Top all-time · #14729
Jaisen Mathai
Personal blog · jaisenmathai.com · on HN as jmathaiprogrammingphilosophystartups
Jaisen Mathai's personal blog at jaisenmathai.com covers programming, philosophy and startups. Since 2008, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “This is what happens when you blindly outsource to India”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for a 2009 how-to on building a Twitter OAuth script in PHP and a 2008 post about how outsourcing goes wrong.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Christian and entrepreneur, writing about faith, generosity, and building software.
Most-linked posts?
- This is what happens when you blindly outsource to India2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-05-08
What Hacker News says?
My most novel ideas have come when my mind isn't distracted. It's really overlooked and is such a frequent source of inspiration that I tried to capture how I experience it in my own work life. https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/latent-product-development...
Comment linking /articles/latent-product-development/
on “The Death of Daydreaming”Submitted Why everyone should write a framework and never use it as a story · 12 points
HN discussionDug up a post of mine from 2 years ago [1]. I bootstrapped for 14 months without salary and then took a pay cut for 2 years. Here are my numbers. I blogged about this as well [2]. Loss of salary for 1 year, 2 months Does not include loss of 401k match or ESPP -$140,000 Successful Kickstarter @ $25k +$20,000 8 week contracting project @ 20hrs / week +$16,000 Living expenses for 14 months (savings/stocks) -$70,000 Pos…
Comment linking /openphoto-trovebox/
on “The 99% (of startups)”Submitted This is what happens when you blindly outsource to India as a story · 5 points
HN discussionPSA: Getting out of Google Photos is both easy and super rewarding if you can run Immich and use Google Takeout. It’s also better than Google Photos. https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
Comment linking /articles/my-ridiculously-robust-photo-management-system-immich-edition/
on “Now Google says it might use your Gmail and Google Photos data to target ads”Submitted Big Tech Wants to Be Your Bible Translator as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI have a super simple spec-based workflow. It works amazingly well. I’m amazed how well coding agents can work through what I consider large features. Last week, I gave a 471 line spec to implement a major feature and it didn’t flinch. I wrote about it here. https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...
Comment linking /articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one-shot-prompts/
on “OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework”Submitted Sojourn for iOS Was 45 One-Shot Prompts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI agree with this. I’ve seen it in my workplace but even more profoundly in my personal endeavors where I have more freedom to explore. My current project is created by one-shot prompts. That’s not some kind of parlor trick. It is the framework for creating and evolving the product. Many people laugh it off as “unserious”. But as I said, I see this happening in my place of work where people are paid lots of money. h…
Comment linking /articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one-shot-prompts/
on “Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model”Submitted My AI App Measures Success When People Stop Chatting with It as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI have found a lot of value in the approach the post describes. I store my markdown as GitHub issues, regardless of how I come up with a detailed feature description (usually a chat session). Before implementation, context is always cleared to ensure that the model is working only from known context (skills, AGENT.md, etc). A major benefit of this is that agents can look up prior prompt instructions as needed or whe…
Comment linking /articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one-shot-prompts/
on “Markdown in /src”Submitted My Shuttleworth Fellowship – Application Deadline for $1M Is May 1 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGiven this is a largely technical crowd, I feel it my duty to share just how good (and free/open) Immich is. If you’re like me and don’t want to be an “admin for life” then it’s still for you. What has worked for me for over a decade is to keep the source of my photos in a boring old folder (backed up to my synology and Dropbox). And then layer photo viewing and sharing apps on top. The day I’m sick of Immich and th…
Comment linking /articles/my-ridiculously-robust-photo-management-system-immich-edition/
on “Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5!”Submitted Letters to My Kids as a story · 1 points
HN discussionImmich is such a wonderful piece of OSS software. I've replaced Google Photos with it. And then some. For the nerds... https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
Comment linking /articles/my-ridiculously-robust-photo-management-system-immich-edition/
on “Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage”Submitted My Ridiculously Robust Photo Management System (Immich Edition) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI sold an open source company in 2015 - video log [1]. I generally found the open source nature more of a liability. One which I could not ignore because our project was very public. The approach I took was to acknowledge questions like “what IP acts as your differentiator?”, diffused it and talked about the business itself. Being subject matter experts in the software was a big selling point because it was a hedge…
Comment linking /openphoto-trovebox/video-log/
on “Ask HN: How to sell an open-source software company?”Submitted Starting up against an incumbent as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThat’s very close to my setup. Agree it’s a massive shift that doesn’t even resemble how I used to create products before. https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...
Comment linking /articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one-shot-prompts/
on “Trying the software factory pattern”Submitted 10 tips to make your PHP application scream as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA tweet of yours a decade ago convinced me to add Google Photos into my workflow (thanks). https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go... I removed it from my workflow when its integration with Drive was sunset. I was without a great UI for a couple years, paying attention to Immich in my periphery. I decided to add Immich this year on a Mac Mini as well. https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridicul…
Comment linking /articles/my-ridiculously-robust-photo-management-system-immich-edition/
on “Noodle Gallery – Self-hosted photo and video manager forked from Immich”Most people who are passionate enough about something to receive these fellowships will take the opportunity to pursue their passion. I had a Shuttleworth Fellowship for 2 years which is very similar to the MacArthur Genius grant. They are both often enough to not worry about having to work a job to pay your bills and feed your family. (The Shuttleworth fellowship includes enough to pay for legal, financial, travel,…
Comment linking /articles/shuttleworth/
on “How MacArthur Geniuses Handle Their Money Windfalls”The closest thing I know of is the Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowships. It's longer and more money than the MacArthur Genius Grants (3 years, $1.2M). Here's my experience as a fellow. http://jaisenmathai.com/articles/shuttleworth/
Comment linking /articles/shuttleworth/
on “How MacArthur Geniuses Handle Their Windfalls”I recently posted that “Big Tech Wants To Br Your Bible Translator”. Each industry has its own challenges with AI. The YouVersion CEO is vocal about his belief that GenAI isn’t suitable for many use cases. I can see why they’d want to control that narrative. https://jaisenmathai.com/faith-and-ai/big-tech-wants-to-be-y...
Comment linking /faith-and-ai/big-tech-wants-to-be-your-bible-translator/
on “Anthropic & friends caught paying religious NGO's 3.3M for propaganda”There was a good twitter oauth script written by jaisen mathai which you many find useful, unless you don't like PHP. :) http://www.jaisenmathai.com/blog/2009/03/31/how-to-quickly-i...
Comment linking /blog/2009/03/31/how-to-quickly-integrate-with-twitters-oauth-api-using-php/
on “Building an iphone app with JQtouch in two hours”I haven't used Astra or Fable much. It's because Opus 4.8 is doing everything I need and I feel confident in using it. Why fix what's not broken? The model isn't the limiting factor for me right now. I just wrote about my process [1] and I fully agree that the more tied you are to existing approaches to software engineering the more trouble you will have. [1] https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-…
Comment linking /articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one-shot-prompts/
on “Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?”Here's a good article/story on the topic: http://www.jaisenmathai.com/blog/2008/05/01/this-is-what-hap...
Comment linking /blog/2008/05/01/this-is-what-happens-when-you-blindly-outsource-to-india/
on “Ask YC: How should outsourcing be structured?”
