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iamjs

167 karma · joined December 24, 2011

jordanstephens.com jordan@stephens.io
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iamjs··on Introducing System One Models and Jev
I wonder if they could have accomplished this with spaCy
iamjs··on DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro
Do you use them for coding with your harness or do you use them in production? I found the latency distribution on OpenRouter to be unusable for DeepSeek v4 Flash.
iamjs··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
Couldn't the US buy back more bonds through QE than any foreign country could sell?
iamjs··on High-Res Photo Shows Sand-Capped Butte Rising from Mars Plain of Polygons
This fascinating map of the path the curiosity rover has taken since landing really helps put this into perspective

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity/location-map/

iamjs··on Ente – Opening Our Books
>> "but practically speaking [they] are broke"

> How do you know this?

They were not claiming a fact, they were posing a hypothetical.

iamjs··on Hospitals and universities repurposing drugs at lower cost
If you haven't watched this talk by Matt Might on Precision Medicine with MiniKanren, you will surely find it inspiring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt3XyeFHvt4
iamjs··on Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)
Reminds me of Borges
iamjs··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
Two years ago, I started a new company, and decided at the outset to avoid using any heavy JavaScript SPA framework. We stuck to simple server-rendered html and only use progressive-enhancement style JavaScript.

Our app was fast, and simple, but it also came at a cost: we were limited in our ability to take rich UI elements off the shelf with an npm package. We had to do a lot more work to provide a rich user experience. Everything took longer, and the user experience was worse as a result. We cared, but sometimes you don't have time to carry through.

The company failed, and I don't think react would have saved it. But I can tell you first hand that righteous adherence to "simplicity" didn't help either. It's always a trade-off.

iamjs··on Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say
That's interesting. Every evangelical with whom I've spoken seems to be willing to give Israel carte blanche
iamjs··on I design with Claude more than Figma now
> It's very likely that at some point they had to explicitly tell Claude "don't worry about that and just make an assumption",

Non technical folks vibe coding aren't explicitly telling Claude anything other than "Accept"

iamjs··on New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste
The city of Corpus Christi, TX is currently considering options for desalination plants—all of which pump their brine into the shallow water inside the bay or the ship channel.
iamjs··on Why Technical Founders Struggle with Marketing
Not unique to software engineers, but a significant factor is that many technical founders are highly specialized. As a result, they use language from their field, draw on cultural context from their field.

Even in this article:

> The marketing playbook for technical founders is just open source logic applied to business.

It's a challenge for us to cross the chasm and meet others in _their_ context. I think that's critical for marketing to be effective.

You would see the same if you hired a medical doctor, or a geologist into a marketing role.

iamjs··on Schlitz Is Gone, but First It's Getting One Last Hurrah
Wow. Never thought I'd see J&J's come up on HN, but as soon as I saw the title, I was intrigued for exactly this reason. I was there too in the early 00's. Small world.
iamjs··on Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored
I know the Chernobyl fallout had a pretty significant impact on agricultural in the region, but I don't think I've ever heard about anything similar in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, or Colorado. Why not? Surely there is less agricultural activity on the American West than in Eastern Europe, but is that the only reason?
iamjs··on Sensational Books to Read This Summer
https://archive.ph/LzM4v
iamjs··on Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app
I think the `/remote-control` feature does this, if I understand you correctly.
iamjs··on Show HN: Countries where you can leave your MacBook at a random coffee shop
Might be more effective if this was by postal code instead of by entire country
iamjs··on Swift bricks to be installed on all new buildings in Scotland
Cool project! My folks get Cliff Swallows nesting under the eaves above their door in central Texas and they make a huge mess. I wish we could encourage them to nest on the side of the house with some bespoke bricks, but they enjoy the doorway.
iamjs··on Reverse Engineering SimTower
This is an unnecessarily rude, dismissive, and low value comment. I loved this game growing up and I think it's fantastic to see this work. I don't find it particularly relevant whether or not a language model was involved.
iamjs··on A Git helper tool that breaks large merges into parallelizable tasks
Sometimes I do this, but sometimes it's just more work than it's worth. I have started to do this a bit more with language models to help reduce the toil, but I yearn for a more rigorous method.
iamjs··on Slop Cop
I'm enjoying pasting early 2000's era blog posts in here and learning that they too were LLM slop!
iamjs··on A Git helper tool that breaks large merges into parallelizable tasks
I have long wanted a tool to help split large diffs into smaller semantic changes. When you're working on a feature, for example, and end up refactoring along the way, you may wish to have your refactor reviewed and merged without any new functionality.
iamjs··on Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
I have a volunteer fig tree growing in a container on my patio in the middle of a bunch of onions. I have always heard of people transplanting them from cuttings, presumably because they are difficult to grow from seed. I have no idea how it got there, but I feel fortunate to have been chosen.
iamjs··on Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse
This sentiment is quickly becoming the most annoying low-effort comment on HN. If you don't want to read it, don't read it. If something about the writing offends you, then describe it, so we can talk about it.
iamjs··on Sleep Machine
This is a Markov Chain based generative arpeggiator. It stochastically walks through diatonic chord changes using weights derived from Hook Theory's database of chord change trends in popular music. For each chord, it randomly selects notes from three octaves of arpeggios. It's sort of like an infinite music box.
iamjs··on Attention Is Bayesian Inference
It's so disappointing that this has become a meme. Lot's of people write with em-dashes. If you want to criticize the _writing_, then do so.
iamjs··on AI is forcing us to write good code
I find that this idea of restricting degrees of freedom is absolutely critical to being productive with agents at scale. Please enlighten us as to why you think this is nonsense
iamjs··on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
Say I wanted to run the GitHub Action's "self hosted" runner on my own infra, then integrate it with my repo using webhooks (like I would for other CI platforms). What value would I be losing?
iamjs··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
I struggled with hand and wrist pain for years from spending too much time at a computer. I did physiotherapy for years and while it helped me manage pain, I was never able to truly build enough strength to get ahead of it until I started bouldering. I took it very slowly—I spent months on very easy problems—but because it was so much fun, I kept going back. Initially, I would only go on Saturday mornings, so I had the full weekend to recover before jumping back into the work week on Monday. After a two or three months of that, I was able to climb anytime I wished. I'm still not a particularly advanced climber, and I typically only go once per week, but I am still slowly progressing, and I absolutely love it.
iamjs··on Ruby already solved my problem
it could be anything, but virtually everything implements `#to_s`.
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