Hacker News: jnovek

New comment by jnovek in "I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program"

jnovek — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:27:39 +0000

The law is there to serve society. If it is not effectively serving society, it should be changed.

New comment by jnovek in "I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program"

jnovek — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:22:24 +0000

Are you using your phone photographs to track my movements? I don't care about the photographs part, I care about the "collecting data that can track my movements" part.

I don't mean my movements on the internet either. I understand that those things are easy to track. I mean in real life.

As far as responsibility for the data goes, you're right, it's not clear. Therefore, anyone who uses the data -- Flock or their customer -- should be required to delete it on my request.

That seems like a pretty clear delineation, no?

New comment by jnovek in "I wrote to Flock's privacy contact to opt out of their domestic spying program"

jnovek — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:32:30 +0000

I don’t care. I don’t care who owns the data. If I can’t easily get private information like my movements removed from a database like this, the legislation does not sufficiently protect me.

It should absolutely be Flock’s responsibility to remove my data and we should absolutely require it by law. Full stop.

New comment by jnovek in "The AI School Bus Camera Company Blanketing America in Tickets"

jnovek — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:54:52 +0000

I trust zero cameras in a world where Flock exists. Seeing me in a camera in a public place? Not a violation of my privacy. Using cameras to track my movements? Absolutely a violation of my privacy.

Laws first, then we’ll talk about cameras.

New comment by jnovek in "If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true"

jnovek — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:45:51 +0000

Are you familiar with Steve Blank? What you’re describing really isn’t his MO at all.

New comment by jnovek in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

jnovek — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:36:11 +0000

Are you talking about contractors just while the DC is under construction or after it’s built as well? Google wants to build one in my home town and I’m questioning what value it will bring to the community.

New comment by jnovek in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

jnovek — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:12:33 +0000

You don’t even need 20 years, I spent the better part of a year in my mid 20s in pain because I was typing with my wrists at an upward angle like GP is describing.

New comment by jnovek in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

jnovek — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:07:45 +0000

That doesn’t seem strange to me, Apple is my “buy it for what’s on the box” brand, stuff that I don’t want to mod. If I want to mess with something I usually use hardware that runs Linux.

New comment by jnovek in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

jnovek — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:06:08 +0000

The rate of hallucination has gone down drastically since 2023. As LLM coding tools continue to pare that rate down, eventually we’ll hit a point where it is comparable to the rate we naturally introduce bugs as humans programmers.

New comment by jnovek in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

jnovek — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:00:04 +0000

How many people who cook professionally are gourmet chefs? I think it ends up that gourmet cooking is so infrequently needed that we don’t require everyone who makes food to do it, just a small group of professionally trained people. Most people who make food for a living work somewhere like McDonald’s and Applebee’s where a high level of skill is not required.

There will still be programming specialists in the future — we still have assembly experts and COBOL experts, after all. We just won’t need very many of them and the vast majority of software engineers will use higher-level tools.

New comment by jnovek in "Unsubscribe from the Church of Graphs"

jnovek — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:37:13 +0000

Businesses do make irrational decisions with their money, that’s a big part of why enterprise sales works.

New comment by jnovek in "I quit. The clankers won"

jnovek — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:21:42 +0000

> Able to review the code output of coding agents

That probably won’t be necessary in a few years.

New comment by jnovek in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

jnovek — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:40:18 +0000

I think I’ve legitimately taken career hits because I cannot stomach it. The culture of LinkedIn is absolutely repulsive to me.

New comment by jnovek in "VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS"

jnovek — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:15:46 +0000

They should have me do that with television programs.

New comment by jnovek in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"

jnovek — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:03:50 +0000

I have a 64G/1T Studio with an M1 Ultra. You can probably run this model to say you’ve done it but it wouldn’t be very practical.

Also I wouldn’t trust 3-bit quantization for anything real. I run a 5-bit qwen3.5-35b-A3B MoE model on my studio for coding tasks and even the 4-bit quant was more flaky (hallucinations, and sometimes it would think about running tools calls and just not run them, lol).

If you decided to give it a go make sure to use the MLX over the GGUF version! You’ll get a bit more speed out of it.

New comment by jnovek in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"

jnovek — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:54:12 +0000

I’m so confused in these comments right now — I thought you had to load an entire MoE model and sparseness just made it so you can traverse the model more quickly.

New comment by jnovek in "Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts"

jnovek — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:48:28 +0000

Thanks for the heads up! I’ve edited my comment to absolve you of any crime. :-P

New comment by jnovek in "Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'"

jnovek — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:41:04 +0000

I was replying to a joke so there was a bit of humor intended there. :-)

Honestly I don’t hate JIRA, it’s “fine”. There aren’t really any project tracking tools that I love.

New comment by jnovek in "Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'"

jnovek — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:29:54 +0000

I’m literally using a flat file to track one of my personal projects right now and I like it more than JIRA.

New comment by jnovek in "Atlassian says it had right to fire engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'"

jnovek — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:27:20 +0000

Surprised? I don’t think anyone is surprised but I, personally, am grossed out by it, it lowers my opinion of Atlassian and makes me less likely to select their products in the future.