Hacker News: jppope

New comment by jppope in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"

jppope — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:12:55 +0000

There are many ways to create "sticky" products, even commodity products (e.g. coca cola, starbucks, etc). Network effects are just one.

Regarding Price to Earnings... I'm not sure everyone fully fleshed out the end game for the frontier companies. It appears the pitch is that this current phase is a stepping stone to Artificial General Intelligence or Super Intelligence. I can understand the perspective of investors though... If you can get half of the world on these products at some point you will find something you can sell them even if its not the core product (i.e. loss leader).

New comment by jppope in "What will be left for us to work on?"

jppope — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:13:15 +0000

I wrote a related article here: https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/good-soldiers-find-wars/

There will always be new, hard problems to work on. AI will not, and can not eliminate that.

New comment by jppope in "Precursor"

jppope — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:16:57 +0000

Agreed, but we should be honest, the internet today is far from healthy

New comment by jppope in "How to read more books"

jppope — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 17:51:19 +0000

Audiobooks are just a different medium. I don't think people should pretend that an audiobook is a book. You process the two in completely different ways. This doesn't imply one is better than the other either.

For me I don't like audiobooks because its very slow and spoken stories should have a different cadence, velocity, set of dynamics, and diction than a book should (check out "the moth" to see what I'm talking about). I hold nothing against people who don't like to read or people who like audiobooks, or people who like slow things - Suum cuique.

New comment by jppope in "Half-Baked Product"

jppope — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 16:23:30 +0000

Totally depends.

Lots of people assume that the valuable thing is the direct business, but a business can be a lot more than that. A competitor may buy you for your engineers or sales team or patents, or assets, or whatever (e.g. Siri, Motorola, etc)... and just toss the rest of the business or sell that stuff off after they have what they want. In other industries they may just buy companies for their assets. Also you never know what will happen with a pivot (e.g. twitter, slack, etc).

The bleak reality is if you can keep growing (making more money than you spend) that alone is usually desirable enough for people to keep giving you money and eventually provide an exit. Why? because it's really hard to do. Its a skill.

New comment by jppope in "Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries"

jppope — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:15:10 +0000

yeah, the production lines are in Reno, NV

New comment by jppope in "I ported Kubernetes to the browser"

jppope — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:16:36 +0000

definitely cool. nice work peterdemin whoever you are

New comment by jppope in "PostgreSQL is enough (2024)"

jppope — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:20:46 +0000

I like postgres. I use it for lots of projects. I like other databases too. I think thats okay.

Here's Malcom Gladwell discussing spagetti sauce which feels oddly relevant: https://youtu.be/iIiAAhUeR6Y?si=UJUUiF6H0j6IY3lL

New comment by jppope in "Mistral OCR 4"

jppope — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:36:25 +0000

thanks I'm going to have to check whats going on with my setup then

New comment by jppope in "Mistral OCR 4"

jppope — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:44:00 +0000

Is there something wrong with their certificate? Chromium is saying https isn't valid

New comment by jppope in "The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends"

jppope — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:45:20 +0000

No, this is 100% battle tested. I can't drop numbers but we just did a study at work comparing referrals to non-referrals... its night and day. Referrals are out performing across the board. the only problem is that eventually you run out of referrals

New comment by jppope in "The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends"

jppope — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:42:32 +0000

Yes. Figure out who your top performers are ask them for referrals. Some people will recommend "meh" people, but more often than not your top performers hang out with other top performers because they appreciate the same things.

New comment by jppope in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

jppope — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:12:51 +0000

well, thank you for kicking ass and doing great work!

New comment by jppope in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

jppope — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:33:11 +0000

Eric, really interested in how you pick the things you work on. I'm a really big fan of the concept of the Long Term Stock Exchange, but projects like that seem to me at times like paddling a canoe upstream using a spoon.

Whats your criteria? Is there an analytical component? Are you willing to work on something even if "success" is unlikely? And with all of this going on how do you have time to work on books!

thank you for your work by the way. It continues to be useful year after year to me and people around me!

New comment by jppope in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

jppope — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:31:56 +0000

  - shrimp scampi
  - Old Adage
  - chai tea
  - Naan Bread
  - Rio Grande River
  - Lake Tahoe
  - PIN/ VIN number
  - ATM machine
  - GPS system
  - Panini sandwich

New comment by jppope in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

jppope — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:17:21 +0000

Correct. We actually don't play "football" properly as a street sport either though... its typically a flag style football (two hand touch, etc) but the main sports are (generally separated by season during school) football, hockey/basketball, baseball.

New comment by jppope in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

jppope — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:13:57 +0000

The comments here are wild. Uh the answer is football/basketball/baseball. We send our best athletes into football, basketball, and baseball. They don't play soccer. I would argue its more shocking that we are as good we are considering the talent pool.

New comment by jppope in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

jppope — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:29:58 +0000

Yes, Code Monkey jobs are gone... I can assure you though that there are plenty of hard problems that reduce human suffering which still need humans to solve them.

New comment by jppope in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

jppope — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:25:13 +0000

Stuff like that is risk tolerance... its not strictly codified and its more akin to probability. Different companies at different stages, in different industries will all interpret their risk differently... how will a smarter model improve that?

New comment by jppope in "Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years"

jppope — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:25:54 +0000

It was made famous by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Incerto.