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jackkinsella

497 karma · joined March 20, 2011

Freelance programmer. Been in the industry since 2009. I live in Berlin and also enjoy writing music.

I like hearing from people so get in touch. :-)

Twitter: @jackkinsella

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jackkinsella··on Gemini 4 Argon
It is wild but it was back in 2024 and that's multiple AI lifetimes back.
jackkinsella··on Ask HN: Gemini CLI vs. Claude Code
I love Gemini for general knowledge and think it far outperforms Claude for research, but personally I cannot use Gemini for programming due to: 1. it taking so long 2. it not giving any information about its thought process / what it's doing "in its head", whereas Claude code tells you what it's thinking and allows you to interrupt.

So for now, I would personally recommend dropping Gemini for the actual implementation of programming or anything involving analysis of your codebase.

I don't doubt that Google has smart people on this, and that this may improve in a few months' time.

jackkinsella··on LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs
Probably a memory leak

But other ideas: - all pages of FE site loaded at once instead as as needed - FE indexed search engine - bug rendering too many invisible HTML elements (eg 1M select boxes)

jackkinsella··on We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
A more charitable explanation would be that they were under product pressure for more features and were never given the slack time to even explore this angle. Happens a lot.
jackkinsella··on Programming languages used for music
Musicabc has some really nice JS and Obsidian plugins that essentially allow you to create little scrapbooks of musical ideas in markdown that are also playable as sound and viewable as sheet music.

https://abc.hieuthi.com/

jackkinsella··on A development tool I cannot live without: bin/merge_master_into_all_git_branches
Thanks for your comment. I've been lucky enough not to be hit by these scenarios yet. One thing that might help is that we encourage short-lived PRs (ideally 1 day, max 1 week) so divergences from master tend to be smaller.

N is not huge though - looking at our operations logs, I think we ran this script only about 35 times in 3 years.

jackkinsella··on I built a tool to do my bookkeeping for me (freelancer)
Cool software! Does this support the formats needed for German bookkeeping? Accounting fees are astronomical here so there is pent-up demand for a decent solution I reckon.
jackkinsella··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
The form permission issue is fixed now - apologies
jackkinsella··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
The form permission issue is fixed now - apologies!
jackkinsella··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (April 2025)
SEEKING FREELANCER | MorphMarket | FULLY REMOTE (all countries) | Designer FE Engineer | 20 - 40hrs/week ongoing contract

I'm the CTO of MorphMarket.com. We are an online marketplace that connects breeders and keepers of lizards, geckos, snakes, frogs, spiders and other pets. Our users passionately love the least loved animals - e.g. here's our COO's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@brittniszoo/video/706572491190134711...

We're looking for someone who has web design skills and ALSO enough front-end programming skills to help implement layout changes etc. into the site. The ideal candidate

- has a spider-sense for design inconsistencies (e.g. poor alignment, font mismatch etc.)

- is able to use _some_ tool to produce quick designs for feedback (we're agnostic about which one: it could be Figma/Sketch/PhotoShop/some random WireFraming tool)

- can write and debug CSS to help us implement the design into our codebase -- and also knows enough React to help move things around.

- can help our team identify our canonical UX components and our visual language and spearhead a project to produce a design inventory to help the team coordinate better on design in the future

- has opinions about what makes a good UX and notices good patterns on other websites and apps

Work culture:

- Mostly async and written communication. Our team is distributed across Europe, Asia, and USA. We don't have common working hours, but you will need to find a way to sync up for perhaps 2 hours per day with colleagues for communications.

- Emphasis on learning and team education (e.g. here's my own YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@semicolonsons) I try to keep things fun and engaging for the team.

- About 15 people on the product team and perhaps 10 staff in other roles.

- Friendly and social on Slack

- We devote every Friday to tech debt / sharpening the saw

If you're interested, fill out this form with a statement of interest, your billing rate, etc. https://forms.gle/KmgNYP3rB3xGbU7RA

jackkinsella··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
MorphMarket | FULLY REMOTE (all countries) | Designer FE Engineer | 20 - 40hrs/week

I'm the CTO of MorphMarket.com. We are an online marketplace that connects breeders and keepers of lizards, geckos, snakes, frogs, spiders and other pets. Our users passionately love the least loved animals - e.g. here's our COO's TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@brittniszoo/video/706572491190134711...

