Hacker News: jansan

New comment by jansan in "The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)"

jansan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:44:40 +0000

JS is just so much more approachable than WASM. You can debug it on the fly, feed it to an LLM, there is no wrapper, it's just so much easier to tinker and work with it.

New comment by jansan in "The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt"

jansan — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:24:15 +0000

Very interesting. I just implemented a text shaper and renderer from scratch with support for complex scripts like Arabic, Nastaliq and Indic (will soon post about it here on HN). Now that you write about it, the lack of stretching really is a deficiency in the OpenType spec.

If you want a solution for this it has to happen in the rendering step, not the shaping (which is HarfBuzz's main task). The shaper has no information about the available space, but when rendering you could stretch individual glyphs to the desired width, similar to adjusting the width of whitespace in Latin, but more complex, because you actually have to modify the glyphs with a scale transform. I am not an expert on Arabic script by any means, but this should be possible IMO. It would at least be an interesting experiment. Of course the JSTF table would be the right way to do it, but there seems to be a lot of confusion around it. Maybe in the age of LLMs we can give it another shot.

New comment by jansan in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

jansan — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:42:55 +0000

Anyone remember the self filling water bottle? Her you are:

www.fontus.at

Of course it did not work. And never hit the market

New comment by jansan in "Anthropic's model naming, extrapolated"

jansan — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:37:15 +0000

- Magnum Opus

- Fairytale

- Pulp Fiction

New comment by jansan in "Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor"

jansan — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:56:33 +0000

Four years ago, when YASA's invention was discussed on HN, it attracted very little interest. Mercedes apparently saw more potential and decided to invest.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31701133 Inside Yasa: how a British firm is revolutionising electric cars (2 points | 0 comments)

New comment by jansan in "GPT-2: Too Dangerous To Release (2019)"

jansan — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:15:36 +0000

Same vibes:

In 2000 Sony "declared that the company’s PlayStation2 has been hit with export restriction because it could be used for military purposes"

"Trade officials said they initially placed restrictions on the game console because PlayStation2’s high-speed graphic processing could be used for missile guidance."

[1] https://variety.com/2000/biz/news/playstation2-export-regs-e...

New comment by jansan in "Claude Fable 5"

jansan — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:11:04 +0000

After having worked with Opus 4.7 for a while I accidentially continued a session that was using Sonnet 4.5 and it felt just very dumb. The replies were much shallower than what I was used to, context was ingored, mistakes were made. I don't think there is a big difference between Opus 4.6 and 4.8, but to Sonnet 4.5 the difference is palpable.

New comment by jansan in "OpenAI Submits S-1 Draft to SEC"

jansan — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:13:56 +0000

Starting the first three sentences with "We" does not pass the Voigh-Kampff / "I am not a robot" test.

New comment by jansan in "Why are so many young people getting cancer?"

jansan — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:36:55 +0000

The number of different reasons that people come up with (and with conviction in many cases) is insane IMO, not any single reply or commenter (I hope).

New comment by jansan in "Why are so many young people getting cancer?"

jansan — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:24:33 +0000

Let's see what we got so far:

- Infectious Diseases

- Sexual Habits

- Obesity

- Agricultural Chemicals

- Dietary Shifts

- Food Processing & Storage

- Microplastics and Forever Chemicals

- Environmental & Indoor Pollution

- Sleep Deprivation

- Covid Vaccines

That is quite insane. When things become hard or impossible to understand, even hardcore atheists turn towards secular religion.

New comment by jansan in "Expanding Project Glasswing"

jansan — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:12:12 +0000

So you believe one marketing department more than the other?

New comment by jansan in "Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T"

jansan — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:05:24 +0000

The real question is how we are defining "worth." Much of the market has decoupled from traditional fundamental data, with Tesla's P/E of 380 illustrating this perfectly, but the Tesla stock price refuses to collapse.

We all know the market can stay irrational much longer than you can stay solvent if you bet against it. If you watched "The Long Short" (excellent movie btw.) you know how close Michael Burry came to capitulation before his subprime bet paid off. He seems to have a tendency to be too early with his predictions, even with his genius GameStop investment. So while he may be right again fundamentally, his timing may be completely off and those companies could be "worth" significantly more than a trillion dollars, at least temporarily, in stock valuations.

My personal prediction is this: The hype will go on longer than people think, just like with the New Economy. There is this quote from market analyst Larry Wachtel in 1999 who said: "Everybody's happy, everybody's making money - something's wrong here"[1]. Ironically, even Wachtel eventually succumbed to FOMO, capitulated, went in late, and lost a lot of money[2]. I am trying to not make his mistake, but it will be tempting to do so, I am sure about that.

[1] https://youtu.be/uaK5tsH59UM?t=1188

[2] https://youtu.be/DSVPsP0Bfx0?t=456

New comment by jansan in "Muxcard, a DIY credit card size computer"

jansan — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:34:54 +0000

I think that there could be a wider screen if such formats are available. Once we have betavoltaic batteries, the entire card can be screen.

New comment by jansan in "Toy Story 5 shows 'terror' of children's screen addiction, says Tom Hanks"

jansan — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:16:47 +0000

If that was true you would see unemployed parents being best at keeping their children from the screens. It is awareness, i am pretty sure about this.

New comment by jansan in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

jansan — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:53:00 +0000

MacBooks recently had this bug that you had to connect it to LAN in order to initialize it, or return it to the shop. It's not all perfect in Apple world.

Still, Windows is a problem here. I wonder what the monthly fee is to get rid of the ads?

New comment by jansan in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

jansan — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 05:34:25 +0000

Good thing there are companies outside San Francisco, too. Actually, almost every company is not in San Francisco if you think about it.

New comment by jansan in "Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)"

jansan — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:47:05 +0000

By that definition every pyramid scheme is rational (of course only until you run out of greater fools).

New comment by jansan in "I hated writing until I learned there’s a science to it (2024)"

jansan — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:18:18 +0000

The science seems to be

1. Write stuff

2. Make it better

3. Continue with step 2

It even is an algorithm.

New comment by jansan in "Claude Opus 4.8"

jansan — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:50:39 +0000

They could at least become faster and more reliable. There are still too many situations when Claude is running in circles and not noticing its own mistake.

New comment by jansan in "Claude Opus 4.8"

jansan — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:48:12 +0000

Yesterday I used Claude on a different laptop that for some reason had an older version of the Claude Code plugin for VSCode and ran Sonnet 4.6 which I initially did not notice. I felt something was really off. Within half an hour I had several situations when I just could not believe how stupid Claude was (although I was only working on a simple static website). Luckily I eventually checked the version, but that experience made it clear to me how big the progress has been recently.