Hacker News: jonahx

New comment by jonahx in "Show HN: HN Hall of Fame – browse 3,100 legendary Hacker News links"

jonahx — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:33:48 +0000

I'm not sure how this would "ruled on", but my take is that the website itself has enough functionality, enough ways to view and slice and dice the info, so to speak, that it can be tried out, and is not merely a "list".

New comment by jonahx in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

jonahx — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:13:35 +0000

> Imagine approaching fundamental scientific research like that. "Welp, it can't make money, so it won't happen."

> There is more to society than capitalism.

I don't read GP like that. I read it as "we should recognize a situation of unstable incentives for an important outcome, and start thinking about other solutions."

New comment by jonahx in "Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse"

jonahx — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 02:03:27 +0000

It unequivocally is AI. It's just not LLM-powered.

The rising LLM = AI equivalency is unfortunate.

New comment by jonahx in "Topcoat: The full full-stack framework for Rust"

jonahx — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 01:31:49 +0000

I'll say that first code snippet is a fantastic TLDR.

New comment by jonahx in "The well-calibrated Bayesian [pdf] (1982)"

jonahx — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:51:27 +0000

Any one off event is an example. But I assume you know that, so can you clarify what you mean by "a probability that can not be analyzed in terms of frequencies or other proportions"?

New comment by jonahx in "Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)"

jonahx — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:06:44 +0000

That's clever rhetoric, but for most use cases it's just not true, and that's the point of the original article. There are legitimate use cases for native apps, but many of them could be converted to an instantly loading, 50-100KB web page without losing any functionality. As opposed to a 50-300MB native app, which you need a fast connection to install, and starts up more slowly than the web page every time you use it.

New comment by jonahx in "Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)"

jonahx — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:22:23 +0000

Historically true, but the original intent quickly dissolved once they app store took off and they realized the cash cow they had on their hands.

New comment by jonahx in "Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)"

jonahx — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:09:24 +0000

> We take tech literacy for granted, because it's like a dozen levels down fundamental to our entire field. But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps.

They "love apps" because apple and android have spent billions to break their mental models and convince them that "you use apps to do things on your phone". Literally. That's the extent of most people's understanding.

So, sure, they "want" apps in the same sense that early internet users "wanted" AOL because in their minds AOL and the internet were indistinguishable. But actual free choice requires an understanding of the choices.

New comment by jonahx in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

jonahx — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:58:57 +0000

This affinity for verbal tics, too, seems learned from humans...

See, for example, "synergy", "proactive", "in the loop," and hundreds more that proliferate in corporate jargon with even more senselessness than the LLMs.

New comment by jonahx in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"

jonahx — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:24:31 +0000

If phone companies' geofence info requires a warrant, it makes zero sense that flock info does not.

New comment by jonahx in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"

jonahx — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:50:34 +0000

Is there any realistic road to having them outlawed nationwide? Eg, ignoring probabilities here, could a wildly successful grassroots program where it became an issue as politically salient as immigration or abortion eventually lead to legislation banning them?

New comment by jonahx in "Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)"

jonahx — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:11:20 +0000

> Until people believe, nothing will change.

I'm with you here.

> When they believe, everything will change.

Taken literally, this is absurd. Belief might be necessary for change, but it's not sufficient!

> That's why there is so much impetus toward despair.

Sometimes people really are in hopeless situations. It seems cruel to blame their despair on not believing enough.

New comment by jonahx in "New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices"

jonahx — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:55:31 +0000

> Antidotically,

Anecdotally

New comment by jonahx in "Organic Maps"

jonahx — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 19:42:32 +0000

It makes sense. People generally want at least one of: money or decision-making power.

If they have to negotiate, constantly settle, and get no money, that's a hard sell.

New comment by jonahx in "If you're a button, you have one job"

jonahx — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:32:24 +0000

I think the better solution for a web page login form specifically is to disable the button "onPressDown", so this error path is impossible.

For users with JS disabled, your solution seems good.

New comment by jonahx in "Leaking YouTube creators' private videos"

jonahx — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:54:54 +0000

My first thought when reading the article was: "The generous interpretation here is that whoever is fielding reports gets so many false positives that they miss true positives (like this report), especially if there's any gray area."

I'm not saying that excuses it, but it is one likely explanation for how it happened. When looking at just one report, the response seems negligent. When looking at a pile of 1000 nonsense reports, with a handful like this, I understand the difficulty.

New comment by jonahx in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

jonahx — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:55:50 +0000

I strongly recommend against auto-squashing. It creates large commits without the semantic intent of the author. In a large PR, you want clean, small, semantic commits, which makes it much easier to review and understand.

New comment by jonahx in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

jonahx — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:40:34 +0000

Becoming very comfortable with "rebase --interactive" and other cmds for editing your (local!) history before merging helps a lot. Once you are, it only adds 5m or so of extra work to most PRs. And while acquiring this knowledge used to be difficult, LLMs make it very easy these days.

New comment by jonahx in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

jonahx — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:34:41 +0000

Ofc you're correct in that sense.

I would add that (related to your "maintainability" point) ensuring the code is as simple as possible, and thus much more likely to be "debuggable by review", is a goal of review. Even that won't prevent bugs in the absolute sense, as you rightly say, but it boosts your probabilities.

New comment by jonahx in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

jonahx — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:28:28 +0000

It's a good practice. Worth mentioning also: the same can be done with ordinary git log, assuming everyone is using git well. A proper git log of yesterday's work can be like your work newspaper with coffee.