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harrisonjackson

1,519 karma · joined December 7, 2012

Founder of Spike Labs - gen AI and chatbot lab

hiring@spikelabsinc.com

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harrisonjackson··on Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
By the same argument, why does it matter from the technology stack side? It doesn't just nullify the business concerns - it largely nullifies the tech stack concerns. Your preference doesn't matter if you aren't touching the code and the product works for your user base.
harrisonjackson··on The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader
I have the X4 and the X3 (newer smaller one). I will get whatever the next version is if it has a backlight or more DPI / support for smaller font.

X4 is great - has usb-c charger and with the cover feels like an easy to pocket and bring everywhere reader. Does not fit on the back of an iphone. I assume the magnet layout works with popular android phones though.

X3 is also great, actually fits on the back of the phone with the magsafe - magnet is a _bit_ too weak. It does fall off in my pocket frequently but I haven't lost it yet. Does not have usb-c - has weird little magnetic 4 pin charger.

I will gift my X4 to my brother once I've loaded some more content to it.

I recommend this for anyone that wants to save web novels for offline reading https://github.com/lncrawl/lightnovel-crawler - Calibre will sync the epubs to the x4 and x3.

Use the crosspoint OS https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader

All that said... I do still use my kindle as default. More content accessible more easily, better syncing, backlight

harrisonjackson··on I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
Easy to see how a North Star (aligned with mission or not) may have shifted this over time. “Hours listened” as a metric. I’ll be interested to read this and see if you mention measuring the rights things as a way to stay on mission.
harrisonjackson··on I miss thinking hard
I believe it is a type of burnout. AI might have accelerated both the work and that feeling.

I found that doing more physical projects helped me. Large woodworking, home improvement, projects. Built-in bookshelves, a huge butcher block bar top (with 24+ hours of mindlessly sanding), rolling workbenches, and lots of cabinets. Learning and trying to master a new skill, using new design software, filling the garage with tools...

harrisonjackson··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
I've owned a few F-150s over the last 20is years. It has the best fold up seats of any truck - entire back cabin floor is flat which is great for my dogs.

I rented a lightning on Turo and it was amazing - planned on getting one as my next truck. I would drive a CT depending on price but they just draw too much attention.

harrisonjackson··on X Just Accidentally Exposed a Covert Influence Network Targeting Americans
https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1992382852328255743?s=20

> This is fake news. Location was not available on any gray check account at any point. Furthermore, the DHS has only shown IPs from the United States since account creation.

- head of product @x

Not to discount the impact of foreign powers over social media but maybe don't spread this misinformation.

harrisonjackson··on Character.ai to bar children under 18 from using its chatbots
Lots of threads in here saying this is just a "legal" protection move...

I'd like to believe that most actual people want to protect kids.

It's easy to write off corporations and forget that they are founded by real people and employ real people... some with kids of their own or with nieces or nephews etc, and some of them probably do really care.

Not saying character.ai is driven by that but I imagine the times they've been in the news were genuinely hard times to be working there...

harrisonjackson··on Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
The Ring app notification summaries still scare me.

> "A bunch of people right outside your house!!!"

because it aggregates multiple single person walking by notifications that way...

harrisonjackson··on Testing the Raspberry Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard
In a keyboard format? Something running a simple OS that doesn't link you or your family identity and data straight into Google?

Something a less technical parent can wire up in the family room from a trusted brand without having to do a ton of research for not only reputable brands but also vendors on amazon?

Educational mission aside this is a good alternative to a chromebook.

harrisonjackson··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
Yep, sick to my stomach. Added a bunch of new mute words on x.
harrisonjackson··on Y Combinator says Google is a monopolist, no comment about its OpenAI ties
We will see what happens with the windsurf acquisition. This is one of the best things with the community though. Both the OSS solutions and wrappers.
harrisonjackson··on Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
I wouldn't recommend at this point in your career/life. Unless you are going to a tier 1 school you're just going to set your career back.

If I was you, then I'd keep hustling with upwork and whatever else you need to while building and launching something meaningful on your own in the space you want to work.

- slap a founder title up on your linkedin (set the start date to now)

- ship something not terrible

- continue iterating on it while becoming a better engineer, product manager, designer, etc all on your own

- learn to use AI coding tools really well

- clone and enhance the features of competitors

- talk about it a lot

- go to conferences for the business sector and for the tech stack

- network a ton

Then apply for a job if you still want to in 1-2 years. You'll have met a lot of people doing that and can hit them up or apply to competitors in the space using your startup as the perfect showcase.

When they ask why you are quitting just say you are super passionate about the space but couldn't raise money or going on a solo founder was terrible and you want to join a team.

And just don't apply for jobs at FANG ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ there are so many other companies out there that need people with the type of experience you'd have after 6 months to a year of the above. They are looking for folks with FANG background, tier 1 college/other pedigree, or specific experience building the same thing.

harrisonjackson··on Show HN: Nash, I made a standalone note with single HTML file
Pretty sure IntelliJ contains a bunch of bundled webviews for various things.

Also, extrapolating usage of vscode seems pretty fair since they said "most"

harrisonjackson··on People are just as bad as my LLMs
Agreed on the second part. Correcting for bias this way might average out the scores but not in a way that correctly evaluates the HN comments.

The LLM isn't performing the desired task.

It sounds possible to cancel out the comments where reversing the labels swaps the outcome because of bias. That will leave the more "extreme" HN comments that it consistently scored regardless of the label. But that may not solve for the intended task still.

harrisonjackson··on Render raises $80M in Series C financing
Render is great.

