Hacker News: jtms

New comment by jtms in "Claude Code gets native LSP support"

jtms — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:55:15 +0000

You’re missing the point, it’s about those tools drastically improving context window management. When you want to tackle large refactors, Claude Code will blow tens of thousands of tokens just searching for files and various refactor related file manipulation. When you run out of window in the middle of a big refactor you’re going to have a bad time.

New comment by jtms in "How to stop functional programming (2016)"

jtms — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 20:44:43 +0000

This is 180 degrees from teams I have been on some years ago - everyone took pride in being thick skinned and detaching their ego from PR reviews. Seems to be a generational thing

New comment by jtms in "EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections"

jtms — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 15:16:56 +0000

sincerely hope this is sarcasm

New comment by jtms in "Building a Mac app with Claude code"

jtms — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 17:13:53 +0000

Absolutely feel the same way. I have been writing software professionally for over 20 years and truly love the craft. Now that I am using Claude Code basically 100% of the time my productivity has certainly increased, but I agree there is a hollowness to it - where before the process felt like art it now feels like industrialized mass manufacturing. I’m hoping that I can rediscover some of what has kept me so fascinated with software in this new reality, because quite a bit of the joy has indeed been stripped away for me.

New comment by jtms in "Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC"

jtms — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 17:16:09 +0000

Yeah I spent almost 10 years building Rails apps and we would always just use whatever the most reputable gem was at the time and it always worked out great. Its only after moving into the JS/TS world that this became not the norm.

New comment by jtms in "Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC"

jtms — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 17:14:05 +0000

I would never suggest "roll your own", but every web framework I have ever used generally has a library that is the go to battle tested auth implementation and just requires adding a few columns and/or tables to your database.

New comment by jtms in "Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC"

jtms — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 03:25:27 +0000

"Better Auth’s pitch is simple: Let developers implement everything from simple authentication flows to enterprise-grade systems directly on their databases and embed it all on the back end."

Its absolutely bonkers to me that web development has gotten to a point where this is a novel pitch. Up until not that long ago ALL auth was done directly in your own database and embeded in your own backend. Am I missing something?

New comment by jtms in "Snorting the AGI with Claude Code"

jtms — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 23:58:17 +0000

Tmux?

New comment by jtms in "A critical look at MCP"

jtms — Sun, 11 May 2025 22:21:25 +0000

Yeah agree. I spent a few hours looking at the langchain repo when it first hit the scene and could not for the life of me understand what value it actually provided. It (at least at the time) was just a series of wrappers and a few poorly thought through data structures. I could find almost no actual business logic.

New comment by jtms in "Ask HN: A friend has brain cancer: any bio hacks that worked?"

jtms — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 22:03:18 +0000

Do you feel a question like this improves literally anything other than your own sense of moral superiority?

New comment by jtms in "Mechanically strong yet metabolizable plastic breaks down in seawater"

jtms — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 17:15:29 +0000

second question - does it/will it cost like $500 per 1kg spool?

New comment by jtms in "Visit Bletchley Park"

jtms — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 02:31:23 +0000

I was there a few years ago and will echo the fact that the folks I interacted with at the museum of computing were truly world class fantastic. When someone loves what they do and where they are it really shows.

New comment by jtms in "Manta Ray UUV prototype completes in-water testing"

jtms — Sat, 04 May 2024 18:05:21 +0000

Unmanned was already gender neutral, but hey… whatever makes people feel like they are virtuous

New comment by jtms in "Science fiction and the death of the sun"

jtms — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 03:56:31 +0000

We are at least getting a 40k series with Henry Cavil I believe

New comment by jtms in "Practical Railway-Oriented Pipelines in Ruby"

jtms — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 18:06:10 +0000

I might be a bit biased (I wrote and maintain a similar gem), but I think this is a great pattern that solves a real problem that is encountered and does so in a very Ruby kinda way. I particularly like the mental model of stringing together multiple service objects into a "pipeline" and the semantics chosen for the API. Kudos to OP for putting this out there!

New comment by jtms in "Practical Railway-Oriented Pipelines in Ruby"

jtms — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 17:05:46 +0000

I'd like to think this is kind of just the cost of discovering that 1 pattern out of many thousands that is actually useful. I am going to guess the Gang of Four didn't just sit down and bang out the entire catalog of design patterns in one extremely productive programming session. They likely battle tested hundreds of different patterns, most of them being thrown out as not useful or a bad abstraction before arriving at the set they published in the book.

New comment by jtms in "Show HN: HackYourNews – AI summaries of the top HN stories"

jtms — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 13:37:45 +0000

The HN hug of death as reported by AI - This is fantastic.

New comment by jtms in "Noclip.website: A digital museum of video game levels"

jtms — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 15:01:54 +0000

It’s not an actual crime, but If it’s an online multiplayer game it is a violation of the terms of service. Add to that it tends to ruin other people’s enjoyment of the service, thus negating the main purpose of the service. I think people who cheat in online games are pretty sad, pathetic, and selfish.

New comment by jtms in "Tremor – The React library to build dashboards fast"

jtms — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 05:13:27 +0000

Yes, that’s right… they are of dubious utility imho.

New comment by jtms in "Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)"

jtms — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 17:17:09 +0000

I think its probably fair to say that we as individual developers are always going to push for the thing we are most familiar and comfortable with. Almost nothing is "complicated" or "bloated" if you are really productive with it and know all the pain points to avoid. My experience with Java is that the language is great, but the ecosystem and tooling is where the bloat and complexity comes in. If I were really accustomed to this ecosystem then I probably wouldn't hold this opinion.