Hacker News: jbreckmckye

New comment by jbreckmckye in "A perfectable programming language"

jbreckmckye — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:18:03 +0000

C--! I forgot that one. The ILR for the first versions of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler

New comment by jbreckmckye in "A perfectable programming language"

jbreckmckye — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:17:02 +0000

> at a party, Sydney Von Arx asked if i could name 40 programming languages.

An attempt (without looking)

JavaScript QBasic PHP Haskell C C++ Ada Algol Racket Scheme Clojure Common-Lisp GOOL Fortran Awk Postscript Forth C# F# Lua Java D Odin Rust Zig Julia Python Nim MATLAB Bash Brainfuck Arnold-C Intercal Gleam Unison Ruby Crystal Erlang Go TCL

Phew!

Show HN: Todo or else, a CLI for enforcing Todo deadlines

jbreckmckye — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:47:02 +0000

The problem with TODO comments is that nothing actually forces you to resolve them. Developers agree to take shortcuts they will revisit, but never actually get around to it.

A good example is feature flags... how often do you go back and actually clean up old flag code?

The tool:

Todo or Else is a small CLI written in Go but supporting multiple languages. Add it to your project and then annotate your TODOs with "tags" like so:

    TODO (by:2027-03, owner:Fran) do something

You can specify a date by either

- using `by:YYYY-MM` or `by:YYYY-MM-DD` to set a deadline

- using `from:YYYY-MM-DD` to set a created date (default staleness threshold is 90 days, configurable)

(I used Go for a few reasons. Firstly: the performance is really solid, on my newish MBP the scanner can process a few thousand source files in just under two seconds. Secondly: the cross compilation story is still really good, even with CGO. Zig handles the tree sitter compilation for MacOS and Linux.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402278

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Show HN: I ported Manim to TypeScript (run 3b1B math animations in the browser)"

jbreckmckye — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 09:46:47 +0000

How much of the work here was done by an agent?

(Being AI accelerated doesn't make this project low value. But it does mean _you_ didn't do the port so much as prompt it)

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Show HN: I ported Tree-sitter to Go"

jbreckmckye — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:08:27 +0000

If all the languages together add up to 15MB that is a game changer for me.

It means the CLI I am working on can ship support for many languages whilst still being a smallish (sub 50mb) download

I shall definitely check it out!

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Show HN: I ported Tree-sitter to Go"

jbreckmckye — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:00:02 +0000

Interesting. I have a similar usecase but intended to use CGo tree-sitter with Zig

Are these pretty up-to-date grammars? I'm awfully tempted to switch to your project

How large are your binaries getting? I was concerned about the size of some of the grammars

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)"

jbreckmckye — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:43:40 +0000

I agree. Whilst I think MS products are on a downward trajectory, I'm getting "Maastricht Planning Department switches to Kali Linux" vibes

I want to see (sincerely) a whole government ditch MS

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo"

jbreckmckye — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:44:52 +0000

Those are very large reductions - can I ask you for a source?

And why is the error bar so large?

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo"

jbreckmckye — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:24:56 +0000

I'm not sure how anyone can respond to that, without asking you to divulge that private data

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo"

jbreckmckye — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:09:59 +0000

Cost, debt, difficulty forming a moat, gap between what the product promises and what it can do, and the difficulty actually raising capital required.

His style is acerbic and (imo) excessive sometimes. But he's also one of a minority of journos actually looking at the numbers and adding them up. Which seems to be a rarity

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo"

jbreckmckye — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:02:39 +0000

I don't think so.

His argument is not "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable"

And that the smoke and mirrors accounting and perpetual thirst for more billions indicates just how unviable it is

Whilst he does dunk on LLM capabilities, the framing is the business angle - can Anysphere etc. actually form a moat and make a profit?

New comment by jbreckmckye in "I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer"

jbreckmckye — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 22:59:31 +0000

Typical shakedown tactic. I used to have a boss who would issue these ridiculous emails with lines like "you agree to respond within 24 hours else you forfeit (blah blah blah)"

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning"

jbreckmckye — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 14:39:02 +0000

Maybe my expensive university degree was worth it after all

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning"

jbreckmckye — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 13:19:28 +0000

I am being slightly sarcastic

New comment by jbreckmckye in "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning"

jbreckmckye — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:26:48 +0000

One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.

One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.

It used to be that ShowHN was a filter: in order to show stuff, you had to have done work. And if you did the work, you probably thought about the problem, at the very least the problem was real enough to make solving it worthwhile.

Now there's no such filter function, so projects are built whether or not they're good ideas, by people who don't know very much

New comment by jbreckmckye in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

jbreckmckye — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:36:53 +0000

That's why he succeeded

New comment by jbreckmckye in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

jbreckmckye — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:30:50 +0000

Would publishing under AGPL count as poisoning? Or even with an explicit "this is not licensed" license

New comment by jbreckmckye in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

jbreckmckye — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:28:26 +0000

We are already seeing this in scams, advertising, spam, and social media generation

New comment by jbreckmckye in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

jbreckmckye — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:27:27 +0000

Not all AI pull requests, are by bad actors.

But nearly all pull requests by bad actors, are with AI.

New comment by jbreckmckye in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

jbreckmckye — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:14:07 +0000

I don't disagree that technology is less fun in an AI era. The question is, what other careers are out there for someone who wants to make things?

About a decade ago, I went through a career crisis where I couldn't decide what job to do - whether technology was really the best choice for my particular temperament and skills.

Law? Too cutthroat. Civil service? Very bureaucratic. Academia? Bad pay. Journalism? An industry in decline.

It is a shame, what is happening. But I still think, even with AI hollowing out the fun parts, tech remains the best job for a smart, motivated person who's willing to learn new things.