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jasonthorsness

2,076 karma · joined May 2, 2022

articles:

https://www.jasonthorsness.com/

projects:

https://jasonthorsness.github.io/tree-dangler/ (ornament editor and dangle physics simulation)

https://hn.unlurker.com (find active discussions on HN)

https://ginprov.com (improvisational web server)

https://weather.bingo (yesterday, today, AND tomorrow's weather)

social:

https://x.com/JasonThorsness

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-thorsness

https://github.com/jasonthorsness

As you can see from these links, my name is relatively uncontested ;)

submissionscomments
jasonthorsness··on Our approach to advertising
Just let me pay to not get ads and for all tiers keep them external to the LLM output
jasonthorsness··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
lol can never resist call to plug: read my blog!

https://www.jasonthorsness.com/

My favorite articles to write are on crafts like the below, I just got a Prusa CORE One kit (not put together yet) so next one will probably be something related to that.

https://www.jasonthorsness.com/34

https://www.jasonthorsness.com/16

jasonthorsness··on Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title
The descriptions of the problems make it sound a little like algorithmic puzzles but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language… Excel is pretty amazing in what you can do; I’ve regretted having to use Google Sheets for the last few years.
jasonthorsness··on OpenSCAD is kinda neat
OpenSCAD is great! I used it to create a bunch of things to cut on a CNC router over the years. Best achievements were a scale model of Mount Rainier and some one-piece picture frames with text cut into them.
jasonthorsness··on GPT-5.2-Codex
Recently I’ve had the best results with Gemini; with this I’ll have to go back to Codex for my next project. It takes time to get a feel for the capabilities of a model it’s sort of tedious having new ones come out so frequently.
jasonthorsness··on Memory Safety in C# vs. Rust
C#'s runtime (dotnet runtime) adds overhead compared to Rust with GC and other stuff too. This is true even with single-binary AOT compilation, the runtime is still there (just like Go). So it will never be suitable for some scenarios.

You can definitely implement manual ownership tracking in C#, this is quite common for non-memory resources and does have some language syntactic sugar with the Dispose pattern for example. But you can't truly roll your own memory management/ownership unless you do something with "unsafe" which seems counter-productive in this case :P.

jasonthorsness··on Memory Safety in C# vs. Rust
This isn't true at all anymore for years! Microsoft acknowledged Linux won for server-side and since C# is primarily used as a server-side language they made everything work incredibly well on Linux.
jasonthorsness··on 2025 Word of the Year: Slop
This one is an apt pick. I only worry it’s early and the true wave of slop is not yet upon us.
jasonthorsness··on iOS 26.2 fixes 20 security vulnerabilities, 2 actively exploited
I can’t handle the swipe up to switch apps gesture with reduced motion it becomes too jarring. I set the glass to “tinted” and that’s about it. I wish they had a stronger disablement of just the glass.
jasonthorsness··on Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons
This is great! I’m going to try the melting carnauba wax in tung oil one. I tried pure tung but it’s too matte for what I want.
jasonthorsness··on Show HN: Base UI v1.0 Unstyled UI Components from the Creators of Radix and MUI
I love unstyled UI components since you get complete visual control but accessibility still works and that's so easy to screw up and not notice it's broken.

I've used Tailwind headless UI (https://headlessui.com/) and it's great, I'll take a look at this one too for future stuff.

