Hacker News: yawaramin

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:58:44 +0000

1a & b. Sure, but you wouldn't know that ahead of time. You'd have to wait until they finished the app.

2. It was enforced, just at a higher level (expensive fines triggered by customer complaints). A good engineer broke down and actually applied the constraints in a preventative way.

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:55:47 +0000

Also possible to just ignore interaction patterns that don't work well with HTML and replace them with ones that do.

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:24:23 +0000

I actually like the built-in stuff and the Constraint Validation API. I wrote about using it with htmx: https://dev.to/yawaramin/handling-form-errors-in-htmx-3ncg

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:21:03 +0000

How good are you at hammering nails with a screwdriver? Tools are important. We have a more apropos saying in our industry: use the right tool for the job. Don't let your brain get fried by the 'poor workman' adage, it's talking about the difference between an expensive tool and a cheap tool of the same kind, not two tools of different kinds entirely.

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:44:22 +0000

From The Article

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:51:13 +0000

FTA: 'To apply for their services, customers could either use an old ASP form on the website, or follow a manual process.'

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:49:33 +0000

No, it's actually people. FTA: 'My client was a utility company, and they had a big problem. To apply for their services, customers could either use an old ASP form on the website...'

Ie customers of the utility company were completing the form, not random users from the internet.

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:45:43 +0000

Doubling conversions, in digital marketing-speak. Marketing firms probably give out fat bonuses for this kind of result.

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:43:29 +0000

Also allows user scripts to interact with the forms, eg I can run a bookmarklet to fill out certain forms. With React controlled components all these changes are wiped out and reset with the state that React has in its app memory.

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:39:35 +0000

None of the increased traffic was from AI agents. FTA: 'The results? When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled.'

All completions were real people. It's a government website.

New comment by yawaramin in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yawaramin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:36:23 +0000

1. Presumably the team that made the previous app also thought they knew what they were doing. Presumably they were not hired on the assumption that they couldn't make a good app.

2. The design constraints had always existed, the previous app just failed to meet them.

New comment by yawaramin in "OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system"

yawaramin — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 03:09:16 +0000

I'd rather not have to maintain lists of source files to compile by hand; dune eliminates this drudge work.

New comment by yawaramin in "OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system"

yawaramin — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:40:31 +0000

The OCaml ecosystem tried the Make route, it was complex, turns out no one likes maintaining makefiles by hand, and they like opaque make rules even less. Like it or not, dune exists for a very good reason.

New comment by yawaramin in "Show HN: Nutrepedia – Nutrition info in 29 locales built with Clojure and Htmx"

yawaramin — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:56:34 +0000

Yeah, unfortunately, looks like they're `

`. This is exactly what I tell everyone to avoid in htmx: https://dev.to/yawaramin/why-hx-boost-is-actually-the-most-i...

New comment by yawaramin in "Show HN: Nutrepedia – Nutrition info in 29 locales built with Clojure and Htmx"

yawaramin — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:49:52 +0000

Hello, nice work. I recommend running Chrome's built-in Lighthouse analysis tool specifically for accessibility. It will make some very helpful suggestions, like img alt text and colour contrast issues. One example that I eyeballed is the search bar–the background colour is pink and the text colour is yellow. Kinda hard to read :-)

New comment by yawaramin in "World Passkey Day: Advancing passwordless authentication"

yawaramin — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:25:11 +0000

Passkeys don’t lock you into anything.

New comment by yawaramin in "Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS"

yawaramin — Sun, 17 May 2026 04:43:36 +0000

> With CSS names are global.

Not necessarily. Nested selectors make it pretty easy to apply styles in a modularized way. See https://rstacruz.github.io/rscss/

New comment by yawaramin in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

yawaramin — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:57:09 +0000

What does 'marker of affinity toward precision' mean?

New comment by yawaramin in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

yawaramin — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:57:38 +0000

But they're not entitled to their own facts.

New comment by yawaramin in "Post Mortem: axios NPM supply chain compromise"

yawaramin — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 03:16:20 +0000

No, it really doesn't scale that well. 'Thousands' of packages is laughable compared to the scale of npm. And even at the 'thousands' scale distros are often laughably out of date because they're so slow to update their packages.

You are of course right that a signed package ecosystem would be great, it's just that you're asking people to do this labour for you for free. If you pay some third party to verify and sign packages for you? That's totally fine. Asking maintainers already under tremendous pressure to do yet another labour-intensive security task so you can benefit for free? That's out of balance.

Are they incapable of doing it? Probably not. Does it take real labour and effort to do it? Absolutely.