Hacker News Reader

jameslkon San Francisco Graffiti

I wish I could say this evoked a nostalgic feeling, but having lived in SF, the literal memory that came to mind immediately seeing these is the repulsive smell of urine and the sight of dirty, trash-laden sidewalks. While graffiti itself could be viewed as artistic expression on its own, I liked looking at some of it, in my mind it seems so often correlated with decay

jameslkon cURL removes bug bounties

Flan is also a type of pudding (milk/eggs base) which can be ate with a fork. Other baked custards too

jameslkon cURL removes bug bounties

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...

I think you should try eating pudding with a fork next

jameslkon cURL removes bug bounties

It seems open source loses the most from AI. Open source code trained the models, the models are being used to spam open source projects anywhere there's incentive, they can be used to chip away at open source business models by implementing paid features and providing the support, and eventually perhaps AI simply replaces most open source code

jameslkon Harvard legal scholars debate the state of the U.S. constitution (2025)

> Chief among those hard-wired components, he said, is the Constitution’s focus on states, rather than individual voters, as the basic “representational unit.” That arrangement “shapes all the elements of our electoral and legal system,” Rana said: the House and Senate, the Electoral College, Supreme Court confirmations. And this arrangement is partly why the U.S. Constitution is among the hardest in the world to amend. It doesn’t simply undermine majority rule, he added; the minority it empowers are those who have historically weilded disproportionate influence in the political system.

This is by design. The United States is exactly meant to be that: states that are united, but independent. The federal government was never intended to lord over everyone's lives. The expansion of the federal government, especially the powers of the executive branch, is the problem everyone seems to dislike (when their favored party isn't controlling this branch), and that's what needs to change

jameslkon First impressions of Claude Cowork

> 3 months ago, Anthropic and Simon claimed that Skills were the next big thing and going to completely change the game. So far, from my exploration, I don't see any good examples out there, nor is a there a big growing/active community of users.

Skills have become widely adopted since Anthropic's announcement. They've been implemented across major coding agents[0][1][2] and standardized as a spec[3]. I'm not sure what you mean by "next big thing" but they're certainly superior to MCP in ways, being much easier to implement and reducing context usage by being discoverable, hence their rapid adoption

I don't know if skills will necessarily stay relevant amongst evolution of the rest of the tooling and patterns. But that's more because of huge capital investment around everything touching AI, very active research, and actual improvements in the state of the art, rather than simply "new, shinier things" for the sake of it

[0]. https://developers.openai.com/codex/skills/

[1]. https://antigravity.google/docs/skills

[2]. https://cursor.com/blog/dynamic-context-discovery

[3]. https://agentskills.io/home

jameslkon Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

This is the natural evolution of coding agents. They're the most likely to become general purpose agents that everyone uses for daily work because they have the most mature and comprehensive capability around tool use, especially on the filesystem, but also in opening browsers, searching the web, running programs (via command line for now), etc. They become your OS, colleague, and likely your "friend" too

I just helped a non-technical friend install one of these coding agents, because its the best way to use an AI model today that can do more than give him answers to questions. I'm not surprised to see this announced and I would expect the same to happen with all the code agents becoming generalized like this

The biggest challenge towards adoption is security and data loss. Prompt injection and social engineering are essentially the same thing, so I think prompt injection will have to be solved the same way. Data loss is easier to solve with a sandbox and backups. Regardless, I think for many the value of using general purpose agents will outweigh the security concerns for now, until those catch up

jameslkon How Google got its groove back and edged ahead of OpenAI

Coding agents seem the most likely to become general purpose agents that everyone uses eventually for daily work. They have the most mature and comprehensive capability around tool use, especially on the filesystem, but also in opening browsers, searching the web, running programs (via command line), etc. Their current limitation for widespread usage is UX and security, but at least for the latter, that's being worked on

I just helped a non-technical friend install one of these coding agents, because its the best way to use an AI model today that can do more than give him answers to questions

jameslkon S&P500 Priced in Gold

When people talk about inflation, I don't think they're referring to just CPI, but asset inflation too. Things like equities, real estate, gold/silver/platinum, bitcoin, etc.

These have been outpacing CPI because they're levered by cheap debt, brought to you by central bank actions that keep rates low so governments can play the same levered games with their own runaway fiscal policies.

jameslkon Ask HN: Resources to get better at outbound sales?

