Hacker News: _jzlw

New comment by _jzlw in "Show HN: Generate Passwords from Regex Constraints"

_jzlw — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:48:34 +0000

Okay, this is kindof incredible. The ability to create a complicated regex from smaller pieces combined in a logical way is insane. This has so many uses.

https://github.com/gruhn/regex-utils#comment-regex-using-com...

New comment by _jzlw in "Grok Is Glitching and Spewing Misinformation About the Bondi Beach Shooting"

_jzlw — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 09:13:06 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by _jzlw in "Pilot narrowly avoids 'midair collision' with US Air Force plane near Venezuela"

_jzlw — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 03:12:27 +0000

"Outrageous" is an understatement. Why does it always seem like military aircraft get a free-pass to break FAA regulations, communicate with no one when in shared airspace, and endanger the lives of everyone in civilian aircraft without any repercussions? This isn't the first time something like this has happened, and it doesn't always end in a near-miss.

New comment by _jzlw in "Show HN: Wiki.txt"

_jzlw — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 03:40:02 +0000

This seems like something intentionally easy for AI to consume, but hard for humans to read.

Why not allow for formatting and the ability to organize documents into a hierarchy via links? We could use some kind of standard, generalized markup language for this, so that a variety of agents acting on behalf of the user ("user agents," so to speak) can present the information in a visual and interactive manner while the source text remains machine-readable.

New comment by _jzlw in "Denial of service and source code exposure in React Server Components"

_jzlw — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:16:50 +0000

Idk about Phoenix, but having tried Blazor, the DX is really nice. It's just a terrible technical solution, and network latency / spotty wifi makes the page feel laggy. Not to mention it eats up server resources to do what could be done on the client instead with way fewer moving parts. Really the only advantage is you don't have to write JS.

New comment by _jzlw in "Denial of service and source code exposure in React Server Components"

_jzlw — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:09:01 +0000

It's funny (in a "wtf" sort of way) how in C# right now, the new hotness Microsoft is pushing is Blazor Server, which is basically old-school .aspx Web Forms but with websockets instead of full page reloads.

Every action, every button click, basically every input is sent to the server, and the changed dom is sent back to the client. And we're all just supposed to act like this isn't absolutely insane.

New comment by _jzlw in "Show HN: Forms are boring AF, so I built a conversational survey tool"

_jzlw — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:51:06 +0000

If you're not willing to accept feedback, and just trying to advertise your paid product (which is all this looks like), then a Show HN is not appropriate. Flagged.

(Also, I think you're confused about your own product. Your users are not the survey-takers. But if it's not for them, then it's not for anyone, because anyone using this product will not reach those respondents, as you've just admitted. Hence my feedback, which you ignored.)

New comment by _jzlw in "Show HN: Forms are boring AF, so I built a conversational survey tool"

_jzlw — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 12:45:46 +0000

A couple problems with this:

1. Nobody likes AI support chatbots. Give me a human dammit. So you're off to a bad first impression with whoever's taking the survey.

2. I can fill out a survey way faster than I can talk to an AI chatbot. While I'm busy waiting for the AI to "think" I could be looking at the next question.

3. The first thing I do when I bother to take a survey is see how many questions it is. I'm happy to provide feedback for a service I use regularly, but I'm not letting you waste my time with a ten-page, hundred-question survey. If I can't see how big the survey is right off the bat, I won't bother at all.

New comment by _jzlw in "Why the Sanitizer API is just `setHTML()`"

_jzlw — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:58:57 +0000

Ah, I see what they're talking about. That's a good article; my brain totally skipped over that link. Thanks.

New comment by _jzlw in "Why the Sanitizer API is just `setHTML()`"

_jzlw — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:53:39 +0000

Well that's... certainly a take. But I have to disagree. Most traffic coming to blog posts is not from people who know you and are personally following your posts, they're from people who clicked a link to the article someone shared or found it while googling something.

It's not hard to add one line of context so readers aren't lost. Here, take this for example, combining a couple parts of the GitHub readme:

> For those who are unfamiliar, the Sanitizer API is a proposed new browser API being incubated in the Sanitizer API WICG, with the goal of bringing this to the WHATWG.

