<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: jonathanlydall</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonathanlydall</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:44:19 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=jonathanlydall" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Posted elsewhere in the comments:<p><a href="https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world" rel="nofollow">https://laprade.blog/your-dietbet-destroyed-the-world</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:17:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49322801</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49322801</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49322801</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I referred to “styles” I was referring to classes.<p>If the same class was defined in a multiple SVGs under their respective <style/> elements, they would affect each other.<p>So sometimes if two icons were in the DOM at the same time, the one’s colours might look wrong since both had the same class names they were using.<p>Element ids were also not used so much for styling but instead for common SVG components (or something, I don’t know the terminology), so would similarly cause rendering issues.<p>Like I said it was especially common if the one started as a copy of the other in Illustrator.<p>The “fix” was to ensure unique element ids and class names, but this was an annoying extra step.<p>Using a shadow DOM for each icon which is an SVG circumvents the entire problem as they ignore anything outside their isolated DOM.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:56:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49279143</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49279143</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49279143</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Pretty much.<p>The icon appeared bigger in some places than others and wanted it to look decent on higher DPI displays.<p>SVGs are so much better for this though, smaller in size and look great at pretty much any resolution.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:46:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278316</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278316</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278316</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>SVGs can define styles and element ids.<p>The problem is if these same element ids and styles are used in different places in your DOM, including other SVGs.<p>Our product is a bit of a platform with extensibility which includes icons for ui elements. It was very easy for us or our users to accidentally use the same style names or element ids when exporting from Adobe Illustrator, especially for icons which are similar to others and started as a copy.<p>When using SVGs as a background it’s not an issue, but we want our SVGs to be able to have different colours be usable in light or dark mode which CSS can do, except it doesn’t work when making the SVG a background.<p>Shadow DOM solves this issue perfectly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:43:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278289</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278289</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278289</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can’t recall the details any more, but I recall seeing something like this in my research on the issue, it might have been a solution to the issue, or I was worried it had a noticeable performance impact.<p>We may also have moved to the SVGs anyway as they also look much nicer when running at different zoom levels like 125%.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:36:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278197</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278197</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278197</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Perhaps it was a different optimisation, but it definitely made significantly downscaled PNGs look way worse under particular circumstances. It was especially noticeable on triangles we used on nodes of a tree view control.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:32:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278156</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278156</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49278156</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm pretty sure the same issue happens with PNGs, which being lossless are generally good for icons as they don't land up with compression artifacts like what happens in JPEGs (which the author points out are really for photographs), they also support alpha blending.<p>When Chrome introduced this "optimization" and it made it through to an Electron release which we were upgrading to, it really messed up the icons in a lot of places in our product such that we had to hold off the upgrade until we had SVGs to replace them.<p>SVGs also have the advantage of being able to respond to light/dark mode. We just needed to put each icon in its own shadow DOM to avoid styles clashing between the different SVGs if they happen to be named the same which was a bit of an annoyance for our graphic designer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:33:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49274051</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49274051</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49274051</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "200 Milliseconds"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For one of the supermarket chains I frequent, from me handing over the single item I'm purchasing I can be walking away within 20s. They scan the item, then a loyalty barcode on my phone and finally I tap my iPhone which has my bank card loaded onto it.<p>Basically, they don't have any significant bottlenecks, POS hardware + software is responsive with an efficient UI for the operator, and the card machine is a wired connection to a router with a fibre uplink.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:11:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167568</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167568</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167568</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "200 Milliseconds"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In South Africa I notice this difference all the time where the big supermarket chains seem to be near instantaneous while small stores are 10+ seconds.<p>I'm certain it's because the big store's card machines have a wired network connection to a router with a fibre connection, while most smaller shops just use card machines with integrated GPRS wireless modems as they even show feedback about connecting as you tap your card.