Cold sales/outbound sales is dying or mostly dead. SaaS platforms and “growth ops” that made it easy to set up sales sequences and find ICP lists helped kill it. AI making it easy to personalize and do all the work has been the nail in the coffin

This is because sales is a zero sum game. When everyone can do something at scale, like send an email sequence, nobody wins. Now inboxes are flooded with spam that get deleted and phones go straight to voicemail because people have learned it’s not worth it. You can try to create even bigger lists to capture some 0.01% that will respond, but that’s a shrinking game and many B2B companies don’t have the market size for it

Instead, for my company and others I know, we’ve returned to old fashioned human relationships that don’t scale as easily. Building partnerships, asking for warm introductions, conferences, networking, events, hell I even know of someone who knocks on doors for B2B and it works for them. People ignore spam from bots but they’ll listen to real humans. They’ll read emails and take phone calls from people they know. It’s about trust now, not scale

I’d still recommend learning closing and everything needed for once a deal is in your pipeline. I think a book like Founding Sales is good for that, if a bit dated now (skip the stuff about cold sales in the first half of the book). Never Split the Difference for negotiation. For in person sales, this is basically what anyone in partnerships and outer sales do. I don’t know of resources on that. I’m learning from friends who do that and old fashioned searching

jameslkon Lotusbail npm package found to be harvesting WhatsApp messages and contacts

I would wager LLMs in a good enough tool/eval loop would actually do pretty well at that task. But they may also be pretty good at just replicating existing libraries wholesale, sans the malicious bits

jameslkon Claude Code gets native LSP support

Useful technology can still create a bubble. The internet is useful but the dotcom bubble still occurred. There’s expectations around how much the invested capital will see a return and growing opportunity cost if it doesn’t, and that’s what creates concerns about a bubble. If a bubble bursts, the capital will go elsewhere, and then you’ll have an “AI winter” once again

jameslkon Lotusbail npm package found to be harvesting WhatsApp messages and contacts

Malicious libraries will drive more code to be written by LLMs. Currently, malicious libraries seem to be typically trivial libraries. A WhatsApp API library is just on the edge of something that can be vibe coded, and avoiding getting pwned may be a good enough tipping point to embrace NIH syndrome more and more, which I think would be a net negative for F/OSS

The incentives are aligned with the AI models companies, which benefit from using more tokens to code something from scratch

Security issues will simply move to LLM related security holes

jameslkon Feds demand compromise on Colorado River while states flounder

I’m not sure why Nevada is always brought up negatively when mentioning CO river usage but Nevada uses the least amount of water out of all states:

https://www.snwa.com/water-resources/where-water-comes-from/...

https://www.snwa.com/assets/images/colorado-river-allocation...

For indoor usage in Las Vegas for example, it recycles 99% of it:

https://lvgea.org/water/

Using water in the desert is a problem, but point to CA or AZ as poster children of abuse for that

jameslkon US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified

That graph is not inflation-adjusted and basically says to avoid using it like this in the description:

> Average prices are best used to measure the price level in a particular month, not to measure price change over time. It is more appropriate to use CPI index values for the particular item categories to measure price change.

I’m not doubting that (inflation-adjusted) energy prices have gone up but this graph is misleading to represent it

FRED actually has a blog post about how you would go about calculating an inflation-adjusted priced graph here: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2022/11/fred-gets-real-unles...

jameslkon Skills for organizations, partners, the ecosystem

“Agent skills” seems more like a pattern than something that needs a standard. It’s like announcing you’ve created a standard for “singletons” or “monads”

jameslkon Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1

Archived version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250912055105/https://www.egypt...

(The site may be hugged to death)

jameslkon AI will make formal verification go mainstream

> As the verification process itself becomes automated, the challenge will move to correctly defining the specification: that is, how do you know that the properties that were proved are actually the properties that you cared about? Reading and writing such formal specifications still requires expertise and careful thought. But writing the spec is vastly easier and quicker than writing the proof by hand, so this is progress.

Proofs never took off because most software engineering moved away from waterfall development, not just because proofs are difficult. Long formal specifications were abandoned since often those who wrote them misunderstood what the user wanted or the user didn’t know what they wanted. Instead, agile development took over and software evolved more iteratively and rapidly to meet the user.

The author seems to make their prediction based on the flawed assumption that difficulty in writing proofs was the only reason we avoided them, when in reality the real challenge was understanding what the user actually wanted.

jameslkon Rob Reiner has died

> Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue).

