Hacker News: jnpnj

New comment by jnpnj in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

jnpnj — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:13:18 +0000

Corporate emails asking why are you not using the paid plan ??? came very very rapidly. So naturally, everybody started to use it blindly so that the dashboard metrics are all high.

It's astonishing how society forgets.

New comment by jnpnj in "Programming Still Sucks"

jnpnj — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:36:16 +0000

I ask myself the same questions. And I see other people discussing this on HN or other websites (old video games culture for instance).

I too feel that the computing aesthetic has vanished, somehow on purpose, a lot of efforts were aimed at making gpus and browser able to emulate anything (magazine, movies), so that's what apps do.

And I also agree about the balance between the tool and user. Limitations forced UIs to be organized, structured in some simple ways, they would do enough work to do some of the work, but the rest was on you to grasp the abstractions and ideas around. The software became something to immerse yourself in to gain more. That was part of the magic.

New comment by jnpnj in "Programming Still Sucks"

jnpnj — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:32:31 +0000

Hehe yeah we all have our own tastes based on time. But I'm also interested about the perception of computers. I too was enamoured with the creative possibilities of it. But nowadays I see a detrimental trend in how aesthetics are born on computers. The cleanliness, the recurrent patterns. A lot of pre-computing visuals were really different, none of it would qualify as nice today, but it was seen a cute before, and I kind of miss the less structured, less obvious, less shiny approach. It was also material, a different game, with constraints about possible colours, shape and precision you know. It also distracts us too much and creates real mind issues (I struggle with strange behaviors when browsing, near no attention-span etc)

So now I rebalance things and put computers in a smaller niche, not the centre of gravity.

New comment by jnpnj in "Programming Still Sucks"

jnpnj — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:11:45 +0000

Could you tell us more about your grandma point of view (if she ever told you more of course).

With age I'm becoming jaded with computing, not personal computers per se, but the overwhelming space taken by them now (especially due to cheap networking I guess).

New comment by jnpnj in "IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields"

jnpnj — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:22:52 +0000

Not really, I knew it was radically strange in its philosophy.

New comment by jnpnj in "IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields"

jnpnj — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:21:45 +0000

I find admirable how every era was filled with fights on just about every detail. Keys included, layout, shape, meaning. And now nobody pays attention that any of this at all. Very strange and funny at the same time.

New comment by jnpnj in "Agent Skills"

jnpnj — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:42:20 +0000

it's strange to see software engineers using skills aka human description of small scripts instead of scripting things directly. often there were cli / tools / libraries to do what a skill does for many years. maybe it's culture issue, people who enjoy automation / devops / predictability will naturally help themselves, but other people just want to "delegate" and be done without trying.

New comment by jnpnj in "Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML"

jnpnj — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:39:08 +0000

looks like an informal DSL for specs that brings back some quantifiable structure, how many people follow the same ?

also, i wonder if people who did MDD (model driven development) have embedded AI in their methodology

New comment by jnpnj in "Dotcl: Common Lisp Implementation on .NET"

jnpnj — Sat, 02 May 2026 13:51:01 +0000

hehe. alternatively dotnil would have sounded closer to dotnet while hinting at lisp terminology and history

New comment by jnpnj in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)"

jnpnj — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:01:32 +0000

    Location: Paris, FR
    Remote: full remote
    Willing to relocate: no
    Technologies: Python, Typescript, Lisps, React, Django, FastAPI, Postgresql, Gitlab/ci, Docker
    Résumé/CV: https://registry.jsonresume.org/jnpn?theme=elegant (github https://github.com/jnpn)
    Email: johan.ponin.pro@gmail.com
    Schedule: Part-time (10/20h per week)

Senior Fullstack Developer | 12+ Years | Seeking Long-Term Collaboration as Freelance

Currently employed but looking to build relationships with teams that value craftsmanship and velocity to grow my skills faster. I'm offering competitive rates ($60-90/hr) prioritizing team culture and interesting problems over maximizing income.

What I bring:

- Taste for type safety

- Pragmatic mindset (planning my solutions for regular delivery and avoid delay or drift)

- Dev tooling expertise (recently: custom Babel AST analyzers for faster debugging)

- Proactive problem-solver who likes to improve processes

Ideal projects:

- Teams with strong engineering culture who build ambitious things cleanly and fast

- Greenfield development or systematic refactoring

- Bonus: Highly formal/industrial model-driven environments and FP/Logic Programming environments (Clojure, Haskell, Prolog)

New comment by jnpnj in "Monad Tutorials Timeline"

jnpnj — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:58:48 +0000

Well, Moggi's paper on monads is from 91 and wadler first tutorial from 92. Am I missing something ?

New comment by jnpnj in "Monad Tutorials Timeline"

jnpnj — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:34:09 +0000

Very very nice timeline ! some interesting papers from the 90s section.

Maybe they could add https://github.com/VincentToups/emacs-utils/blob/master/mona... . I found J.V. Toups writing very nice, and useful to see how monadic composition could exist without type support.

New comment by jnpnj in "I have officially retired from Emacs"

jnpnj — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:15:05 +0000

I was wondering how people feel about this trend. LLM allow you to free yourself from foundations (frameworks, programmable programs) to just generate any support layer you want from old or new libs. This is all very understandable.. yet I find it a loss, in the lisp world, having a core model and semantics shared by all the upper layers means ease of reuse (for instance people leverage emacs calc classes in other places), llm allows for easier fragmentation..

New comment by jnpnj in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

jnpnj — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:24:04 +0000

But is the debate about "fleshing out a system spec" or "ability to come up, plan and explore various ideas to solve problems elegantly on a budget" ? I think there's always these two sides conflated as one when discussing LLM impact on users.

New comment by jnpnj in "Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x"

jnpnj — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:41:51 +0000

Yeah, I don't know why this never popped on my radar. I read Abrash books long ago, MS employees blog too, its history around the creation of UIs (xerox/apple and all that), the OS/2 era .. and I never saw his name (or maybe selective vision tricked me).

Very fun fact

New comment by jnpnj in "GPT-5.5"

jnpnj — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 23:05:23 +0000

Who else is trying to leverage the situation so that they don't dig their own grave too fast ?

    - I often don't ask the LLM for precompiled answers, i ask for a standalone cli / tool
    - I often ask how it reached its conclusions, so I can extend my own perspective
    - I often ask to describe it's own metadata level categorization too

I'm trying to use it to pivot and improve my own problem solving skills, especially for large code base where the difficulty is not conceptual but more reference-graph size

New comment by jnpnj in "3.4M Solar Panels"

jnpnj — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:51:07 +0000

Apprently there are a lot of innovations hitting market, perovskites left the lab, and tandem cells are above 30%

New comment by jnpnj in "Types and Neural Networks"

jnpnj — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:24:29 +0000

A bit confusing but extremely enjoyable, thanks

New comment by jnpnj in "Clojure: Transducers"

jnpnj — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:12:35 +0000

https://series.sourceforge.net/ this is the SERIES package you're referring to ? sorry, mostly a CL newb here, it's the first time I read about it

New comment by jnpnj in "Types and Neural Networks"

jnpnj — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:19:21 +0000

I see. So if IIUC, it's similar to programmable pocket calculators too, and it's very enjoyable to have a physical key per language construct.