.

New comment by jimmont in "Taiwan to Deploy ‘Bee Eye’ Radars Near Chinese Mainland"

jimmont — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 15:16:41 +0000

China is more likely to have its government choose a very different leader with resulting policy changes than attack Taiwan. Its economy and along with this politics have increasing problems which are unlikely to reach a plateau or improve in the next decade, possibly longer, and the current leader's policies are accelerating and exacerbating these problems. The only major wild card I see is if the government is able to make a unilateral move against Taiwan in an effort to distract from its internal problems. I don't know how the PRC works well enough to have some notion of how realistic this might be. Given Biden's restatement of the US positions it seems even less likely this would happen. And if it did I'd expect the US and Japan will immediately become involved, promptly followed by other allies if it escalates. What I also cannot gauge is what might happen if action were limited to only a place like Kinmen. If so the arms shipments to Taiwan and would likely immediately change and who knows maybe both Japan and the US would setup military bases there.

New comment by jimmont in "What I wish I knew about onboarding"

jimmont — Sun, 29 May 2022 16:27:29 +0000

Often tech debt stems from political and cultural issues that cannot be (easily) fixed. And even when that's not the issue, are obviously non-trivial costs to resolve. It's been hard for me personally to realize how cultural, even religious Silicon Valley and technology work is. I tend to think there's a common appreciation for certain values, openness and transparency in execution, and these are not the case.