HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jrosenblatt

233 karma · joined November 30, 2010

https://ae.studio/human-agency
submissionscomments
jrosenblatt··on Programming Still Sucks
"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."

is brilliant writing. It's such good writing that it might convince you it's true. But it's cope. By that point, all senior engineer jobs will be automated too. And companies with old unknown chron jobs and USB sticks will get replaced by ones that innovate.

jrosenblatt··on If AI Becomes Conscious, We Need to Know
Quite a lot of smart people are taking it seriously

We are at AE Studio with research like https://ae.studio/research/self-referential and https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10188

Anthropic is doing interesting work here, Eleos exists (https://eleosai.org/), and https://digitalminds.substack.com/p/digital-minds-in-2025-a-... is a great review of other compelling work

The field is just beginning but it is worth taking a serious scientific approach to this work

jrosenblatt··on Ask HN: What is your profession?
CEO at http://ae.studio
jrosenblatt··on Amazon was Down
$31K in '08. What is it today?
jrosenblatt··on From Business Cards to Contacts - Without CardMunch
Seems like the only difference from CardMunch is they import contacts to Salesforce for you.
jrosenblatt··on [dead]
Ironically, I felt inclined to upvote this from the main page, but upon reading the comments no longer do
jrosenblatt··on Ask HN: If you had 5 years of uninterrupted time, what would you build and why?
Not incredibly ambitious, but would be cool:

Gmail like it used to be before the Google Plus redesign, with Boomerangforgmail and Idonethis built in

jrosenblatt··on LivingSocial: Employees' and Founders' Common Stock Now Worthless
What was your old startup 8 months ago?
jrosenblatt··on Show HN: I Built An App to Teach Mind Control
Can you provide a link to buy the heart rate monitor/easily see options available?
jrosenblatt··on Why I Love Balanced
They're Stripe for marketplaces, and they're great. (we've used them since Sept at https://crunchbutton.com)

Question though: why doesn't Stripe support marketplaces?

jrosenblatt··on Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
Sure, ZNGA went down 6% yesterday, to about the same price it was on Wednesday, which is still 15% more than it was a couple weeks earlier.

Not sure about Zynga as a company, but it's easy to overreact to the market's reaction to this news.

jrosenblatt··on Can You Work in Netscape Time? (1995)
Conventional wisdom in 1995: "How does a predator avoid becoming prey? How does a company with 75% of its market increase share against well-funded rivals? It's simple: nobody ever stops working."

Workplace fashion in 2012: "Think how much they could have accomplished if they just worked 40 hour weeks!"

What do you think they'll think in 17 years?

jrosenblatt··on Valid Credit Card Number Generator for Testing Purposes
But we need an expiration date for testing!
jrosenblatt··on Why Facebook is killing Silicon Valley
But of course the "newly monied social media entrepreneurs" will "invest in their dreams." Many already are. Dreams like space exploration and reforming education seem to be shared by a lot of entrepreneurs today.

After we make money from easier-to-start startups, we can be like Musk and Thrun...

jrosenblatt··on The Birdy - Track your expenses thru a daily email
check out keepdream.me - idonethis for remembering dreams when you first wake up
jrosenblatt··on The problem with startups is that they can’t solve the big problems.
The examples may be "artificially" hard, but, aren't they still hard? And, by your own definition (solving big problems=hard problems), don't they still qualify as big problems?

It's true that big problems have to be "hard" in some way, or it would be presumed that these problems would already be fixed. However, in ordinary usage, problems can be made difficult by something that is not technologically or intellectually challenging, but by something that is just practically difficult.

I think a good example would be Dwolla. Or, you might consider deposing a cruel dictator a "big problem." But it's one that was made difficult by the "artificial" challenges of rallying the right type of support, circumventing corrupt government institutions, and so on. Dealing with institutions that have made change difficult is a real and non-trivial concern, even if it's an "artificial" one.

At the same time, the Millennium Prize problems are arguably some of the "hardest problems," but people don't run around talking about how they're the world's "big problems." It isn't implausible to say that solving problems that affect people significantly may be considered "bigger problems" or at least more worth solving those that are not.

On a somewhat related note, I think some of the most important "big problems" are those which are technologically challenging and practically challenging because of current moral fashions. Many of us here may think it important to get humans to a self-sustaining colony off Earth. But most people today don't at all consider it one of the world's "big problems." Still, I think we can do it...

jrosenblatt··on Isaac Asimov on Security Theatre.
Not so sure about the elevator part. Depends on the elevator. The elevator in my building in NY has functional open and close buttons.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/2010/12/the-great-el...

jrosenblatt··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (October 2011)
Yale-based Food Ordering Platform hiring part-time awesome programmers for free sandwiches and money. We have already launched and are making money but are improving and expanding.

Seeking good people with experience in django and/or javascript+frontend development.

Email judd@aya.yale.edu for more info