I already have in my prior comment:

>> You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.

In other words, your logic is:

Assume rent should be this amount -> subtract last paycheck to arrive at difference -> assume hourly wages should be this amount -> divide paycheck difference by hourly wage -> assume the result is the number of hours unavailable for work -> assume lack of hours is the cause for inability to live in a home

Note how many assumptions there are. Some questions that may disqualify any chain of this reasoning:

* How much is the median rent in places where a majority of this population lives? Is it potentially higher where they were living?

* Has the rent to income ratio changed at all, especially in their location?

* Were the majority of these individuals making minimum wage before? Could they have been working gigs for less or more?

* Are the lack of “hours” worked really due to lack of work and not another factor (e.g. ability to work, transportation, skill, etc.)?

* How much is this population spending on other costs that have taken precedence over living in a house? Has that changed at all?

With all that said, a stretch is not implausible. In reality, there is no smoking gun, only a myriad of contributing factors, different for each individual.

jameslkon Rob Reiner has died

> We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.

It seems like a stretch to assume this is a jobs issue. You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.

That said, housing prices continue to outpace household income [0], which should be a lot easier to explain as a cause for the problem that many cannot afford housing where they were able to before. Especially in California where there’s a greater incentive to hold on to a house and extract rent from it due to prop 13, and infamous amounts of attempts to constrain housing supply through regulations and lawsuits.

0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1MH1V (Real Median Household Income vs Median Sales Price of Houses Sold)

jameslkon Pro-democracy HK tycoon Jimmy Lai convicted in national security trial

There’s a lot of examples, yes in South America too, but the US helped replace or tried to help replace some governments during the Arab Spring. Libya being the biggest example, where the US and its allies imposed a no fly zone to help topple a dictator it didn’t like [0]. It could have done that in other places, but you didn’t hear a peep from the US when those protests were crushed by their governments during the Arab Spring.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...

jameslkon Pro-democracy HK tycoon Jimmy Lai convicted in national security trial

> One of the dark consequences of America losing its city-upon-a-hill aspirations is we're less able to effectively call out evil abroad.

"City-upon-a-hill" is marketing and has never been grounded in fact. It’s hubris and arrogance. The US is viewed as that place if you get on the wrong side of, it will bomb you or replace your government through coercion. It outspends every country on "defense" to ensure this.

History is littered with plenty of examples where the US favored a more authoritarian or "evil" government over less, sometimes even installing them. Arab Spring is a recent example where you saw governments replaced with the US' help, while leaving some notable monarchies alone.

In reality, the US employs its foreign policy for its own interests. It’s always been like that.

jameslkon Claude CLI deleted my home directory and wiped my Mac

Ultimately it seems like agents will end up like browsers, where everything is sandboxed and locked down. They might as well be running in browsers to start off

jameslkon [dead]

HN loves this library but I really don’t get the appeal. It extends HTML with a bunch of attributes with their own syntax:

hx-trigger="keyup changed delay:500ms"

hx-trigger="click[ctrlKey]"

It fires off weird events you’re supposed to hook into with JS:

document.body.addEventListener('htmx:beforeSwap', function(evt) { …

You lose static analysis and gain hard to track down bugs merely from typos

It reminds me of ColdFusion and Angular v1, with its extensions to HTML. HTML was meant for defining content structure, not behavior

Just use plain JS over this if you hate React so much. Or jQuery even. Keep the behavior out of the content layer.

jameslkon How private equity is changing housing

I agree with you general point, however in the long term, I don’t think this will financially end well for those betting on housing as an investment. At some point, if a loan essentially spans the course of a borrower’s lifetime, it’s no longer a loan, it’s a rental.

Therefore the lender will not be made whole when their debt serf dies. That seems to place an upper ceiling on the (inflation adjusted) growth of the investment side.

jameslkon How private equity is changing housing

Supply constraints are a symptom of the problem, which is housing is a huge leveraged investment for many. You generally won’t get policies for building more when it negatively affects the finances of a majority of voters

jameslkon After the Bubble

It’s a non sequitur, like saying “Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.”

I’m guessing the author meant it tongue in cheek but really meant “everyone I know or follow knows it’s a bubble”

jameslkon Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

> Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000 new-hire questions a month.

> Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us.

> … Six months later, 80% of the questions I'd been being asked had disappeared.

Interesting implications for how to train juniors in a remote company, or in general:

> We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near colleagues.

https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...