Hacker News: jswelker

New comment by jswelker in "HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?"

jswelker — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:35:56 +0000

Much of the extra weight of Claude Code and Codex harness are (ostensibly?) for security and alignment purposes. Whether they are effective is an open question, but leaving those dimensions out and calling it a tax is disingenuous, just turning insecurity into a negative externality.

"Why pay the waste disposal tax? Dumping into the ocean is free!"

Pi actively omits any sort of guardrails and sandboxing in the name of speed and simplicity, so it is not shocking that it is faster and simpler.

Doubling the cost of something in the name of vague security is standard operating procedure for big enterprises, maybe even quite cheap.

New comment by jswelker in "Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium"

jswelker — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:35:29 +0000

Truly Poland stronk.

New comment by jswelker in "Codex Micro"

jswelker — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:58:26 +0000

I was hoping this would be codex-cli with much less bloat. Alas.

New comment by jswelker in "Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release"

jswelker — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 02:08:04 +0000

DSP is awesome and makes you hate hydrogen with prejudice. Also interplanetary logistics are better than trains. Combat is kinda meh though. Also hate the spherical grid.

New comment by jswelker in "Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release"

jswelker — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:57:37 +0000

Upcycling is not that hard. The real problem imo is that legendary quality is such a late unlock, and lower than legendary feels kinda worthless for everything except maybe personal gear and power poles.

New comment by jswelker in "Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release"

jswelker — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:55:26 +0000

The throughput of the rail is nearly infinity, but you will still be bottlenecked by the speed of inserters and belts on loading and unloading. I think of trains in best case as a highway that temporarily merges many belts together across a long distance before splitting off again at the end. Ultimately they are about saving space and keeping the infra tidy.

New comment by jswelker in "Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release"

jswelker — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:54:51 +0000

Just make sure you bring many artillery shells and Tesla turrets for extra zen.

New comment by jswelker in ""No, I swear I wrote this.""

jswelker — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:04:17 +0000

You've found the "holy grail" of LLM writing differentiation! Your opinion is in the "Goldilocks zone" between vacuous and paternalistic!

New comment by jswelker in "Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release"

jswelker — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:00:34 +0000

Hey man thems fighting words. I like doing different builds but hate feeling rushed with a nonstop ticking clock on an otherwise chill building game.

New comment by jswelker in "Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release"

jswelker — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 15:59:37 +0000

It seems like the developer intent based on spores and spoil times and farm space constraints is to harvest small amounts as needed and build just in time products. But the tools to do that a suck, and the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles. If products stop moving, you are kinda fucked because there is no good way to distinguish between fresh and nearly spoiled goods other than simple inserter priority rules.

It all works but feels wrong and dumb.

New comment by jswelker in "Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release"

jswelker — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 13:40:56 +0000

I love this game but am kinda disappointed with the patch after almost two years of hype. I was hoping for a total overhaul of the quality mechanics, not just a random nerf here and there. And there is still the big problem that by the time you unlock late game cool tech like foundation, fusion, and legendary quality, you no longer have much use for them. And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.

New comment by jswelker in "AI's PR Problem"

jswelker — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 01:39:47 +0000

I thought this was gonna tell me why no one reviews my pull requests.

New comment by jswelker in "Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?"

jswelker — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 03:11:02 +0000

Java has been right there all along like the awkward best friend in a romcom.

New comment by jswelker in "Ask HN: Will programmers write more efficient code during the memory shortage?"

jswelker — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 03:09:13 +0000

This is sadly a Betteridge's Law of Headlines situation.

New comment by jswelker in "Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks"

jswelker — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 03:06:57 +0000

I have known a lot of people who think they are (the only) As and spend all their time bike shedding and generally dicking around with tooling and griping about patterns that they prevent everyone around them getting anything done.

New comment by jswelker in "A dumpster arrived behind my university's library"

jswelker — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:12:10 +0000

I was a real university librarian for a decade. Most of the books they throw away are truly garbage. Yes some libraries take it too far with "weeding" too much, but it is necessary:

1) the space is needed for other purposes (even though funding for said purpose might not be secured) 2) having shelves of useless junk makes discovering useful good stuff much harder 3) the university library has a mandate to support the curriculum of courses being taught, not being a repository of all human writing

Yes interlibrary loan UX sucks (although at my library I made it quite good!) and yes interlibrary loan needs to be pushed much harder.

New comment by jswelker in "The Unsung Hero of the Lord of the Rings (2025)"

jswelker — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:05:45 +0000

Really? Bill the Pony is higher in my ranking of heroes than Bombadil.

Bombadil is low low on the list along with other insufferable dicks who could have fixed the entire conflict in 5 seconds like Gandalf and the giant eagles.

New comment by jswelker in "Got kicked out of uni and had the cops called for a social media website I made"

jswelker — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:16:59 +0000

The reason you don't see it is because it is a massive privacy violation, and also it was move for move done in the plot of the movie Social Network about young Zuck, not exactly a novel idea.

New comment by jswelker in "Got kicked out of uni and had the cops called for a social media website I made"

jswelker — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:11:32 +0000

Everyone has mentioned this is ethically bankrupt, and I totally agree.

Very little mention of the fact that this project is extremely ho hum from a technical perspective and in terms of creativity.

This is maybe 2 steps up from a Hello World example app. It could have mostly been generated by Rails scaffolding script 15 years ago, not even mentioning AI could crap this out in 20 minutes. Most frameworks have build-a-twitter-clone docs that are actually more complex than this.

And the idea of people having profiles with the ability to comment on them is pretty much feature zero on every social media app ever. I remember thinking this was cutting edge stuff 20 years ago on Xanga.

Cool toy project I guess (morals aside) but not quite the proof of 200 IQ this guy seems to think it is.

New comment by jswelker in "How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents"

jswelker — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:16:24 +0000

The price tag and environmental impact of constant diaper delivery seems off the cuff like it would negate the original benefit of cloth diapers. Admittedly I have not done math on this one.