We're looking for someone who has web design skills and ALSO enough front-end programming skills to help implement layout changes etc. into the site. The ideal candidate

- has a spider-sense for design inconsistencies (e.g. poor alignment, font mismatch etc.)

- is able to use _some_ tool to produce quick designs for feedback (we're agnostic about which one: it could be Figma/Sketch/PhotoShop/some random WireFraming tool)

- can write and debug CSS to help us implement the design into our codebase -- and also knows enough React to help move things around.

- can help our team identify our canonical UX components and our visual language and spearhead a project to produce a design inventory to help the team coordinate better on design in the future

- has opinions about what makes a good UX and notices good patterns on other websites and apps

Work culture:

- Mostly async and written communication. Our team is distributed across Europe, Asia, and USA. We don't have common working hours, but you will need to find a way to sync up for perhaps 2 hours per day with colleagues for communications.

- Emphasis on learning and team education (e.g. here's my own YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@semicolonsons) I try to keep things fun and engaging for the team.

- About 15 people on the product team and perhaps 10 staff in other roles.

- Friendly and social on Slack

- We devote every Friday to tech debt / sharpening the saw

If you're interested, fill out this form with a statement of interest, your billing rate, etc. https://forms.gle/KmgNYP3rB3xGbU7RA

jackkinsella··on The Average New Yorker Spends $10,454 in Upfront Costs for a Rental
In Germany, it used to the case that renters would be forced to pay the broker fee. At this point, it was typically three month's rent. But the government created a law Bestellerprinzip (Orderer principle) that made it a requirement that the person who initiated the contract with the broker (nearly always the landlord) must also pay the fee.

The fee magically dropped to one month's rent and less since that point; now that the less desperate party had to foot the bill, they were unwilling to tolerate the high prices.

NYC needs the same legislation.

jackkinsella··on How to Memorize Faster with the Spaced Repetition Learning Technique
The value of SRS goes way beyond memorization. When applied seriously to a field like programming, it enables you to think about the program-design space in a more abstract manner and quickly call to mind and evaluate possibilities. Look up "chunking" as it relates to performance (e.g. in chess).

I've written (and, more recently, made a video) about my 10 years of experience using SRS (via the free tool, Anki) to boost my IT skills.

https://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/janki-method

jackkinsella··on Feeling unproductive? Maybe you should stop overthinking
Maybe you're new here, but your comment punches below the belt and isn't acceptable in a community like this.

If you disagree, be civil and give reasons rather than throw insults.

jackkinsella··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
Also learning the uke. I wonder what hacks you've figured out? My first insight was:

- it's easiest to remember chords when you think of them as fundamental ur-shapes with the "bar" shifted up (sometimes requiring additional fingers)

jackkinsella··on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
After falling in love with the Destroy All Software style of genuinely advanced, all-encompassing programming screencasts, I started a YouTube channel with my own twist on the theme: Screencasts situated inside a decade-old, profitable, production web app, ones that emphasize actual workflow.

I've been an indie-hacker for 10 years so have seen the effects of my programming decisions over the same period. I've seen how fads come and go, sometimes wreaking havoc. I've also seen how coding decisions affect business (such as strategies to transform data into seo at scales of 10k+ items). I've seen how to keep something running day-and-night as if your livelihood depended on it - since it very much does.

That's the game plan anyway. I'm five episodes in: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC17mJJnvzAa_e9qQqLIfIeQ

For fun I took up the tenor ukulele. Compared to any other instrument I've tried, it's got a much kinder learning curve. You can sound alright playing four-chord rock and pop songs in easier keys like C major after a month.

jackkinsella··on Become a Better Developer by Reading Source Code
As with any good habit, it's important to reduce resistance. If you want to eat healthy, have juicy apples at hand in the fridge.

I made a conscious decision to start installing all my dependencies into a folder within my project source-code so that I can painlessly jump to the dependency's source and read it. (E.g. in the Ruby world, this means installing to "./vendor" in your project).

