Hacker News: James_K

New comment by James_K in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

James_K — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:34:03 +0000

I will never stop singing the praises of plain HTML. It's accessible, it's portable, it's simple, but for some reason we need horrid JavaScript nonsense to operate.

New comment by James_K in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

James_K — Sat, 09 May 2026 05:56:08 +0000

POLAND MENTION!!!!!

New comment by James_K in "Men who stare at walls"

James_K — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:49:28 +0000

Meditation from first principles.

New comment by James_K in "Laws of Software Engineering"

James_K — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:05:25 +0000

I feel that Postel's law probably holds up the worst out of these. While being liberal with the data you accept can seem good for the functioning of your own application, the broader social effect is negative. It promotes misconceptions about the standard into informal standards of their own to which new apps may be forced to conform. Ultimately being strict with the input data allowed can turn out better in the long run, not to mention be more secure.

New comment by James_K in "Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it"

James_K — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:52:20 +0000

But it's not “lots of people,” it's everyone. Everyone has a picture of their face on their phone. And the information is encrypted because phones use disk encryption by default. “Someone can get a photo of your face and passport if they have full unencrypted access to your phone's hard drive” is like saying “someone could turn off your alarm and make you late for work if they break into your house.” There are simply bigger concerns in that situation.

New comment by James_K in "Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it"

James_K — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 23:17:52 +0000

The “hack” in question is pointing out that the app forgets to delete images of the user's face and ID (stored). A lot of people have pictures of their face already on the phone, and often their ID as well so this is hardly a security flaw in any real sense.

New comment by James_K in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

James_K — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:35:55 +0000

She could have accepted the Email, then printed the documents off and said it was faxed. I highly doubt anyone checks.

New comment by James_K in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

James_K — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:33:30 +0000

Working for an organisation which systematically abuses and degrades disabled people is not a morally neural act. If you're life is difficult then that's sad, but not an excuse to exact that difficulty 100 fold on other people.

New comment by James_K in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

James_K — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:30:58 +0000

I'm almost certain this is from the UK, and here we have a government that is absolutely obsessed by the concept of benefits fraud. Every real analysis has shown that virtually none exists, but it is a good excuse to tighten up the government budget by trimming some fat (disabled people).

New comment by James_K in "I hate: Programming Wayland applications"

James_K — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:22:37 +0000

That is not a problem with Wayland because specifying this is not a within the purview of Wayland. People like you don't seem to understand that Wayland is specification, and not an implementation like X11.

New comment by James_K in "I hate: Programming Wayland applications"

James_K — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 03:03:14 +0000

I think you've got it backwards. Applications like OBS do not typically register default global keybindings to avoid clobbering, you have to do it manually in their settings menu. The only difference with a generic interface is that the dialogue opened from the setting menu would be from the WM instead of OBS.

New comment by James_K in "I hate: Programming Wayland applications"

James_K — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:26:32 +0000

Or you could write portable software that doesn't rely on reading global input. OBS you give as an example, and it is a good one. They could simply register a D-Bus handler and provide a second binary that sends messages to the running instance. The software is more general in this way as it allows full programmatic control. A Sway user, for instance, could add

  bindsym $mod+r exec obs-control toggle-recording

to their configuration. What's more, they can do this in response to other system events. A user might wish to change the recording configuration of OBS in response to an application opening, and it now becomes possible to write a script which opens the application and applies the change.

If your disdain for desktop isolation is so great, you needn't even use D-Bus. Registering a simple UNIX socket that accepts commands would work equally well in this case.

What's really desired here is a standard way for programs to expose user-facing commands to the system, which is clearly not within the scope of the specification for a display server. The problem with X11 is that it has for a long time exposed too much unrelated functionality like this to the user, and so many apps have become reliant on this and developers have neglected the creation of portable ways to achieve these objectives. A new specification for display servers that excludes this harmful behaviour is a clear long-term positive.

New comment by James_K in "I hate: Programming Wayland applications"

James_K — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:59:38 +0000

How many keybings do you have and how often do you try new window managers? Compromising the security of the whole system just to save you a few `sed`s when writing some config files seems like a bad trade off.

New comment by James_K in "I hate: Programming Wayland applications"

James_K — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:44:03 +0000

I'm using Sway right now and I have key binds. Not sure why you think that's impossible.

New comment by James_K in "I hate: Programming Wayland applications"

James_K — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:40:57 +0000

Reminds me somewhat of Vulkan. I think the trend of making the actual specification of something lower level and less convenient is rather logical. Why burden implements with a load of convenience functions when that could be left up to libraries?

New comment by James_K in "A Journey Through Infertility"

James_K — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:38:04 +0000

The biggest fertility distributor is probably sugar by a country mile. Being fat screws with your hormones.

New comment by James_K in "Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English"

James_K — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:19:35 +0000

Performance and size can easily be added to any specification, maintainability is not a problem if you never have to maintain it, UI/UX are design issues not code issues. If you specify a UI, it will have the UX you want. We can already do UI creation with visual editors.

New comment by James_K in "Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English"

James_K — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:45:15 +0000

  import Mathlib
  def Goldbach := ∀ x : ℕ, Even x → x > 2 → ∃ (y z: ℕ), Nat.Prime y ∧ Nat.Prime z ∧ x = y + z

A short specification for the proof of the Goldbach conjecture in Lean. Much harder to implement though. Implementation details are always hidden by the interface, which makes it easier to specify than produce. The Curry-Howard correspondence means that Joel's position here is that any question is as hard to ask as answer, and any statement as hard to formulate as it is to prove, which is really just saying that all describable statements are true.

New comment by James_K in "Show HN: s@: decentralized social networking over static sites"

James_K — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 04:48:12 +0000

Just use RSS at that point. I don't see the value of encrypting everything, like people are gonna be spying on your random static blog entries.

New comment by James_K in "Notes on writing Rust-based Wasm"

James_K — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:15:29 +0000

If you are interested in multi-byte access to GCed arrays, something similar can already be accomplished. You can hold the array data in Wasm linear memory, then have an object that wraps a pointer to it, and using JS code, associate a finalizer with that object that frees the related section of linear memory. It's essentially how FFI memory is handled in most native GCed languages.