Hacker News: jrimbault

New comment by jrimbault in "Type-safe HTML templating in Zig"

jrimbault — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:11:33 +0000

New comment by jrimbault in "Why the Bronze Age Collapsed"

jrimbault — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 09:20:49 +0000

If that's 500 fighting men, that's actually a sizeable army. Especially with no supply train.

New comment by jrimbault in "Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop"

jrimbault — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:49:08 +0000

I wanted to wire an webcal/https ics link into the GNOME calendar the other day: absolutely no way to do that. There's a prominent calendar in the top bar of GNOME, and it seems no one actually uses it?

New comment by jrimbault in "Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop"

jrimbault — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:49:19 +0000

When I was on Windows there was point in time when I use Stardock's Fences, around or between 2010-2014.

Pretty nice product as I recall, lots of features to make the "Desktop" more or less dynamic. Pretty soon after I stopped using the "Desktop" entirely.

[] https://www.stardock.com/products/fences/

New comment by jrimbault in "Canada welcomes EU proposal to become 'associate member'"

jrimbault — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:38:41 +0000

Luckily states are not hormones-driven romcom protagonists.

New comment by jrimbault in "I think I hate the internet"

jrimbault — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:24:53 +0000

> People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on that drive.

We do complain about roads and infrastructure, and try to improve them so the inevitable idiot's impact is lessened.

New comment by jrimbault in "Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap"

jrimbault — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 09:02:49 +0000

Handicap Go by Nagahara Yoshiaki helped me tremendously.

I started playing I believe in March of 2025. I had the very good luck that one of my high school best friends is a 4 dan EGF player, and was in the French team 20 years ago. We played constantly against each other with 9 stones handicap and him teaching me a lot.

But when I read that book, in a few weeks/months we went from 9 stones to only 3 stones by August 2025. and we have stayed at 3 stones since, playing very even games, with only a handful or couple of points differences. Only very recently did I win by 9.5 points. Which made me hope I had made new progress, but I had to resign in the very next game.

New comment by jrimbault in "The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC"

jrimbault — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:13:24 +0000

What if I _want_ a staging area?

New comment by jrimbault in "We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility"

jrimbault — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:09:52 +0000

And even then, the "rare" qualifier is not needed here. What Amazon/LLM companies are doing is amoral. This is intellectual piracy (not in the "copyright infringement" sense) at the highest level. Stealing and centralizing the accumulation of human knowledge to eventually rob us all and put all power into the hands in the hands of a handful of people, who are not benevolent.

New comment by jrimbault in "Parsers don't have to be complicated"

jrimbault — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:57:22 +0000

Can you feel the irony when typing this? "Simple readable C code" itself not being able to be parsed by "simple readable C code".

New comment by jrimbault in "An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan"

jrimbault — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:25:13 +0000

Athena/PTSD-girl being the only Trojan with a face doesn't dismiss that affirmation, only reinforces it. And she writes about her in another paragraph.

New comment by jrimbault in "An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan"

jrimbault — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:22:51 +0000

It's not controversial. It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world. There has been some critics* of her translation among classicists, but not _controversies_.

*: which is only natural, that's their job to criticize each others' translations

New comment by jrimbault in "An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan"

jrimbault — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:20:03 +0000

How do you get 'roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"' from this critique? Nowhere does she say something vaguely like that.

New comment by jrimbault in "Good Tools Are Invisible"

jrimbault — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:03:06 +0000

Having designed a good number of internal tools for teams of developers I couldn't agree more.

Earlier I had the tendency to "leave the guts" open, thinking my users were developers and would want that. All it did was put obstacles in my teammates actually doing their work. My teammates must use the tools I made for them to achieve work the company needs them to do, they don't want, nor should they want to, fiddle with a little tool they won't find anywhere else.

I still leave a lot of escape hatches, but I try to design the internal tools in such way as to make the users fall into a pit of success.

Edit: also, error messages, error messages, error messages and auto suggestions for common errors

Edit 2: also the number of people only addressing the examples in the post rather than the spirit of the post is... disappointing.

New comment by jrimbault in "A better way to tie your gym shorts. (Or any drawstring) [video]"

jrimbault — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:58:32 +0000

I love how new people keep discovering Ian's website (cf the xkcd 1053). It's a really well made website, the pictures and animations are very well chosen to explain knots and lacing.

New comment by jrimbault in "Why did this journal retract two 1940s papers by Max Planck?"

jrimbault — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:40:40 +0000

I notice how the title by Ars Technica is much less baity than Nature: "Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?" vs "Why did this journal retract two 1940s papers by Max Planck?"

New comment by jrimbault in "I don't chain everything in JavaScript anymore"

jrimbault — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:17:58 +0000

Note that for little while now lazy iterators have been available:

- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

- Array.prototype.values https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

This addresses a few criticisms here, and the main criticisms I had.

New comment by jrimbault in "The purist's guide to phở in Hanoi"

jrimbault — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:43:07 +0000

Cheekily, might not the "purist" want a "pot-au-feu" ? (i have a sincere dislike of purity talk, especially in cookery)

The article mentions it, but doesn't disprove it.

New comment by jrimbault in "Claude Design"

jrimbault — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:08:05 +0000

> Of course, there is indeed no shame. There is also no pride.

But there's is "pride" in making tools people actually use without issue

New comment by jrimbault in "Show HN: Cq – Stack Overflow for AI coding agents"

jrimbault — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:02:18 +0000

Couldn't you have used a subdomain "ai.mozilla.org" rather than a new tld? I'm guessing some marketing executives got involved?