Hacker News: jbritton

New comment by jbritton in "Why hasn't AI improved design quality the way it improved dev speed?"

jbritton — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:27:03 +0000

Stitches pages on an infinite canvas is possibly the worst UI I have ever seen.

New comment by jbritton in "How can I keep from singing?"

jbritton — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:49:48 +0000

I believe I’m tone deaf. There is no test for this. I am color blind, but I have the most favorable form of red/green color blindness which means for the most part I see all colors, but I fail the tests. Likewise I hear tones, and can distinguish tones. I can play something and know if I have hit the wrong key. However, I have practiced long enough to know I’m tone deficient and that knowledge really affects one’s desire to practice. I see little kids on YouTube that already have more talent than I could ever achieve. I really don’t see myself ever being able to pick up anything complicated by ear. If it’s transcribed correctly then sure it’s doable with sufficient practice. I can’t hear a chord and know what chord it is. I have dabbled with my guitar for 30 years. I frequently struggle to know when frequency goes up vs down. I can’t sing in key. I can barely tune a guitar by ear. It’s usually off a little bit though and it takes me a very long time. The song “Back in Black” has this little bit at the beginning G E D B and then sort of an A bend. Whatever Angus does with that A note I just can’t figure out. I have tried it a thousand times.

New comment by jbritton in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

jbritton — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 01:10:30 +0000

I wonder how often problems happen that the redundancy solves. Is radiation actually flipping bits and at what frequency. Can a sun flare cause all the computers to go haywire.

New comment by jbritton in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

jbritton — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:46:18 +0000

More complexity, no benefit. Human languages have lots of problems. I would simplify English if I knew how and had the power to make it so.

New comment by jbritton in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

jbritton — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:56:40 +0000

I strongly dislike flexible input like __Unambiguous___, *Unambiguous*

I’m reminded of the time Microsoft allowed mistakes in html writing. They attempted to parse a wide variety of common user errors. The effect of this was no standard and nobody else able to write a Microsoft compatible parser.

I dislike Nim lang because of this. At least Nim defined the specification. Still though I think it creates more cognitive load learning every legal variation and it makes searching more difficult.

I think to authors point if Markdown actually had a strict simple definition with one way to do it and no embedded html we would be better off.

New comment by jbritton in "Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager"

jbritton — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:28:04 +0000

On X11, the window manager handles the window decorations. So splitting them is going to involve some possibly non-trivial messaging and config.

New comment by jbritton in "Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices"

jbritton — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 03:33:05 +0000

I’m developing on an Nvidia Orin which requires Ubuntu 22.04. Snaps are broken on this platform. I used an alternative ppa that provided a chromium.deb.

New comment by jbritton in "Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?"

jbritton — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 05:00:22 +0000

Also true of specifications. Anything not explicitly stated will be decided by the implementer, maybe to your liking or maybe not.

New comment by jbritton in "Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?"

jbritton — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 04:54:32 +0000

It’s kind of interesting relating this to LLMs. A chef in a kitchen you can just say you want PB&J. With a robot, does it know where things are, once it knows that, does it know how to retrieve them, open and close them. It’s always a mystery what you get back from an LLM.

New comment by jbritton in "Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English"

jbritton — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:54:28 +0000

I find dark mode much easier to read and far less eye strain. I guess it just shows that users should be the ones to set the preference. There are studies on monkeys showing light mode leading to myopia. Although lately I have come to learn there are lots of poorly done studies.

New comment by jbritton in "Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English"

jbritton — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:41:54 +0000

I tried this recently with what I thought was a simple layout, but probably uncommon for CSS. It took an extremely long back and forth to nail it down. It seemingly had no understanding how to achieve what I wanted. A couple sentences would have been clear to a person. Sometimes LLMs are fantastic and sometimes they are brain dead.

New comment by jbritton in "My “grand vision” for Rust"

jbritton — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 01:50:57 +0000

It appears the error message has been improved.

New comment by jbritton in "My “grand vision” for Rust"

jbritton — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:03 +0000

When I wrote my very first Rust code, I was trying to write to a socket. I got stuck on this task with misleading error messages for the longest time. I finally realized I had not made the socket object mutable. I’m used to Posix where you have an integer file descriptor and I don’t tend to think of socket write as a mutable operation. At least it doesn’t mutate state that my app manages. Perhaps something in the kernel gets mutated. I believe the socket interface may have been intended to support queuing which is perhaps why it needed to be mutable. I might have needed a lower level api. I just mention this because I think it’s interesting as to how it should be typed when mutation is external to the app. I didn’t follow through on using Rust and this was long ago so I’m sure some details are wrong.

New comment by jbritton in "We Will Not Be Divided"

jbritton — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 06:41:28 +0000

I think this is different. It’s a statement that this product is not qualified to perform that function(autonomous killing decisions). I think it is pure madness to think AI is currently up to this task. I also think it should be a war crime. I think congress should pass a law forbidding it.

New comment by jbritton in "We Will Not Be Divided"

jbritton — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 06:26:41 +0000

It’s not clear to me that the AI itself will refuse. You could build a system where AI is asked if an image matches a pattern. The true/false is fed to a different system to fire a missile. Building such a system would violate the contract, but doesn’t prevent such a thing from being built if you don’t mind breaking a contract.

New comment by jbritton in "Show HN: A small programming language where everything is pass-by-value"

jbritton — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:32:35 +0000

The article mentions shallow copy, but does this create a persistent immutable data structure? Does it modify all nodes up the tree to the root?

New comment by jbritton in "High-Level Is the Goal"

jbritton — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 05:53:39 +0000

The Reddit example is about two different design choices. The DOM is a tree of state that needs to stay in sync with your app state. So how to make that happen without turning your code into a mess. The old Reddit had to first construct the DOM and then for every state change, determine what DOM nodes need to change, find them and update them. Knowing what needs to change gets ugly in a lot of apps. The other alternative is to realize that constructing a DOM from any arbitrary state is pretty much the same as constructing it from initial state. But now you don’t have to track what DOM nodes must change on every state change. This is a massive reduction in code complexity. I will grant that there is something similar to the “expression” problem. Every time there is a new state element introduced it may affect the creation of every node in the DOM. As opposed to every time a UI element is added it may affect every state transition. The first Reddit can be fast, but you have to manage all the updates. The second is slow, but easier to develop. I’m not sure going any lower solves any of that. The React version can be made more efficient through intelligent compilers that are at better at detecting change and doing updates. The React model allows for tooling optimizations. These might well beat hand written changes. The web has complexity also of client/server with long delays and syncing client/server and DOM state, and http protocol. Desktop apps and game engines don’t have these problems.

New comment by jbritton in "Show HN: GlyphLang – An AI-first programming language"

jbritton — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:42:50 +0000

I had a conversation with Claude about what language to work in. It was a web app and it led me to Typescript mainly because of the training data for the model, plus typing and being able to write pure functions. Haskell might have been preferred except for the lower amounts of training data.

New comment by jbritton in "CSS Grid Lanes"

jbritton — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:11 +0000

I have often thought layouts should be done by a constraint solver. Then there could be libraries that help simplify specifying a layout, which feed constraints to the solver.

New comment by jbritton in "AI will make formal verification go mainstream"

jbritton — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 23:10:48 +0000

I was thinking about C++ and if you change your mind about whether some member function or parameter should be const, it can be quite the pain to manually refactor. And good refactoring tools can make this go away. Maybe they already have, I haven’t programmed C++ for several years.