Hacker News: jxf

New comment by jxf in "Shantell Sans (2023)"

jxf — Sun, 31 May 2026 10:09:21 +0000

I'm not familiar with Metafont -- is this what you're referencing? https://ctan.org/pkg/metafont?lang=en

New comment by jxf in "The Permanent Upper Crow"

jxf — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:25:45 +0000

Let them eat crow.

New comment by jxf in "The Permanent Upper Crow"

jxf — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:25:16 +0000

This is filthy undercrow talk!

New comment by jxf in "Scorched Earth 2000 – Web"

jxf — Thu, 14 May 2026 07:22:15 +0000

> It was such a simple concept but it worked so well. Wouldn't be able to do something like that anymore due to all manner of sandboxing in action. Lost a tool, gained security.

This class of programs absolutely still exists (see: every debugger, scanmem, GameConqueror, etc.).

Sandboxing doesn't prevent processes from inspecting the memory of other processes, it just prevents the sandboxed process from doing things it shouldn't.

New comment by jxf in "The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization"

jxf — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:03:58 +0000

My understanding is that it's not that the _models_ are banned, but rather the _platform_ is banned. It is acceptable to host, say, `deepseek-r1-distill-qwen-7b` and run it yourself, for example. It is not acceptable (to the authors of these bans) to download the DeepSeek app and run it on your work device.

New comment by jxf in "Less human AI agents, please"

jxf — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:53:39 +0000

It's much harder to search using an AST tool for a human. It's certainly harder than grepping, for example. I use AST tools myself, but it takes a while to represent a complex structure in a big codebase when I need to look for that.

New comment by jxf in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

jxf — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:44:31 +0000

> What are some other things that you think "pollutes your brain"?

Moderating posts on a public (or worse, private) forum. You will see some truly heinous, vile things.

New comment by jxf in "Less human AI agents, please"

jxf — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:40:39 +0000

It's not always amenable to grepping. But this is a great use case for AST searches, and is part of the reason that LSP tools should really be better integrated with agents.

New comment by jxf in "Our Agreement with the Department of War"

jxf — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 22:18:37 +0000

Governments have a long, long history of using "poison to kill a third party", to use your analogy.

New comment by jxf in "Heroku is not dead"

jxf — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 03:44:19 +0000

I think Cloud Run has many nice features that Heroku's apps don't. However, Heroku's services ecosystem and the easy bindings don't have a direct Cloud Run equivalent, imo, and are inferior in the GCP world.

New comment by jxf in "Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI"

jxf — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 19:48:35 +0000

We've been writing with our hands for thousands of years. I suspect that on balance a Butlerian Jihad against AI slop would be perfectly fine for our hands.

New comment by jxf in "Are arrays functions?"

jxf — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 01:22:07 +0000

In the mathematical sense, all functions are relations, but not all relations are functions.

New comment by jxf in "Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?"

jxf — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 16:12:16 +0000

"Personal blogs are back", says article, without providing any data or evidence to substantiate this claim.

New comment by jxf in "End of Japanese community"

jxf — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:19:09 +0000

As a native English speaker, "I'm sorry for how you feel" is patronizing. Genuine apologies acknowledge mistakes rather than invalidate feelings.

New comment by jxf in "Firefox profiles: Private, focused spaces for all the ways you browse"

jxf — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:00:15 +0000

Agree, containers are exactly what I want and I use them all the time. Profiles are too much isolation, like installing separate VMs to run processes in a completely isolated way when something like Docker is fine.

New comment by jxf in "RegEx Crossword"

jxf — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 07:44:07 +0000

I tried this for over 20 minutes and made almost zero progress because I thought the expressions also had to be words, like a crossword puzzle. Oops. It might be worth clarifying that somewhere.

New comment by jxf in "Sodium-ion batteries have started to appear in cars and home storage"

jxf — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 05:29:20 +0000

The idea with really cheap batteries is that they don't need good energy density. You just swap them every so often and put the one you aren't using in the charging rack. You could even carry your own reserve energy with you!

New comment by jxf in "Claude Code vs. Codex: I built a sentiment dashboard from Reddit comments"

jxf — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 05:13:51 +0000

Did you also use Claude, and you like Codex better, or are you making a more general observation about the leapfrog in creative power agents are bringing to engineering?

New comment by jxf in "A story about bypassing air Canada's in-flight network restrictions"

jxf — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 12:26:56 +0000

IMO a certain amount of youthful indiscretion that takes the form of challenging systems and structures feels like it's both tolerable and important. Agitation prevents calcification.

New comment by jxf in "Cleaning house in Nx monorepo, how i removed unused deps safely"

jxf — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 09:27:14 +0000

This is a good reason why even cursory checking for whether dependencies actually get used is valuable.