HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dwb

1,264 karma · joined January 2, 2012

they/them
submissionscomments
dwb··on Data centers trigger voter backlash
You are using the same logic as those who kept the franchise restricted to the property-owning class. Parent is rightly mocking you for it.
dwb··on Ask HN: Anthropic banned me from using Claude Code and I don't know what to do
Sorry, no, but I’ve been using the latest DeepSeek model for personal stuff and it’s pretty good, way cheaper, and can be used in Claude Code directly.
dwb··on I built Ponytrail, a local audit trail for AI coding-agent edits
I get enough of this with a pre/post tool hook that takes a jj snapshot and teaching the agent about `jj evolog`.
dwb··on Aikido Code Audit
I hope it’s an improvement on their current PR review code scanning, which alerts on code that only looks possibly vulnerable in isolation, without looking at the context. I guess I assumed it was an LLM being extremely lazy, but maybe it’s just static analysis. Anyway it’s pretty annoying.
dwb··on Commodore Releases Flip Phone
Only? It was half your comment. The point is that the amount of "real use" (I think we can all guess at a good-enough definition) of a phone without WhatsApp in a country where it's pervasive is not enough for most people. And what do you mean by "maps exist"? Paper maps?
dwb··on The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)
We're talking about governmental document-like websites with relatively simple forms here, not your particular legacy web app, there is no excuse for not getting them right. Gov.UK did. Plain HTML, used in a straight-forward way that is very clear from the approachable documentation on, say, MDN, is already responsive, readily consumable by screen readers, and works with any backend that already exists. If you have to fix a mess left by someone else you have my sympathy - I've been there too. But the original post is appealing to people who have a choice between plain, standard-use HTML, and any alternatives. And yes, I'm all for much harsher penalties for private companies that produce inaccessible web sites/apps too.
dwb··on MicroUI – A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C
The point of a UI library is to interface with users. If it totally fails to interface with a subset of users then it is obviously deficient to some degree. It is callous and foolish to dismiss offhand users who rely on assistive technologies. You probably have a poor idea of who they are and how many people we’re talking about. You never know when you or someone you care about will become one of them, even temporarily. You never know how far your software will reach when you write it.
dwb··on Commodore Releases Flip Phone
You are not a representative user, at least in a country where WhatsApp is dominant.
dwb··on The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)
Sorry, I don’t buy it. There’s nothing “expert-tier” about plain accessible HTML, and with LLMs, there’s even less excuse. I’m not primarily a frontend web engineer and I can manage it.
dwb··on The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)
My point is that websites are particularly amenable to being cheaply built in a fast and accessible way. I would say classes of, say, macOS apps are similar. Government certainly should be insulated from at least the market pressures that push websites into being slow and inaccessible. Competence is more a roll of the dice, I’ll grant you, but I’m not as pessimistic as you on that.
dwb··on The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)
There are types of software for which I’d largely agree with you. Websites are not one of them: it takes effort or incompetence to make them slow and inaccessible.
dwb··on Meta’s chaotic AI strategy
Maybe some of us direct our curiosity in more worthwhile directions, and have already figured out our worldview with regard to situations like this.
dwb··on The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)
You are either refusing to address the central point or your reading comprehension needs a lot of work. A premise of your original post was that libraries have newer devices than some users. I maintain that libraries should not have to be a fallback for your crappy website.
dwb··on The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)
Public libraries are great and there should be a lot more of them and everyone should enjoy them, but they should absolutely not be a substitute for respectful, accessible web design and engineering. The elitism is that only people with the shiniest new devices should get to use your website on their terms.
dwb··on The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)
What a depressingly elitist and exclusionary view. The modern web browser contains all the technology right there to make fast, maximally-accessible websites and even some “app”-like things, but nah you can’t be bothered, screw the less-fortunate. Would you want to “just go to a library” instead of use the device you already have? I strongly doubt it.
dwb··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
Totally wrong, re-read the article. React requires JavaScript, which the new page doesn’t. That’s a strict accessibility improvement. (And I’m not a React hater!)
dwb··on Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
What? Almost everyone who has a Mac uses macOS.
dwb··on Port React Compiler to Rust
Implementation details matter! Especially when reviewing the implementation.
dwb··on Claude Fable 5
The Economist is very much part of the establishment, whoever they are owned by. It is not surprising that they would want to play down any idea that the UK is less “democratic”. Furthermore, The Economist is one of the main mouthpieces of British capitalism, and so their definition of “democracy” is going to be very much of the liberal, capital-friendly kind, which is not completely incompatible with some authoritarian tendencies.
dwb··on Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world
> The latest frontier models will write code better than you and more elegant

