Hacker News: jiscariot

New comment by jiscariot in "Siri AI"

jiscariot — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:56:58 +0000

In the US, every time I file my taxes, I wonder what % of people don't meet the cognitive barrier to successfully file. I suspect a large portion of people offload tax filing to a service or accountant for numerous reasons, which is basically a personal assistant.

New comment by jiscariot in "Solving the “Zork” Mystery"

jiscariot — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:12:05 +0000

I spent countless hours as a kid trying to figure out the games secrets. Only, 20-years later, did I read that you were supposed to be collecting specific items and putting them in the trophy case to "win".

New comment by jiscariot in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

jiscariot — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:20:24 +0000

Not FANG, but I work at a company that operates some infrastructure at scale. What I've seen is after we've rotated through a number of different tools, in different pilot groups, eventually converging on tool X (a custom, internal wrapper around opencode).

Now every "working session" like meeting, at the team or dept level, has been around how to use tool X. Tricks using tool X. Problems using tool X. I can't help feeling if we had spent the same amount of time building up core knowledge/contempencies around say, design patterns, networking, specs, we'd be in a better place for building.

Instead we are going to have a few thousand people who know a tool really well.

New comment by jiscariot in "Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude"

jiscariot — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:02:53 +0000

Still, they didn’t give up because that wallet contained 5 BTC; this may not sound much, but it has a value of almost $400,000.

They are really underestimating their audiance here.

New comment by jiscariot in "I changed my personality in six weeks"

jiscariot — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:00:18 +0000

Additionally, the author seems to be placing value judgments on agreeableness and neroticism. That's fine they if want to change their personality, but I would be very hesitant to argue that turning up the agreeableness and down the self-awareness dials, are a net benefit to society.

New comment by jiscariot in "Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)"

jiscariot — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 21:31:59 +0000

I've read this one before, but this time it really hit home in how unlike most of the modern AI-emoji-filled-cringy-heading-20-page blog slop, it is. Very refreshing.

New comment by jiscariot in "The best things and stuff of 2025"

jiscariot — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 17:14:53 +0000

I like when people explore deep interests and share them. Especially, someone who has been doing it for 15 years, consistently. A pre-AI window of humanity. This stuff is more important now, than it ever was.

Thank you for sharing with us how you are happy that you have a wife and kids.

New comment by jiscariot in "AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'"

jiscariot — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:00:05 +0000

I agree - there is a baseline amount of effort that should be expected. I was once dealing with a co-worker who was treating me like an llm. I had to encourage him that our job isn't about knowing things, but figuring things out. There's also that slack DM's don't scale like documentation does.

New comment by jiscariot in "Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case"

jiscariot — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:58:11 +0000

Will this help other services like Netflix, Spotify? Or am I misreading things.

My understanding, at least several years ago, that Netflix was paying as much to Apple in subscription fees, as they did for their AWS hosting.

I also noticed when upgrading my Spotify account, I couldn't do that through the iphone app itself - I assumed this was because it would break TOS, or they didn't want to pay a massive chunck of the monthly subscription cost to Apple.

New comment by jiscariot in "Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet"

jiscariot — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 17:42:45 +0000

Just think about what they could accomplish if they had more engineers than lawyers.

New comment by jiscariot in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

jiscariot — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 11:50:39 +0000

I wonder what effect the US's heavy reliance on HB1 visas (and off-shoring more broadly) has had on the size of the cohorts graduating with CS degrees.

All I have is anecdotal conversations of people avoiding tech under the assumption that writing code would be off-shored.

New comment by jiscariot in "We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that"

jiscariot — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 17:39:13 +0000

Using the author's loose criteria, one could say a criminal record is a social credit system.

These are the emergent fruits of living in a complex society, where one cannot realistically track reputation of everyone they encounter across all areas of life. We could move away from some of the formalized systems, if we decided to go back to shaming people for poor behaviors.

New comment by jiscariot in "AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions"

jiscariot — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 20:40:21 +0000

The emergent trait of AI laceing every other sentence/comment with emojis is a pretty good signal for when you want to ignore AI slop. I almost wish it was codified in to the models.

New comment by jiscariot in "Flipper Zero dark web firmware bypasses rolling code security"

jiscariot — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 15:04:19 +0000

Where I live, the ability for the "Kia Boys" to easily steal cars, really boosts their effectiveness at robbing people at gunpoint. Sprees of 20 people being robbed by the same group. It's not poor kids who lack school transporation options, doing their best to get by.

New comment by jiscariot in "“No tax on tips” is an industry plant"

jiscariot — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 16:56:41 +0000

Agreed 100%. I will enjoy the creative financial engineering that likely comes with this policy, as we attempt to classify more and more things as gratuity, to escape the reach of the IRS.

New comment by jiscariot in "Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death"

jiscariot — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 15:11:23 +0000

I'd love to find a way to encourage more dragonfly's to come hang out in my yard (middle of forest). I think of them as little organic mosquito-eating drones.

New comment by jiscariot in "How the BIC Cristal ballpoint pen became ubiquitous"

jiscariot — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:28:42 +0000

The skilcraft US government pen, was spec'd to write 5k in -40F to 160F and is also manufactured by the blind. I've got a box of them spread out anywhere I need a pen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/0...

New comment by jiscariot in "How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school"

jiscariot — Wed, 14 May 2025 16:56:38 +0000

I re-read Gatsby about 30 years after high-school and came away thinking that it was one of the most well written books I'd ever read. FSF's command of the English language is truely amazing in the book. When originally forced to read it in high school, I'm sure I hated it, like I hated everything.

I would recommend a re-read later in life for anyone who didn't like it the first go around. It's less than 200 pages, so not much of a time comittment. Teacher's do assign you a lot of crap in HS, so it can be hard to tell what is worth your time.

New comment by jiscariot in "IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge"

jiscariot — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 22:11:30 +0000

Target basically decided to stop "over-delivering" on DEI. e.g. stuff like $2 billion to black-owned businesses, increase black workforce by 20%, etc. Even with the rollbacks, they are probably doing on average more DEI for the sector, than a Costco, Amazon.

They definitely messed up the messaging, though, in that they positioned themselves to be somehow boycotted by both left and right.

Costco is 20x the business as Target for numerous reasons, I kind of doubt any of it has to do with DEI.

New comment by jiscariot in "Bored of It"

jiscariot — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:25:07 +0000

> "Every pub conversation winding up talking about it."

Is this a SV thing? Conversations about IT with anyone other than co-workers are a once-a-year thing for me. It is actually refreshing, because a lot of the stuff I work on esoteric/niche it's not coming up a lot in conversation.