The effect of doing this is that it's easier for me to read the source code of a library than it is for me to leave Vim and look up the docs online. Voilà, now I'm reading more source.

jackkinsella··on How to play the guitar by ear, for mathematicians and physicists (2000) [pdf]
This is something I struggled with for longer than I should have. For me, the turning point was just diving in and practicing playing along with real songs every day until the patterns became clearer. No matter who uncomfortable and hopeless it felt at first.

I recommend going to HookTheory and working your way through every song you're familiar with in the "beginner" section. These songs tend to stick to the big four chords (I IV V vi) and once you nail them, you're half-way there for most pop and rock. https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/difficulties/beginner

You'll make more progress doing that for an hour a day over a month than you will in five years of theory.

jackkinsella··on Show HN: My ML applications book, which HN helped me write (sample chapter) [pdf]
It's a more common origin story than you might think, and not just in tech publishing. I have a friend who wrote a comedy article as a paid guest post. The thing went wildly viral and the publishers came a-knocking to bookify his piece.
jackkinsella··on Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
Learn how to break information addiction. Just because you _can_ Google it, doesn't mean you should. Embracing ignorance is liberating.
jackkinsella··on Improving my productivity as a working programmer (2017)
I found your idea of recording the screen during work very clever and I plan to replicate.

Some things that have worked for me:

— learning to type programming symbols accurately and with confidence. I realized when pair-programming that I lose a ton of time to backtracking due to typos. This is particularly bad when working in interactive code consoles where the poor editing capabilities mean typos are more costly. There are web applications out there like typing.io that help with this.

— keeping a "dumb mistake log" where I write up any silly errors that cost me too much time so I'll know to double check these things next time (e.g. "space instead of tab in Makefile > make tabs appear differently", "wrong file but with same name > keep an eye on the folder in the editor when switching files")

jackkinsella··on Ask HN: What are some interesting employment benefits to offer?
A four-day workweek (in exchange for a lower salary) is very appealing to many programmers.
jackkinsella··on Too much to learn. Overwhelmed, incompetent, and behind
You'll never learn it all—none of us do. But there are employers out there who are willing to give you a chance to learn on the job, so long as you've nailed the core ideas. I consult in web development, mainly using Ruby and JS, but some clients are happy to hire me in PHP despite my having no experience here. Their assumption—and I think it's a reasonable one—is that my 10yr's experience with web patterns will largely carry over.
jackkinsella··on Ask HN: Who to Follow on the Internet in 2020?
Scott Alexander for general insights and deep-dives https://slatestarcodex.com/

@patio11 for the software business

jackkinsella··on Ask HN: What are you using for backups?
I use arq for automatic daily backups to s3 as well as Time Machine once a month to an external HD for an extra layer of redundancy. But more importantly than that, I have a checklist for testing that my backups actually work and that I won't somehow end up locked out of a server etc.
jackkinsella··on What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
I often find in these discussions that Americans look with undue admiration over to Europe and imagine that the same stuff doesn't happen here.

But it does.

I recently got my wisdom teeth pulled out in Germany, and without my asking, the doctor sent me a pack of 12 Ibuprofen and billed me 24 euro, i.e. €2/pill. I didn't want them because I had 500 of the same at home, which I bought for 25 euro — i.e. €0.05/pill. That's a markup of 40x.

jackkinsella··on Verizon says to shed 10,400 jobs by mid next year
It's comments like this that keep me coming back to Hacker News. I sometimes find myself in political discussions with people and feel that they aren't playing fair for whatever reason (fair in the sense of good natured truth-seeking). Your counter-example is the perfect, non-snarky retort.
jackkinsella··on There is more to high house prices than constrained supply
The plentiful council housing, while certainly wonderful for the reasons you gave, did come at a cost. I was surprised to learn that the upper tax rate on income over 20k pounds in 1974 was 83%, rising to 98% for investment income. [1] I believe this trend was what the Beetles sang about in Taxman.

1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_U...

jackkinsella··on Calculus Made Easy (1910)
YouTube math god 3Blue1Brown has a lovely series of videos that visualize linear algebra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNk_zzaMoSs&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...
jackkinsella··on Ask HN: How do illegal online services charge money?
Cryptocurrency is often used in these circumstances, as there is (usually) no centralized body with the power to lock the law-breaking party out of their funds.
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