Very easy to launch any docker image, script, stack etc.

You can templatize any repo for a 1-button deploy with a render.yaml and a link in the readme. More products offering "self-hosted" should do this.

harrisonjackson··on Ask HN: Share your "LLM screwed us over" stories?
I look at it more like a lever or pulley. I'm still going to get a good workout exerting the maximum that I can. But wow can I lift a lot more.
harrisonjackson··on 1 bug, $50k in bounties, a Zendesk backdoor
Crazy that a company/product that depends so much on email as an interface would have policies to dismiss a bug like this.

It is challenging for Zendesk to enforce or fix DKIM, SPF, and DMARC issues across all client domains so better to just ignore it :grimace:

harrisonjackson··on 1 bug, $50k in bounties, a Zendesk backdoor
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. This is a foot gun that you can run into even with an auth provider like Auth0 or Clerk let alone rolling your own.

Directory SSO: These are systems like Google Workspace or Okta, which maintain a central directory of users and their access rights.

Non-directory SSO: These are services like "Sign in with Apple" (SIWA) or GitHub authentication, which don't maintain such a directory.

harrisonjackson··on Launch HN: Outerport (YC S24) – Instant hot-swapping for AI model weights
> Outerport is a caching system for model weights, allowing read-only models to be cached in pinned RAM for fast loading into GPU. Outerport is also hierarchical, maintaining a cache across S3 to local SSD to RAM to GPU memory, optimizing for reduced data transfer costs and load balancing.

This is really cool. Are the costs to run this mainly storage or how much compute is actually tied up in it?

The time/cost to download models on a gpu cloud instance really add up when you are paying per second.

harrisonjackson··on There Is No Website
Use the play button to break them
harrisonjackson··on Flux: Open-source text-to-image model with 12B parameters
Your comparisons are all with the flux shnell model

> The fastest image generation model tailored for local development and personal use

Versus flux pro or dev models

harrisonjackson··on Show HN: I generated 70k audiobooks with OpenAI Text-to-Speech
Ah, nice! I've been doing something similar to convert web novels --> epub --> mp3/m4b --> sorta a graphic novel --> sorta a video / slide show

Here is pride and prejudice and up the thread you can see another web novel example:

https://twitter.com/HarrisonJackson/status/18109373574214537...

ElevenLabs has so many great voice models but is super expensive. I want to experiment with some oss voice models and even train my own but not sure on a great starting point with that. Play.ht has some good voices, too.

Seeing some of the results here with the openai tts I will probably switch at least the narrator to use one of these to save some money.

harrisonjackson··on Roblox has ported the entire front end JavaScript stack to Lua
Wow this sounds like a big undertaking. They translated react 17 to lua and a bunch of other libs. This makes dog fooding more things possible but I don't see how for some of these...

I am interested in any tooling or AI they used to help automate this.

The most useful lua code that I've written was very basic openresty nginx scripting around SSL certificates

harrisonjackson··on FrankenPHP: Modern PHP App Server
I haven't done any php development in maybe 10 years but this landing page almost got me to spin up a hello world.

I like the elephant frankenstein character - goofy and ugly/cute. Design, color scheme, copy, and animations are clean :chefkiss:

The value prop is well highlighted - at least for someone that's been out of php dev for a while. This seems like a nice way to bootstrap something small. Getting started code snippet makes it seem quick and easy.

harrisonjackson··on Google is feeling pretty pumped about a new way of showing you ads on YouTube
I didn't realize how annoying Youtube ads were until I upgraded to premium for download offline capabilities.

Now the ads seem much worse whenever I have a non-premium experience on the service.

harrisonjackson··on I stopped paying taxes a decade ago. The results shocked me
Depending on the jobs he had and if they took deductions, he probably doesn't owe that much - might have even gotten a refund some years? Even without deductions, the jobs listed "odd jobs" and bartending - a lot of his income was probably not reported.

The standard deduction is a lot for some people.

harrisonjackson··on OpenAI: Streaming is now available in the Assistants API
This and/or being able to fetch the responses with their token usage by id. What is that ID for without a way to retrieve the completions with it?
harrisonjackson··on Readability.js
This is pretty good for stuffing web scrapings into an LLM context.

Can also use `JSDOM ---> element.textContent` depending on your needs. Useful for snagging all the text content or a specific element's.

harrisonjackson··on Replicate vs. Fly GPU cold-start latency
I spent a couple months hacking on a dreambooth product that let users train a model on their own photos and then generate new images w/ presets or their own prompts.

The main costs were:

- gpu time for training

- gpu time for inference

- storage costs for the users' models

- egress fees to download model

I ended up using banana.dev and runpod.io for the serverless gpus. Both were great, easy to hook into, and highly customizable.

I spent a bunch of time trying to optimize download speed, egress fees, gpu spot pricing, gpu location, etc.

R2 is cheaper than s3 - free egress! But the download speeds were MUCH worse than s3 - enough that it ended up not even being competitive.

It was frequently cheaper to use more expensive GPUs w/ better location and network speeds. That factored more into the pricing than how long the actual inference took on each instance.

Likewise, if your most important metric is time from boot to starting inference then network access might be the limiting factor.

harrisonjackson··on My favorite database shirts
Before clicking through I had that mongodb shirt in mind as my personal favorite.

I got a few of them at aws reinvent in like 2012.

2nd favorite is a Cassandra one of similar make.

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