<p>A stall vendor who I use somewhat regularly warned me one time that her card machine was down (I guess some kind of maintenance as it was earlyish on a Sunday morning) so would only be able to accept cash. I helped her put the card machine on a nearby shop's free WiFi and not only did it work around the problem, but it made card transactions going forward significantly faster.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:04:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167487</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167487</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167487</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "When random.bytes() runs but doesn't work"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This does not seem to be a good write up at all, see nullc’s explanation in this discussion of (what seems to me) the actual root cause whereas this article spent a lot of words making the argument that bad commit messages <i>must</i> mean bad code, later using the assertion to try “prove” what the technical problem was.<p>I agree that a bad commit message combined with a big commit is a huge smell, but as it’s just metadata for the code and not the code itself, it is not in itself evidence in any form.<p>That being said, probably okay after explaining the technical code issues for the author add a couple of a sentences about how all this was was part of 1000s of a lines of code changed in commits with useless messages which demonstrates generally bad  code hygiene.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 02 Aug 2026 08:14:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49142227</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49142227</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49142227</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "The End of an Era"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sometimes pleasure is in the activity, not just the outcome.<p>A good movie or novel is a generally pleasurable experience from start to finish, where the conclusion on its own might have only been mildly interesting at best.<p>Sex is also like this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:10:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123357</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123357</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123357</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I used reading mode on Safari and it was perfect for reading.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:56:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113386</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113386</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113386</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well, they do have a point on the “unmanly” aspect as there is a reason that men are statistically more likely to die before old age than women.<p>Also, I’ve found that when asked about the risk of something, most people believe 
that bad things only happen to <i>other</i> people (who also believed that, until it happened to them).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:54:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089765</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089765</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089765</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Talking about road safety.<p>In South Africa we have 12,000+ road <i>fatalities</i> a year, by comparison Australia (renowned for strong law enforcement) with about half of our population size has 1,200 or something. (And they apparently happen to have about 4,500 teen pregnancies a year.)<p>Australia’s (or maybe it was New Zealand’s which I visited on the same trip) road safety campaign is called “Towards Zero”, while South Africa’s is called “Arrive Alive”.<p>A big part of the difference in fatalities is that Australia has much better general law enforcement (such that a lot of foreigners complain about it), while over here it’s dismal with Arrive Alive’s strategy seemingly being to always do the same thing as last year’s holiday season except with “trying harder”, while largely ignoring day-to-day traffic offences.<p>Due to the high chance of being caught for transgressions, Australians tend to way more often stick to the rules of the road, while over here there is horrendous amount of (to put it politely) shenanigans happening almost all the time.<p>And the impact of this difference in discipline shows in the above stats.<p>Years ago now, but my now wife spent 10 days in intensive care after a minibus taxi driving on the wrong side of the road head on collided into the car she was a passenger in. My wife was fortunately in a car with good safety features and had a medical aid plan allowing her to receive some of the best care possible in the country, but I’m doubtful that the mini bus taxi passengers (who tend to be in the poor class of the population) sent to public hospitals received care anywhere near as good, I think I heard after this article [1] was published that two people died.<p>Perhaps road accidents, or at least fatalities, can be reduced more than you realize.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.citizen.co.za/northcliff-melville-times/222787/20-people-injured-in-taxi-collision/" rel="nofollow">https://www.citizen.co.za/northcliff-melville-times/222787/2...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:33:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089546</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089546</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089546</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Where I am from, organised political movements are not a factor of teen pregnancy and were not the least bit in my mind when I made my statement.<p>And my two examples are completely arbitrary because my point applies to pretty much any problem which would be solved by people being “more careful”.<p>So, political/religious elements aside, teen pregnancy and road safety are the same in terms of “if people were just more disciplined, there would not be these problems” (i.e. if teens who have easy access to contraceptives planned ahead before giving into impulsiveness; if drivers were more attentive to their behaviour), which I then pointed out is naive because the reality is that people aren’t perfect, they aren’t always disciplined, we’re all only human.<p>Hence, we need other solutions to help with problems which don’t require ignoring that people are only human and lack perfect discipline.<p>I agree that some organised movements can be a problem in that they can make other problems worse.