Hacker News: jrimbault

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?

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

jrimbault — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 13:35:36 +0000

I saw that, but anyone can link to anything. Luckily on mozilla.org there's a link to mozilla.ai, so that legitimizes it a bit. But that is not obvious.

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

jrimbault — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:07:28 +0000

Sorry, dumb question: is "mozilla.ai" related to "mozilla.org" and to the larger Mozilla organization? Because changing the tld makes this actually non-obvious. I see "mozilla.ai" and I think "someone is trying to phish".

New comment by jrimbault in "Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns"

jrimbault — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:06:11 +0000

Except a lot of actual, very smart, economists are for UBI or similar arrangements (it's not a settled matter). And geohot might be smart, but he's just a self described hacker.

If we're going to use authority arguments.

New comment by jrimbault in "The state of the kernel Rust experiment"

jrimbault — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 07:40:58 +0000

In C this kind of issue is so common it wouldn't raise to the status of "CVE". People would just shrug and say "git gud".

New comment by jrimbault in "What will enter the public domain in 2026?"

jrimbault — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:01:24 +0000

When the "classics" were decided to be "the classics" (by who? why? on what authority?) a lot of them were newer than Mickey Mouse is today.

New comment by jrimbault in "[dead]"

jrimbault — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 13:22:35 +0000

The quotes aren't in the original title:

> Two US marines implicated in killing family in notorious Iraq war shooting, expert tells BBC

New comment by jrimbault in "You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here"

jrimbault — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 10:11:24 +0000

I used to.

New comment by jrimbault in "What Is Complexity in Chess?"

jrimbault — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 12:39:00 +0000

Thanks for the first link it's really fun game :)

I've been playing lots on OGS (with my friend in particular), under my pseudonym erelde