HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jexe

414 karma · joined March 2, 2008

Co-founder https://here.fm
submissionscomments
jexe··on 'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows
As a parent of a new kid, being present is exactly why I wanted a pair - I didn't want to spend time looking at them through a screen, but still wanted to keepsake some precious early moments.

(didn't work out that way in practice, but that was the idea)

jexe··on What happens if you put work into the second dimension?
We thought about it - but concluded that any auto-cleaning would fall under "undoing many of the benefits of the canvas." Like a housekeeper who straightens up your desk and suddenly your spatial memory is lost and you can't find the important thing you left sitting out yesterday.

Could be wrong, though! Devil is in the details with this one.

jexe··on What happens if you put work into the second dimension?
Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm)

We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.

It was a lot of fun to hang out in as a multiplayer live video room, though, so we leaned into that with (relatively) more success.

jexe··on The Act and the Outcome of Creation
Probably similar to many of you on HN, I've spent years and decades building stuff for a purpose. To "do" something, to hit a metric, to solve someone's problem. Trying to create with unlimited agency and for its own sake can be hard, and there's a lot to unlearn along the way.

I'm working my way through the Artist's Way right now - it's basically a 12 week "recovery" program for creativity. If you can make the time, and it does take some time and commitment, something like this is worth the investment.

Becoming a better, more open creator will touch all aspects of your life in surprising ways.

jexe··on Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE
It's clear time and again that having short-term growth at all costs means you can't have principles.
jexe··on The best is over: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
Lots of agreement and think there has been a lot written about the sterilization of something that was once beautiful and creative. Sad but inevitable when your best kept secret club isn't so best-kept anymore.

Left off, and what we really want to know, is... ok, so what now?

jexe··on HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
This tweet was from 3 days ago.

Mismanaged comms? Yes

HN front page effect? Prob not

(could be Reddit frontpage effect or related tho)

jexe··on HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
> I don't like it, but can't do much about it.

Is the culture really such that you can't escalate an obvious, fairly minor mistake that is turning into disastrous PR?

That would explain a lot of recent Anthropic takes actually.

jexe··on The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
I'm concerned that there's no real way to "opt out" of an AI future realistically. Is this something that people are seriously thinking they'll be able to do and successfully stay gainfully employed and contributing to the world?
jexe··on The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened
I'm not an OAI fanboy by a longshot - but I'd view lots of experiments that didn't work out as a healthy thing, especially for a company trying to find footing in a new industry.
jexe··on Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed
Right, depends on your use cases. I was looking forward to the model as an upgrade to 2.5 Flash, but when you're processing hundreds of millions of tokens a day (not hard to do if you're dealing in documents or emails with a few users), the economics fall apart.
jexe··on How to Keep Winning
Half of the founders will say never quit. The other half will say you have to fail fast.

Choose your gurus wisely.

jexe··on It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts
Reading an AI blog post (or reddit post, etc) just signals that the author actually just doesn't care that much about the subject.. which makes me care less too.
jexe··on If you are reading this obituary, it looks like I'm dead
I read it as rolling with her own joke and lightening the load on the B+ rating (obviously also expressed as a loving ribbing given the context around it)
jexe··on Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change
That's a lot to invest in someone at a large comparative loss, in a world where employees don't last more than a couple years before job hopping.
jexe··on I'm absolutely right
nobody in my life feeds me as many positive messages as Claude Code. It's as if my dog could talk to me. I just hope nobody takes this simple pleasure away
jexe··on Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface
Incidental gatekeeping by leaving it on the black market isn't the way to keep it safe, quite the opposite - that poses a lot of dangerous risks.

Bringing it into the light under thoughtful consideration and openly discussing and encouraging harm prevention is the only way to make this safe. Everyone should have the right to to exploring this if they want to, and there should be plenty of open discussion, research, and education. I really appreciate the open-source approach here, the spirit of this movement feels like the right thing for humanity.

jexe··on Tell HN: John Friel my father, internet pioneer and creator of QModem, has died
Thanks to your father for his contribution to my childhood, I used QModem every single day until my parents screamed, and it changed my life. I made friends on some local BBSes that I still have 30+ years later.

Sending condolences and gratitude.

jexe··on The trap of "I am not an extrovert"
These labels do as much to hurt ourselves as they do to try and help.

The truth (for me at least) is that whether I'm comfortable and energized by others depends on my level of comfort with the people, my familiarity with the situation, my mood, the general vibe, etc.

"Being" one or the other feels like a limiting belief that we can hide behind if we're not aware of what it's doing to us.

jexe··on Fish have a brain microbiome – could humans have one too?
Well finally I have a new excuse to ask dumb questions here...

But what I mean is, what are the downstream consequences of this knowledge? Does it change how we can reason about health, cognition, etc?

jexe··on Fish have a brain microbiome – could humans have one too?
If this were also true for humans, what would the implications be?
jexe··on OpenAI shows 'Strawberry' to feds, races to launch it
Missed opportunity to name it Strawbery
jexe··on Software Friction
Most important point on keeping friction to a minimum is the reduction of moving parts in your app. Find the most architecturally simple way to build, without relying on many third parties or external dependencies. Think long and hard every time you sign up for an API key somewhere. Baroqueness doesn't necessarily win the game.
jexe··on Mental health in software engineering
I worked in the Meta NY office for a while, and had a friend living down the block with anxiety, with a prescription to treat it.

Sometime during my tenure, her prescription started becoming unfillable; the pharmacies are only legally allowed to carry a limited quantity to combat substance abuse issues.

What was happening? Turns out the Meta office was staffing up rapidly and taking more floors in the building, and all of the engineers needing anti-anxiety medication started consuming all of the local supply.

This is a serious problem that we do not take seriously. Broadly speaking, startups in particular are aggressive and there's still an air of machismo and bro culture (from which Meta was born) that prevents caring for one another in this way.

jexe··on Launch HN: Highlight.io (YC W23) – Open-source, full stack web app monitoring
Our team has been looking at Highlight recently and getting feedback from our team -- and they love it. Super solid product that will replace a lot of what we use now for logging and session recording, and the Highlight team is insanely responsive and has been great to work with.

Congrats on the launch!!

jexe··on Jeff Bezos loses attempt to block the Moon-landing contract NASA gave to SpaceX
Having some competition is probably the best way to make space companies work efficiently, cheaply, and reliably, so these two egomaniacs fighting it out in a space race might be the best possible thing for progress in the industry.
jexe··on Enso 2.0 is out (visual polyglot programming)
Congrats on the launch!! Really excited for what your team is building.
jexe··on Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany
Really excited to see this. Being part of the scene was absolutely fundamental to finding passion in tech and understanding how creative the process is at the core.
jexe··on Head of Remote Work
I'm curious how you define culture that you call if over-rated.

To me, culture is the individual accountability and focus on results that you describe, plus humility, freedom to take initiative, mentorship, empathy, perseverance, personal growth, conflict resolution... and this absolutely is defined by the people you choose to work with and behavior of the leadership.

I used to be in your camp and think culture was a ridiculous thing to focus on, now I'm in the camp where I believe it's the most important part of successful teams.

jexe··on Note from Mark Zuckerberg
I'm sort of surprised by the level of cynicism the HN crowd has. Call me naive, I'd like to believe that he's trying to do something good with his money without letting shareholders steer FB into a typical wall street short-term balance sheet game.

Reminds me of https://medium.com/conquering-corporate-america/mark-zuckerb...

Page 1 of 4Next →