Hacker News: jppittma

New comment by jppittma in "Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers"

jppittma — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 15:33:45 +0000

It is though? Are you gonna open a second unconnected subway system in new York and compete with them? That's always the question for a natural monopoly I thought.

Youre gonna have another company digging a second set of tunnels?

Does it make any sense whatsoever to have two?

New comment by jppittma in "Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program"

jppittma — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:46:58 +0000

I feel like AI has ruined hn

New comment by jppittma in "Gemini 4 Argon"

jppittma — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 08:05:13 +0000

It's gonna be both.

New comment by jppittma in "Gemini 4 Argon"

jppittma — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:06:16 +0000

I feel like the frontier labs are going to serve fast/lower intelligence models at a better per token cost than the open chinese models. You're telling me that in the long run, you're going to self-host your own ai infra for cheaper than google can serve it to you? I don't really buy it. I think the dedicated AI data centers are going to serve AI at a lower marginal cost than random businesses self-hosting, and then it's a question of how much of that margin they can capture.

New comment by jppittma in "It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs"

jppittma — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:26:18 +0000

I feel like you missed my point. To be slightly more explicit, I find it comical how willing security people are to build a "secure" product that's completely useless for getting work done.

New comment by jppittma in "It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs"

jppittma — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 22:32:19 +0000

This is YC, why not pitch a start up that sells AI agent that don't train with/for internet access/usage?

New comment by jppittma in "I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer"

jppittma — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 04:17:16 +0000

I've had better success with having it write and then rewrite rather than trying to prompt the first write into following my style rules.

New comment by jppittma in "Can I opt out of my input or output data being used for training?"

jppittma — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:36:43 +0000

Not trying to be rude, but do you work in tech? I can't imagine presenting this as a plan of record in a design review. And the world runs on good faith. If you call a pharmacy, claim to be some doctor, leave a voice mail, and give their (public) NPI number, there is no validation.

Why aren't people calling in prescriptions for themselves? I guess it just kinda runs on trust me bro and the threat of being put in prison.

New comment by jppittma in "Can I opt out of my input or output data being used for training?"

jppittma — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:45:37 +0000

that was accidental? this would be straight up fraud.

New comment by jppittma in "ravynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source"

jppittma — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:14:13 +0000

EndeavorOS. I think it's actually the userspace though, which this aims to emulate. The problem is that if you're using a macbook for final cut pro, then endeavorOS doesn't solve your problem.

New comment by jppittma in "RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source"

jppittma — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:07:24 +0000

I think the better example is actually GNU, which endured several challenges as a clean room implementation of unix. I think this is legally sound, but IANAL.

New comment by jppittma in "Why OOP Exists"

jppittma — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 07:05:07 +0000

> none of the components had sovereignty over the state they needed to do their job independently. It's just components micro-managing components all the way down.

Isn't one of the tenants of FP that nothing is mutable anywhere?

New comment by jppittma in "How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs"

jppittma — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:14:32 +0000

That's because megadonors don't give to candidates directly? In order to trigger the unlimited campaign finance guaranteed by citizens united, you create a super pac. They can't openly coordinate with the candidate.

New comment by jppittma in "Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down"

jppittma — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 21:06:31 +0000

Yeah, but that's a suicide pact. In order to sell us debt at a loss, they have to take a loss.

New comment by jppittma in "Gemini 3.7 Flash"

jppittma — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:41:20 +0000

I think that argument should stop with advocacy for law. I have no problem with this when it's means playing optimally within the current laws, things like hiring world class tax attorneys. But if using your immense wealth to ensure the rules that everyone plays by favor you specifically, instead of the country/world, It feels like this is closer to bribing a judge than hiring a tax attorney.

New comment by jppittma in "Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029"

jppittma — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:59:07 +0000

Each marginal person produces more than they consume. As a whole, everyone is better off for having more people.

New comment by jppittma in "Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types"

jppittma — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 23:16:08 +0000

Claude will migrate your whole repo in an hour.

New comment by jppittma in "Claude Design"

jppittma — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:42:02 +0000

I think that the beauty of the human experience is that all you need to learn is to practice. You automatically improve at what you're doing. The kinds of skills that atrophy when you use AI are skills that AI can already automate. And nobody is going to pay you to do slowly what a machine can do quickly/cheaply.

When you deploy AI to build something, you wind up doing the work that the AI itself can't do. Holding large amounts of context, maintaining a vision, writing apis and defining interfaces. Alongside like, project management. How much time is spent on features vs refactoring vs testing.

New comment by jppittma in "Fast and Easy Levenshtein distance using a Trie (2011)"

jppittma — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:16:30 +0000

It depends on if or not you're trying to correct for typos, or do something semantic. Also, embedding distance is much much more expensive.

New comment by jppittma in "Code has always been the easy part"

jppittma — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 03:54:06 +0000

coding is getting your foot in the door to software engineering, which is really like, computer systems engineering. We do so much more than code...