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personjerry

7,329 karma · joined November 28, 2013

Previously Head of Growth at Dendron (YC W21), and machine learning at Facebook before that.

If you're stuck on your startup and need to bounce ideas, talk metrics, or figure out customer development, I'm happy to chat.

My email is personjerry [at] gmail [dot] com

My blog is at https://jerry.wtf

submissionscomments
personjerry··on xAI joins SpaceX
xAI owns Twitter... So now space company owns Twitter? Wtf
personjerry··on Employers, please use postmarked letters for job applications (2025)
This does nothing.

I'll just start a business that mails letters to companies for you.

Now, an APPLICATION FEE, that's interesting. Hmm.

personjerry··on How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital
I'm waiting for the yearly "Waterloo is the Silicon Valley of Canada" article that always fails to deliver its promise.

I grew up in Waterloo but it's just not it lol.

personjerry··on There is an AI code review bubble
I don't really understand how this differentiates against the competition.

> Independence

Any "agent" running against code review instead of code generation is "independent"?

> Autonomy

Most other code review tools can also be automated and integrated.

> Loops

You can also ping other code review tools for more reviews...

I feel like this article actually works against you by presenting the problem and inadequately solving them.

personjerry··on Our approach to advertising
(In)famously, Google's motto used to be "Don't be evil"

Scary to think about, if moving away from "Don't be evil" is the precedent for an "AGI company"

personjerry··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://www.jerry.wtf/

My personal site and blog

personjerry··on Turn a single image into a navigable 3D Gaussian Splat with depth
This is just Apple's tool plus a splat viewing library? Perhaps disingenuous to call "our web app"

This is the heavy lifting: https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284658

personjerry··on Show HN: Scroll Wikipedia like TikTok
The animations + audio are great. I feel like these meaningfully differentiate from some other similar projects. There's a lot of potential here.
personjerry··on Take One Small Step
I recommend The Now Habit if you found this line of thinking to be useful. It provides frameworks to understand why you have such mental blocks and more concrete strategies to try.
personjerry··on Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
Approaching 0 is wild
personjerry··on Apple releases open-source model that instantly turns 2D photos into 3D views
This repo's instructions seem to work as written just fine?
personjerry··on MIRA – An open-source persistent AI entity with memory
Doesn't seem to work very well, i have to coerce it to create memories and even then it's losing track of them or failing to create memories altogether. I want a single thread I can talk about multiple different social interactions in my life but it fails to keep track even of a single storyline, and fails entirely to save anything from the second storyline.
personjerry··on Six Big Bets
At 51 you don't have the energy and time to compete on "grinding" which is often the "advantage" in the early days of a startup before a moat has solidified
personjerry··on Six Big Bets
I should've been more clear, I feel like at 51 a better leverage of impact is no longer the startup but writing (essays, blogs, books) or other forms of influence (e.g. teaching)

I appreciate the feedback on the writing!

personjerry··on Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
I think it's a cool perspective, but the not-so-hidden assumption is that for any given domain, the efficiency asymptote peaks well above the alternative.

And that really is the entire question at this point: Which domains will AI win in by a sufficient margin to be worth it?

personjerry··on I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
If you have the raw HTML why would you need to do this at all?
personjerry··on Django 6
Do you guys find Django includes enough batteries? Why or why not?

I find myself using Cookiecutter Django [^1] more often than not, better auth, a bunch of boilerplate configs, S3 and email setups if you want, and other stuff rather than have to jiggle with "Django infra" myself

[^1]: https://github.com/cookiecutter/cookiecutter-django

personjerry··on Launch HN: Phind 3 (YC S22) – Every answer is a mini-app
Hmm this answer seems to have ignored everything I said, provided a generic answer ("you") which is exactly the problem, and doubled down on models/technology portion (and edge cases?) which is neither built by Phind nor did I question.
personjerry··on Launch HN: Phind 3 (YC S22) – Every answer is a mini-app
The problem is I don't think every answer needs a mini-app. I'd argue there are very few answers that do.

For example, it feels like Google's featured snippet (quick answer box) but expanded. But the thing is, many people don't like the feature snippet, and there's a reason it doesn't appear for many queries - it doesn't contribute meaningfully to those.

This functionality is doing exactly the opposite of the process of building good web apps: Rather than "unpacking functionality" and making it specific for an audience, it "packs" all functionality into a generalized use case, at the cost of becoming extremely mediocre for each use case, which makes it precisely worse than any other tool you'd use for that job.

As a specific example, I clicked your apartments in LES search (https://www.phind.com/search/find-me-options-for-a-72e019ce-...) and it shows us just 4 listings...? It shows some arbitrary subset of all things I could find on StreetEasy, and then provides a subset of the search functionality, losing things such as days on market, neighborhood, etc.

It's a cool demo, but "on-demand software" is exactly "Solution-In-Search-of-a-Problem".

The difficult part you need to ask is, like feature snippet, what are the questions worth solving with this, and is the pain point big enough that it's worth solving?

personjerry··on GitHub: Git operation failures
Looks like Gemini 3 figured out the best way to save costs on its compute time was to shut down github!
personjerry··on Show HN: I made a heatmap diff viewer for code reviews
why?
personjerry··on Show HN: AutoLearn Skills for self-improving agents
I don't understand, it'd be nice to see even a single example of the application
personjerry··on Things I've learned in my 7 years implementing AI
I stopped reading at "AI skeptics ask, “If AI is so good, why don’t we see a lot of new startups?”" because what???
personjerry··on Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
> I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis.

"Quality of life" is a hugely privileged topic to be zooming in on. For the vast majority of people both inside and outside the US, Time and Money are by far the most important factors in their lives.

personjerry··on Why do we keep gravitating toward complexity?
I don't think we're gravitating towards complexity. It's much simpler:

1. We add more functionality to the base of what exists (e.g. HTML). More and more individual features. (e.g. selecting things in the DOM, animations, effects, interactions, tracking state)

2. At some point someone takes all the patterns in the latest wave of functionality and writes a library for them. Library is widely lauded or adopted (see jquery, React).

3. We think of new features building on top what is now the new norm, it's now table stakes. Rinse and repeat.

This is a common pattern in engineering, for example writing new entries to a DB, then at some point going back and compacting.

personjerry··on Meta is spending $10B in rural Louisiana to build its largest data center
> I'll never understand why tech companies choose some of the locations

That's because you've chosen not to read about it. Location is one of the most important things they think about for data centers and there are plenty of articles on the subject.

Here's a recent article:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/25/meta-massive-data-center-lou...

“We set out looking for a place where we could expand into gigawatts pretty quickly, and really get moving within that community on a large plot of land very quickly,” said Rachel Peterson, vice president of data centers for Meta. “We looked at finding very, very large contiguous plots of land that had access to the infrastructure that we need, the energy that we needed, and could move very, very quickly for us.”

To answer the question you're implying, surrounding temperature is pretty minor, the cooling required is orders of magnitude higher, so power access is more important; You'll frequently find them located near sources of energy.

personjerry··on Show HN: Diggit.dev – Git history for architecture archaeologists
Can you give the use case? Or example runs? Seems like git log or git bisect should be enough?
personjerry··on The Leverage Paradox in AI
This seems like an unsubstantial article, ironically it might have been written by AI. Here's the entire summary:

AI makes slop

Therefore, spend more time to make the slop "better" or "different"

[No, they do not define what counts as "better" or "different"]

personjerry··on The electric fence stopped working years ago
AI article
personjerry··on Launch HN: Golpo (YC S25) – AI-generated explainer videos
You can absolutely hire a human to make arbitrary content
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