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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 Launch HN: Golpo (YC S25) – AI-generated explainer videos
I feel like this is another case of throwing AI in a non-AI-required problem. Khan Academy itself just hired people to make its videos at a very reasonable wage. Why would you need to add AI into the equation? If you wanted to, you could build a platform of basic video / whiteboard content creators at a very reasonable price point.
personjerry··on Gartner's grift is about to unravel
Is it too late to short?
personjerry··on I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file
The reason why there's always a million reinventings of the todo wheel is because at its core, notes are just databases. A TODO form of note is about as flexible as Redis, and so the use-cases are many, from quick writes/reads (i.e. jotting down TODOs) to sortedset (i.e. priority list TODOs) to full task management (i.e. more data in the value), and everything inbetween.

In the same way we build around Redis for whatever tasks we need, you see engineers build around the concept of the note, complaining every other solution isn't exactly what they're using it for, and they're right, because on the other end is another engineer building for their niche use pattern.

By unpacking the use cases and slicing the right niches there might be a better notes app product somewhere, but I think it takes a very strong product person, not an engineer, to figure that out.

personjerry··on How I code with AI on a budget/free
It's another advertisement article
personjerry··on GPT 5 vs. Opus 4.1 for Vibe-Coded Apps
It's an advertisement.
personjerry··on Show HN: An interactive dashboard to explore NYC rentals data
> let's say around 10% of that can be accounted for via seasonal increases.

Summer inflation is much more than that

personjerry··on The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious
Wait until you guys hear about fibonacci tab spacing: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ewic.fib...
personjerry··on Kiro: A new agentic IDE
Why not deploy the game? I'd love to try it
personjerry··on Why email startups fail
Pretty sure this is AI written, hence the inconsistencies mentioned in this comment section.
personjerry··on Launch HN: Issen (YC F24) – Personal AI language tutor
Loom embeddings work in HN posts? Is that new?
personjerry··on OpenAI and Jony Ive's "io" brand has disappeared
Clickbait title. Here's the full article:

> OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory.

personjerry··on Infinite Grid of Resistors
Where are you going to find an infinite grid of resistors in real life to measure?
personjerry··on Online sports betting: As you do well, they cut you off
To play devil's advocate, why do you get to decide what's a "bug in human behavior"? If they're happy about it... ?
personjerry··on Einstein, Hawking, and Tao (Haiku)
This is a meditation on this article from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44098772

personjerry··on You share a house with Einstein, Hawking and Tao
> The reason they get used a lot for tasks along the lines of "rewrite this so it sounds smarter" is that that's what they're best at.

I disagree. The reason is that that's what aligns best with what most people are looking for help on.

There is a disconnect between reality and the AI product consumer envisioned here. There is no magical enlightened user who's going to unleash their inner potential.

How much physics or math does the average person know? How much do you think they even WANT to know? The answer is surprisingly little.

On a day-to-day basis the layman writes emails and other mundane tasks, and wants to do them faster and easier.

Having a squad of geniuses in my pocket doesn't pay my bills.

personjerry··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
Do you guys think it's too late to start building yet another AI Agent for writing software?
personjerry··on Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?
When people talk about UI information density it always reminds me of this HN discussion about the flight controls on a plane:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702560

personjerry··on Show HN: I vibecoded a 35k LoC recipe app
https://www.recipeninja.ai/recipe/r_WHeXRD7qXHV0Vr/cyanide-i...

Ah yes, they just don't make cyanide ice cream like grandma used to

personjerry··on Show HN: I Built a Customer Feedback Tool
What's the difference between this and like https://canny.io/ ?
personjerry··on I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days
That seems like a steal? Engineers are paid much more to do much less
personjerry··on It is as if you were on your phone
> Follow the prompts and be free.

Which is it?

personjerry··on Partnering with the Shawnee Tribe for Civilization VII
I would argue the bulk of Civ VII's ideas were actually taken from Humankind
personjerry··on TikTok is back in the App Store
Isn't this a slippery slope into authoritarianism? How are people not more worried about this? The whole of checks and balances is this, this is democracy literally eroding away isn't it?
personjerry··on Ask HN: Promoted, but Career Path Derailed
^ This.

But to elaborate more, do you ever play a single player game like Skyrim, finish every quest, lead every guild?

Life is unfortunately not like that, you can't "win" every path. It's multiplayer, and everything comes with a tradeoff.

If you want to win at "career success", it's there, lots of people would love to be in your place. But people will sometimes tell you what to do.

If you want to win at "agency" it's also available, but you lose money and progress, take a big risk.

personjerry··on Google removed 2.36M apps from Google Play using AI threat detection
Why can't they have better app moderation for apps going in in the first place? Prevention rather than cure? It almost feels like this is a mislead after they screwed up in the first place.
personjerry··on Anthropic raising funding valuing it at $60B
Reminds me of Vault-Tec from the Fallout universe trying to "win the capitalism game" and "optimize shareholder value" after a nuclear apocalypse, going so far as to facilitate nuclear war in order to raise their value as a "defense company"
personjerry··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2024)

  Location: Canada / New York
  Remote: Remote OK
  Willing to relocate: Maybe
  Technologies: Python, Django, Javascript, iOS, ML, LLMs, Distributed Systems
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/personjerry/
  Email: Click my username
Previously at Facebook, Dendron (YC W21). Engineering leader with 9+ years of experience at both FAANG scale and at startup intensity. I also still build systems and touch code every day so I can IC as well. Primarily looking for opportunities in NYC or remote US, but there's many cities I love. Currently in some conversations with big tech and considering competitive options :)
personjerry··on Functional Rick and Morty Butter Bot can roam your breakfast table
So it doesn't actually spread butter, it's just named Butter Bot for the marketing hype?
personjerry··on The heirloom tomato org chart [video]
Or, as a startup, maybe you want to be taking more shots on goal?
personjerry··on Don't return named tuples in new APIs
I feel like get mouse coordinates is a perfect time to return a named tuple though?
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