They often do, but they often don’t. I regularly have to push for more elegant, or less lazy solutions.

dwb··on 4K years ago, Mohenjo-daro grew more equal over time
> Someone was obviously "in charge" lol

I don’t find that obvious from what you’ve described. Agreeing on weights and measures is well within plausibility of a society where power was pretty evenly distributed. I don’t remember Graeber and Wengrow describing it as a stateless utopia, they were a lot more academic than their detractors suggest in the usual caricatures. Is there any more evidence you’ve read about that supports this conclusion?

dwb··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
I knew you were speaking more technically about economic efficiency, but what does that matter when the real processes are often so inefficient? Or when it results in so many bad outcomes?

I won’t be taking “writing tips” from you; my words are an expression, not pure calculated rhetoric. I never thought I was going to change your mind, I wanted you to face a teeny tiny bit of resistance.

Expressing an opinion and making observations is not arrogance. I said “I think” and “I’m against”, I never claimed any virtue, I didn’t brag, and I didn’t tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. According to me, I just have a view about part of the way the world works, that’s it. Reading tip: get better at it.

dwb··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
Hilarious; such ugly arrogance. Of course it “works” to the extent that you describe, otherwise we wouldn’t be in exactly the situation that I’m against. Where you came from doesn’t matter at all. The system is working for you so you are for it.

You assume too much, that I am going to argue for centrally planned economies or something. I never claimed or implied I was an expert, or to what degree I’m “winning the race” (what a horrible way to think about human society!). I think it’s either an absurd failure of imagination or simple invested ideology, that we have to have either hardcore “free” markets (free for who?) or strict Soviet-style planning (typically with the assumption that we have only the knowledge and technology from that period too, for some reason). I think we can do a lot better than both.

Your impressive-sounding words about efficiency quickly fall apart for anyone who has actually looked at the dirty end of capitalist processes. Inefficiencies abound; the market optimises for only money which a lot of the time is a stupidly poor abstraction of the stuff of life that actually matters. And that abstraction enables and justifies untold cruelty and exploitation.

If you were a sort of capitalist-pessimist, saying that you didn’t like it but this seemed to be the least-worst option, I’d think you were woefully unambitious, but at least some way understandable. But you arrogantly defend this system, and brag about how your massive brain managed to exploit it. Welcome to HN, I guess.

dwb··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
Are you saying that you’re right because you’re rich? The equity of the economy is not very similar at all to a game.
dwb··on Why Japanese companies do so many different things
A CEO is not "just a really well paid worker", don't be ridiculous. If you have the power of hiring and firing, or have enough money to not have to work for your subsistence, you are not a worker in any leftist sense.
dwb··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
Yeah and a lot of far less powerful people got fucked over from the crash. Is that what a successful, functioning economy looks like to you?
dwb··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
Keep peddling that capitalist realism. “There is no alternative!” The market may not misallocate capital, by definition, but it very clearly and routinely misallocates resources. Let me guess: you’re doing relatively well for yourself?
dwb··on Coins Stream
“Sign in to play”, Google auth only - no thank you. Close tab.
dwb··on Show HN: Spec-Driven Development Workflow for Claude Code
Exactly. A detailed-enough spec is just code that you can’t run. If models and agents got to a point where doing a good job in Claude Code plan mode meant that I didn’t have to keep an eye on them in implementation, then I would be interested in some bigger spec-driven thing like this. That is still far from the case today for me.
dwb··on Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
LLM agents are also very capable of using npm and build systems, and also get the same benefits from them as humans do. For very very simple things (again, just like for humans), it may be viable. But in anything non-trivial I would be horrified with a codebase that was just LLM-spaghetti-DOM-manipulation.
← PreviousPage 3 of 20Next →