jasonthorsness··on GPT-5.2
I have it now
jasonthorsness··on SQLite JSON at full index speed using generated columns
When a data tree is tightly coupled (like a complex sample of nested data with some arrays from a sensor) and the entire tree is treated like a single thing by writes, the JSON column just keeps things easier. Reads can be accelerated with indexes as demonstrated here.
jasonthorsness··on SQLite JSON at full index speed using generated columns
This is the typical practice for most index types in SingleStore as well except with the Multi-Value Hash Index which is defined over a JSON or BSON path
jasonthorsness··on GPT-5.2
Does anyone have it yet in ChatGPT? I'm still on 5.1 :(.
jasonthorsness··on It Will Soon Be Curtains for the Movie Theater
I don't and have never gone very often, but it's a lot of fun to see certain films in enormous theaters like IMAX. I will definitely see the Project Hail Mary film that way. And my kids still like to go, and I know people who go a ton on the subscription plans. So, who knows!
jasonthorsness··on Did that Colorado station sign say gas for only $1.69? Yes, it did
And here I am in Washington State still over $4
jasonthorsness··on Go's escape analysis and why my function return worked
You can run the compiler with a flag that shows all the escapes with -gcflags “-m” and there’s also support in goland and vscode to show the escapes as inline annotations in the editor. This sort of thing IMO is one of the useful things about IDEs: showing hints from later parts of the tool chain about how things are going to turn out
jasonthorsness··on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight
It is handled on the Unlurker front page (you will see a little note that says “time adjusted for second chance”). The replay doesn’t do any adjustment for it, but I think that makes it reflect the reality of when the comments came in since the adjustments are like a temporary bump
jasonthorsness··on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight
It's fun to read some of these historic comments! A while back I wrote a replay system to better capture how discussions evolved at the time of these historic threads. Here's Karpathy's list from his graded articles, in the replay visualizer:

Swift is Open Source https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10669891

Launch of Figma, a collaborative interface design tool https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10685407

Introducing OpenAI https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10720176

The first person to hack the iPhone is building a self-driving car https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10744206

SpaceX launch webcast: Orbcomm-2 Mission [video] https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10774865

At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=10799261

jasonthorsness··on Lambda Durable Functions
Sounds like a step in the right direction. I would like to see an all-up dashboard of everything in the shared state, and good control over upgrades (maybe a mode where in-progress functions can complete on version 1, even if new functions are getting kicked off on version 2, etc.)
jasonthorsness··on Lambda Durable Functions
The distributed state associated with workflow systems like this makes observability and code upgrades a challenge compared to just having an application orchestrating workflows with progress persisted in a shared database. But if they solve those problems this would be really nice, as I've seen a ton of home-grown systems re-write checkpointing, retries, etc. and usually get it wrong.
jasonthorsness··on Fallout 2's Chris Avellone describes his game design philosophy
If you like this sort of content, I recently found Sandy Petersen (Call of Cthulu, Doom, Age of Empire, Halo) is extremely active on X. Lots of interesting tidbits about game design https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu
jasonthorsness··on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race
ha what an incredible consumer-friendly outcome! Hopefully competition keeps the focus on improving models and prevents irritating kinds of monetization
jasonthorsness··on Is 2026 next year?
"AI overview" has become a running joke in my kids middle school due to this sort of thing :P. This one is particularly good
jasonthorsness··on The Generative Burrito Test
This progress bodes well for my chances of visualizing an invention I have been working on, a perpetual burrito extruding machine
jasonthorsness··on $2B Counter-Strike 2 crash exposes a legal black hole
lol maybe to clarify: if I make something, just because you use it doesn't give you the right to compel me to change it for you... you can ask politely but can't force my actions
jasonthorsness··on Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
What is the air quality like to actually breathe in your experience? I have noticed Jakarta on lists of poor AQI and it doesn't look great [1] but I think the AQI number is kind of an abstraction.

[1] https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta/hi...

jasonthorsness··on Ask HN: What is your monitor setup?
Two 28" Samsung 4K monitors from Costco from ~6 years ago.

I like having two, because you can dock/organize windows more cleanly than with one giant monitor.

jasonthorsness··on $2B Counter-Strike 2 crash exposes a legal black hole
"In fact, the existing legal structure largely protects Valve’s ability to engage in this sort of digital market manipulation. Players and investors were simply out of luck."

Whew, as it should be. This is a game, and I'm happy that some cohort trying to make money off of it can't bully the creators into changing it.

IMO if you make something, and the terms are clear up-front when people pay for it, and they aren't forced to use it, you should retain full control over your work without some kind of legal regulation. This seems so obvious to me that I was surprised when Tim Sweeney prevailed against Apple and I'm not sure how I feel about that case (great respect to Tim Sweeney as an individual, but I am not sure I buy his arguments).

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