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:50:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49088248</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49088248</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49088248</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You could say the same about teen pregnancy being a practically solved problem, except there is still the problem of teen pregnancy. Or even something more mundane as driving consistently safely all the time to solve the problem of accidents.<p>If everyone was disciplined all the time in regard to everything, many problems in the world would simply not exist. But we live in reality where for whatever reason, people don't know to do something, or they do know and they're just not disciplined, or they make a mistake due to extenuating circumstances. And I would expect that the vast majority of people would oppose any idea of somehow punitively "dealing with" people who get some things wrong.<p>So I would say that it's very evidently not a practically solved problem, because if it were we wouldn't be looking to solve it still.<p>Within this reality, a vaccine is a great additional tool at solving the problem of preventing the spread of HIV.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:34:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084571</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084571</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084571</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[First wave power plant receives DNV certification]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.heise.de/en/news/World-s-first-wave-power-plant-receives-DNV-certification-11373440.html">https://www.heise.de/en/news/World-s-first-wave-power-plant-receives-DNV-certification-11373440.html</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034010">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034010</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:25:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.heise.de/en/news/World-s-first-wave-power-plant-receives-DNV-certification-11373440.html</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034010</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034010</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "For most US drivers, EVs offer emissions benefits and cost savings"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You seem to be in the ICE enthusiast category, which is likely a minority of car owners.<p>For most people though, if they are buying a car it's because they can't practically get by without one, so things like "soul" and "character" of the car are irrelevant and actually an anti-feature if it makes the car cost more to own than an EV option which does the job perfectly well and is possibly even better in terms of features and comfort at the same TCO.<p>A bit like the unfortunate decision of Sony deciding to discontinue physical PlayStation discs was likely inevitable based on the market clearly preferring to move away from them [0], I suspect it's inevitable that sales of EVs will ultimately completely dwarf, if not entirely replace, ICE cars. If the range issue is solved (admittedly not a certainty), ICE cars could become relegated to usage only by enthusiasts like yourself and once the last generation who grew up with ICEs dies out, will probably be as common as a horse drawn cart.<p>[0]: <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/matpiscatella.bsky.social/post/3mrd2dzqyvk2l" rel="nofollow">https://bsky.app/profile/matpiscatella.bsky.social/post/3mrd...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:35:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033148</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033148</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033148</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "Code mode yields a 99.2% cost reduction in our systems"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We ultimately switched to this approach with great success for our own product. We stumbled on its success a little by chance.<p>We have a visual designer and for LLMs to interact with it we originally built a tool per manipulation operation type (e.g. add, edit, delete item - for various item types).<p>We actually already had a JavaScript API with corresponding .d.ts file for scripting inside our product and one of our clients asked that we also expose this as an MCP tool. I figured sure, should be quite quick and easy, and with Claude Code's help I managed to do it in a single afternoon.<p>We then found that the LLMs way preferred reaching for this tool, managing with it to get their tasks done with fewer mistakes along the way and in much smaller time frames.<p>After seeing this and doing some more validation (I've also read that Cloudflare article), we ditched the other tools completely and made a cheat sheet for the LLMs on how to use our API.<p>Because our API returns decent error messages including stack traces, even if the script fails the LLMs have no trouble making another script to fix their mistake and carrying on from where the error occurred.<p>In hindsight it really was hardly surprising as LLMs are already aiming to be as good as possible at coding and with JS being so popular I imagine it's particularly good at it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:02:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020229</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020229</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020229</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jonathanlydall in "Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do many people use Firefox on 50" 8K TVs as opposed to regular monitors? I wouldn't want such a large display on a computer unless the computer is being used as media server. And my experience when I got new monitors for work about 18 months ago, was that decent ones at higher than 1440p were more expensive than I felt was worth it.<p>Also, I expect one or more of the following from a 50" 8K TV at that price:<p>- Bundled with ad/spyware.<p>- Poor image and/or sound quality.<p>- Doesn’t last long, or image quality very noticeably degrades after a relatively short amount of use.<p>I also wonder if perhaps it’s still like back when HD was still new, where TVs would advertise “Full HD”, but were actually only referring to being able to accept a 1080p input signal which they would then downscale to their <720p LCD panels.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:17:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48994363</link><dc:creator>jonathanlydall</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48994363</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48994363</guid></item></channel></rss>