News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

js98

Re:Can gzip be a language model? on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @12:46PM (#49804209)
“Solving” mnist with gzip: https://jakobs.dev/solving-mnist-with-gzip/
Re:I made my phone slow on purpose on Monday June 01, 2026 @12:54PM (#48359421)
Personally, my recent and surprisingly greatest win was to set up my old phone (samsung S21) with the addictive apps, removing them completely from my iPhone.

Quite literally "cold-turkey'ed" from 4.5-ish hours/day to 2 hours a day in a single day, consistent over the last few weeks.

I set up my second phone with a custom homescreen, and installing the 'bad' apps on there (Instagram, Youtube, NYTimes in particular). I dont use it for other apps.

Now if I want to scroll, which I still do sometimes, I have to walk to a specific chair next to which my 'addiction phone' is, I'll scroll for 10-15 minutes, and get back to the real world. I used to have particular issues with scrolling during vibe-coding sessions, and I'm genuinely surprised how well this approach worked for me.

Ask HN: How much AI is in your writing?

Looking at tech blogs, HN submissions, et cetera, a lot of content is (partly, increasingly?) generated by AI. The value of the reader's time and slop has been discussed at length. I ask:Among you, the HN-community who writes, how much do you use AI in the process?There is somewhat a spectrum from none, to grammarly-style cleanup, to whisprflow to 'look at my project, write me a HN-ready...

( Read More... | 37 comments | 4 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026) on Monday April 13, 2026 @03:20AM (#47748792)
Hey all, I’ve built Nekode (https://github.com/Jakob-98/nekode), which is desktop-cats for monitoring your AI coding agent sessions (OpenCode/Claude Code/ Copilot CLI/VSCode Copilot). It works as a macOS menubar app, and the cats run around on your desktop.

Each cat mirrors the agent's state, such as sleeping when idle, walking when working, sitting when waiting for input, running toward your cursor when it needs permission.

Fully native Swift, no Electron, under 5 MB, zero network requests, all session data stays local as plain JSON.

I published it source-available with an honor-system license, but this week I’m going to fully open source it and remove the licence. The payment/nag system was an interesting experiment but the project is more useful to me as a proper OSS tool at this point.

https://nekode.dev

Re:Obsidian Sync now has a headless client on Saturday February 28, 2026 @04:05PM (#47200225)
Oh wow thats good timing. I DIY’ed a workaround for this only last week for my openclaw instance. Happy to change it to this! https://jakobs.dev/granular-notes-access-limiting-openclaw-b...
Hey all. TL;DR: none of this is super novel or fancy, but the set of a few simple approaches (cloud VM, tailscale for connecting, strong isolation, long-running sessions, basic notifications) made using agents with all tools enabled much more useful for me.

I hadn’t seen many practical writeups on running coding agents in cloud VMs specifically, so I figured it was worth sharing what actually worked day-to-day for me. I use this approach practically daily now

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here? on Thursday January 15, 2026 @02:45AM (#46629370)
https://jakobs.dev Sharing learnings from engineering work!
I tested ChatGPT Atlas as an alternative to writing a small scraper for collecting price distribution counts from Dubizzle (UAE Marketplace). It could extract correct numbers for a single filter, but consistently failed to repeat the same simple browsing steps across categories, hallucinating completion or stopping with vague time-constraint explanations. Curious if others have seen similar behavior with LLM-based browsing tools (or have had an alternative work for them)
Similar writeup I did about 1.5 years ago for processing millions of (technical) pages for RAG. Lots has stayed the same it seems

https://jakobs.dev/learnings-ingesting-millions-pages-rag-az...

This website is unreadable on mobile.
Nice work! I spent a bit too much time creating a map with 5 colors… ;)
Re:Today's AI Isn't Sentient on Wednesday May 29, 2024 @11:37AM (#40513099)
This seems just like a single argument and counter argument against the sentience (or lack thereof) of AI today. I feel like the article lacks some broader views on the nature of sentience, and is quite narrow in its approach

Although, in fairness, I probably wouldn’t make a much better case for either of the sides

Re:Silk Helped the Armies of Genghis Khan Conquer Asia on Friday May 03, 2024 @01:24AM (#40244349)
Good story, but the writing is annoyingly tough to follow.
Ha this is great! I built something similar to this for myself a few months back at my personal site at https://jakobs.dev/chat
Re:4K4D: Real-Time 4D View Synthesis at 4K Resolution on Wednesday October 18, 2023 @01:41AM (#37925194)
Actually a company has been working on this for a few years now, and I believe they are currently in production. Their focus is football/soccer I believe. I was going to do a research internship at them before I dropped it for a different one. Here it is: https://www.beyondsports.nl/

Looking at it, they heavily focus on tracking the movements of players now to replay in AR

Re:Show HN: Magentic – Use LLMs as simple Python functions on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @03:51PM (#37664958)
Very cool! At first the title reminded me of a project me and my colleague are working on called OpenAI-Functools [1], but your concept is quite the opposite, combining LLMs in your code rather seamlessly instead of the other way around. Quite cool, and interesting examples :)

I’ll definitely try to apply it in one of my pet projects. Good stuff

[1] https://github.com/Jakob-98/openai-functools

Re:Show HN: 78% MNIST accuracy using GZIP in under 10 lines of code on Wednesday September 20, 2023 @11:53AM (#37585760)
Author here: completely agree. I think it is not much of an achievement by itself, but it is interesting to see that it works!

I will add a comment/edit to the post once I am home to clarify the relative ease of solving MNIST

Re:Homebrew Website Club on Sunday September 17, 2023 @08:29PM (#37550806)
Sounds like I should join! This is something I knew should exist, but hadn’t found it yet.

Will sign up for one of the events, for now feel free to already look at https://Jakobs.dev

Older »