Easy. Can fit that in right after "this blog post will explain why", and now everyone is on the same page.

New comment by _jzlw in "Why the Sanitizer API is just `setHTML()`"

_jzlw — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:32:13 +0000

The author really needs to start with that. They say "the API that we are building" and assume I know who they are and what they're working on, all the way until the very bottom. I just assumed it's some open source library.

> HTML parsing is not stable and a line of HTML being parsed and serialized and parsed again may turn into something rather different

Are there any examples where the first approach (sanitize to string and set inner html) is actually dangerous? Because it's pretty much the only thing you can do when sanitizing server-side, which we do a lot.

Edit: I also wonder how one would add for example rel="nofollow noreferrer" to links using this. Some sanitizers have a "post process node" visitor function for this purpose (it already has to traverse the dom tree anyway).

New comment by _jzlw in "Using Python for Scripting"

_jzlw — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 14:56:48 +0000

Well, that's kind of what I mean. For scripts in a python project, you can freely use whatever packages you need. But for one-off scripts, if you need bs4 or something, you're screwed. Either your script now has external dependencies or it requires special tooling.

It just feels strange that C# of all languages is now a better scripting tool than Python, at least out of the box. I did notice uv has exactly the feature I'm looking for, though it's obviously third-party:

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d...

Is everyone just using uv now instead of pip, perhaps? Or is just another alongside pipenv, conda, poetry, etc.? (Python's not my main these days, so I'm out of the loop.)

New comment by _jzlw in "Using Python for Scripting"

_jzlw — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 09:46:35 +0000

How do you handle packages? I want scripts to a be a single file with a shebang, not a repo with a requirements.txt that I need to run in a venv. To me, this is the biggest blocker to using Python for any non-trivial scripting (which is precisely the kind where I wouldn't want to use bash), but I'd like to know how others deal with it.

C# scripts let you reference packages in a comment at the top of the file, for example:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...

New comment by _jzlw in "How I block all online ads"

_jzlw — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 09:18:09 +0000

Take a look at AdGuard Home. It's functionally similar to pihole but overall better made / easier to use (IMO). I only use the first AdGuard DNS Filter and have only need to allow one domain to unbreak a site, but I also combine it with the browser extension (DNS-level blocking isn't going to remove all ads no matter what you do). You can check the query log to see what's getting blocked.

New comment by _jzlw in "I forked instead of taking the easy way out"

_jzlw — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 10:35:51 +0000

Server-side rendering is a well-established term.

New comment by _jzlw in "Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image"

_jzlw — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 10:25:57 +0000

This is the part that I find insane. What if the bridge had collapsed, and no one had bothered to post a picture of it to social media?

New comment by _jzlw in "GitHub Shop"

_jzlw — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:22:51 +0000

https://thegithubshop.com/collections/shop-all/products/1541...

That's actually really cool.

I wonder if it's an addressable LED strip you could hack or just white LEDs behind tinted plastic.

New comment by _jzlw in "Ask HN: Best tricks to make a PWA feel more native?"

_jzlw — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:13:07 +0000

Native mobile or native desktop? The former is relatively easy, at least for Android. React and Angular both have very good Material UI libraries. But making a PWA feel like a native desktop app is hard. There's a reason most Electron apps adopt their own unique theme. I've never seen a component library that fully replicates a desktop UI without feeling like a web app, not even Microsoft's own Fluent UI web components.

New comment by _jzlw in "Apex: Universal Markdown Processor"

_jzlw — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:29:47 +0000

The link doesn't give any examples of the extended featureset, but there's some neat stuff here:

https://github.com/ttscoff/apex/wiki/Syntax

New comment by _jzlw in "Chinese fighters target SDF jets with radar lock-on, Japan says"

_jzlw — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 23:20:45 +0000

> We have lodged a strong protest with the Chinese side and demanded strict measures to prevent recurrence

This is like a school teacher telling the bully to knock it off and then walking away.