Hacker News: jvillasante

New comment by jvillasante in "A key remapping daemon for Linux"

jvillasante — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:51:14 +0000

I've used `keyd` in the past and found it to be very fast and good. I have moved to `xremap` since, as an Emacs user being able to do this https://github.com/xremap/xremap/blob/master/example/emacs.y... make everything much much better.

Can something like that be done with `keyd`?

New comment by jvillasante in "The vi family"

jvillasante — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:00:31 +0000

I use Emacs but these days I spend so much time in the terminal that I'm seriously thinking going back to (N)Vim + Tmux combo. Emacs just feels so slow and complex when you are SSHing into multiple servers while running multiple AIs... I should go read that Vim book everybody recommends!

New comment by jvillasante in "Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)"

jvillasante — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:10:14 +0000

For those souls loosing their skills to the easiest to adopt technology ever created... agentic development works for him because he KNOWS what he is doing in the first place!

New comment by jvillasante in "Modern Common Lisp with FSet"

jvillasante — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:45:37 +0000

I think the website is weird to navigate. "Next" links go to top-level headers instead of the "logical" next. For example, if I'm on "1.1 Fset Tutorial" clicking "Next" takes me to "1.2 Using Fset" instead of "1.1.1 The Major FSet Types".

At a conceptual level, do these data-structures store what in other languages would be pointers and so every access would mean paying for the pointer indirection or do they store objects themselves and they are cache friendly data-structures?

New comment by jvillasante in "Claude Code Cheat Sheet"

jvillasante — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:52:34 +0000

Isn't this going to be stale in a week? Can you just tell Calude Code to generate a cheat sheet of itself?

New comment by jvillasante in "Honda is killing its EVs"

jvillasante — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:17:58 +0000

That article reads like a 5 years old wrote it. In particular the part that says "software-defined vehicles is sweeping the automobile industry" and going further by saying "this is what consumers want and expect".

Yeah, if you're 5 and you want to keep paying subscriptions for a car you already bought! Not to mention software failures, over the air updates, hacking, etc

These tech writers (or bros) need to be replaced by AI or something, total disconnection with reality and what a car is for most people (e.g. it's not a computer and it should be mostly about reliability than anything else).

New comment by jvillasante in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

jvillasante — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:21:50 +0000

Exactly my thought! I guess I'll keep Firefox for the foreseeable future...

New comment by jvillasante in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

jvillasante — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:19:12 +0000

> We’ve been searching for a memory-safe programming language to replace C++ in Ladybird for a while now.

The article fails to explain why. What problems (besides the obvious) have been found in which "memory-safe languages" can help. Do these problems actually explain the need of adding complexity to a project like this by adding another language?

I guess AI will be involved which, at this early point in the project would make ladybird a lot less interested (at least to me).

New comment by jvillasante in "Show HN: AI Timeline – 171 LLMs from Transformer (2017) to GPT-5.3 (2026)"

jvillasante — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:11:29 +0000

Why is it hard in the times where AI itself can do it to add a light mode to those blacks websites!? There are people that just can't read dark mode!

New comment by jvillasante in "My AI Adoption Journey"

jvillasante — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 11:15:04 +0000

This are all valid points and a hype-free pragmatic take, I've been wondering about the same things even when I'm still in the skeptics side. I think there are other things that should be added since Mitchell's reality won't apply to everyone:

- What about non opensource work that's not on Github?

- Costs! I would think "an agent always running" would add up quickly

- In open source work, how does it amplify others. Are you seeing AI Slop as PRs? Can you tell the difference?

New comment by jvillasante in "In Zig, what's a writer?"

jvillasante — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 21:48:22 +0000

It seems to me that Zig is a language that has been hacked together as opposed to designed carefully. What a mess around such a simple concept!

New comment by jvillasante in "Please don't force dark mode"

jvillasante — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 22:37:09 +0000

The only reason I have started to use `eww` in Emacs to "read the web" is because people pushing those amounts of dark on everybody, it has become unbearable!

New comment by jvillasante in "Zig: What to Expect from Release Month"

jvillasante — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 18:14:01 +0000

Yes, but isn't that an implementation detail? Shouldn't they prioritize getting to 1.0 (the language itself) and then work in implementation details like that? I mean, It's a monumental task to write compiler and linker from scratch!

New comment by jvillasante in "Zig: What to Expect from Release Month"

jvillasante — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:28:57 +0000

Well, I use C++ for that today and don't see much benefit in switching really. Switching to a memory-safe language is something that I can support and even sell to my team, but switching to just a "simpler" language I'm not sure...

New comment by jvillasante in "Zig: What to Expect from Release Month"

jvillasante — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:27:13 +0000

I kind of agree but my main language is actually C++ (I know, don't hate me) and, wherever C is a target I just use C++ :)

New comment by jvillasante in "Zig: What to Expect from Release Month"

jvillasante — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:25:41 +0000

What does incremental compilation have to do with writing your own compiler from scratch? Isn't Rust supports incremental compilation as does every language out there?

New comment by jvillasante in "Zig: What to Expect from Release Month"

jvillasante — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 14:50:25 +0000

I've been trying to understand what Zig place is in the world so I can learn more about it. I like the idea of simplicity in programming languages but, other than that and since there's Go already, what is the proposition here?

In particular:

- LLVM is not enough, let's write our own compiler.

- Interfaces are an overhead, use comptime instead or roll your own vtables.

- In a world where "memory unsafe" languages are under attack... yeah, we don't care about that.

I'm not trolling, this are serious questions from afar that I would love to figure out before investing time with Zig.

New comment by jvillasante in "C++ Safety, in Context"

jvillasante — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 12:28:07 +0000

While other communities are already taking direct steps towards safety, the C++ community is still trying to define what safety means. I think it's funny and sad at the same time!

I didn't read the article (just browse it) but here's the TLDR from the article itself:

``` tl;dr: I don’t want C++ to limit what I can express efficiently. I just want C++ to let me enforce our already-well-known safety rules and best practices by default, and make me opt out explicitly if that’s what I want. Then I can still use fully modern C++… just nicer. ```

As is normal in C++, the defaults are wrong. Developers should "opt in" for unsafe instead of "opt out" of it!

New comment by jvillasante in "A Modern C Development Environment"

jvillasante — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 12:22:09 +0000

I agree about devcontainers. Now you are pushing everyone in the team to use vscode which is bad on its own. I think docker is fine, but I mostly try to stay away from any project that even mentions vscode (an editor should not be part of any project IMO).

New comment by jvillasante in "Ask HN: Any good black Friday deals?"

jvillasante — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 16:37:35 +0000

Not The Pragmatic Programmer :(