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franciscop

12,640 karma · joined August 27, 2014

I love Javascript and Open Source. Studied Industrial Engineering but now working and living in Tokyo.

https://francisco.io/

https://github.com/franciscop

submissionscomments
franciscop··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
I just wrapped up https://llmrender.com/, a tiny (10kb) Markdown to React renderer works with all of the Markdown + LaTeX math you'd normally expect in a normal project.

I made it because doing one of the mainstream Markdown renderers + Katex (LaTeX) + Prism.js (syntax highlight) adds 300kb of gzipped JS to the frontend projects, so with this you can have it all for just 10kb. It also works well with streaming/does stable partial rendering.

It supports features usually reserved for LLM chatbots, but also for normal everyday Markdown, so feel free to use it or give feedback!

franciscop··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
No well was built since there was no permit. That's it, end of the story.
franciscop··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
Sorry if it was not clear, this is about Spain/EU enforcement in Spain vs EU enforcement in Morocco, where we import tons of fruits from. I think it's plenty obvious that the enforcement level will be different at the source.

Edit: I've asked that myself multiple times. There's also some stubbornness there as well TBF.

franciscop··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
Because it's fields+trees that have been there for decades, and even if there's no profit few years, it still pays for the salaries of the workers and expenses of maintaining the fields. If you stop it, things die and then it's more expensive to restart.
franciscop··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
No, this is definitely an official gvmt body that can fine you if you try to sell fruit as organic that doesn't follow the regulations. It IS definitely compulsory if you mark your produce as organic.
franciscop··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
I know someone close who grows oranges in Spain. He has to go through hell, had to rework multiple times the fields so that they pass the strict Spanish regulation for organic produce. They get evaluated not only on the final product being pesticide free, but also on the full process being compliant, with heavy fines for non compliance.

This is fine-ish, except that the imported oranges get checked only seldomly (if that) and are given a lot of leeway, making it very hard to compete if you grow them locally. Last couple of years saw some profit for growing them locally, but it's been times where there was literally no profit at all for 5+ years.

Funny story: he requested a permit to build a well, and ofc it takes forever so he just waited. After 4-5 years waiting, having even forgotten about it, someone called him: "we're here to inspect the well". What well? You haven't given me permission yet. "yes, we know, but people build them anyway before getting permission so we thought you'd do the same".

franciscop··on Spanish traders set the standard for GnuCash database design
Yes, my historical understanding is definitely that it could be split into two easily, not that we counted with our fingers skipping the thumb (Spaniard here).
franciscop··on Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged
It seems it was an experiment at that moment, and that it went well? I do hope they release it under 2.x though, cannot imagine how a 1M LoC can break in so many ways, especially if what xiphias says is true:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132902

franciscop··on I’ve banned query strings
Thanks for removing the rest on that google link, the one I get after switching to "images" and back to "web" is this monstrosity:

https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&sca_esv=8061bd9cb1...

Edit: which luckily and sensibly Hacker News cuts short since it's 463 characters

franciscop··on CARA 2.0 – “I Built a Better Robot Dog”
Look at the original video/article, they used drone motors for the robot dog, by reusing the rotor/stator and rewinding the coils manually.
franciscop··on Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers
I was just reflecting on what I saw/thought! But sure, take it as a compliment, the website and branding are amazing, I'm (positively) jealous of how good they reflect on the product, congrats.
franciscop··on Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers
As I'm writing a small markdown renderer, I find it difficult to even find a name for it, let alone get people to use it once it's ready. So I guess the ol' Markdown is too standard for a "plain markdown" editor to stand out today. Only tools that are polished and dare-I-say full of features beyond normal markdown can stand out from normal Markdown editors to make it into the front page of HN. Sort of natural selection I guess.
franciscop··on Building a JavaScript runtime in one month
Not the blog article author, I just saw an interesting article and posted it here. But I can answer the first question, there's 3 major ways I can think of:

- Read the specification in-depth and understand it well.

- Just testing, if you know JavaScript you can test it in other runtimes, create tests around the methods and then you know how it works well. This is usually more for edge cases though, like what happens if you mutate the 3rd argument of Array.map?

- Look at other implementation's internals, as you said.

franciscop··on Protect your shed
When I push myself to do these things, it loses all meaning. I do fun programming because it's fun, when I tried pushing myself like this virtually always I ended up more tired (for a miryad of reasons). And if I need to push myself, I'd rather just learn more Japanese, or do some exercise, or something else. But when I have like 1-2 weeks holiday, I will for sure sneak a few full coding days in there, and that is liberating.
franciscop··on Protect your shed
I did this for ~10 years, and absolutely no regrets, it was a lot of fun and the side projects gave me energy.

Nowadays it's hard though, learning a new language, with a gf and a full-time demanding job, I don't have a lot of time to be tinkering. I do feel a bit sad about this but just assumed it's just life, and cannot imagine with kids how impossible this'd be.

I did look at doing some basic housekeeping with LLMs (updating deps, standardize testing across projects, etc) and realized I have literally 200+ side projects, most of them websites/JS libraries/React libraries. I was a bit baffled, of course 80% of it is trash, but I was kind of amazed at how many things I've actually done.

franciscop··on Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
Strongly agree! I was answering my parent comment that had a very negative view, it is indeed an amazing situation where' in!
franciscop··on Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
Do you think e.g. the AI/LLM boom is all rent seeking? Do you think there's no positive value for the world on the recently announced e.g. MacBook Neo and that it's purely a monopolistic activity? Those are 2 clear recent examples of big players making massive benefits for the world, and I'm okay if they get X% of that value as company valuation.
franciscop··on macOS Tahoe windows have different corner radiuses
This was one of the very few advantages of moving from Linux => MacOS, that at least most of the software was beautiful and consistent by default. I'm saddened to see that this is not true anymore. Been holding the Tahoe upgrade, and might just keep my macbook air m1 much longer than originally intended because of this.
franciscop··on Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art
The book can say anything it wants, whenever it's true and/or applicable in court later on is a very different matter. Spain's SGAE is a very powerful lobby but still needs to follow the law.

Edit: haven't followed the law in a while, but you could definitely copy, digitalize and scan documents for yourself and your friends (copia privada).

franciscop··on Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art
"If it took all the fossil fuel on Earth" What do you mean? To TRAIN an LLM model it takes roughly the same amount of energy as to raise a person, so it's not even really expensive in energy costs.
franciscop··on MacBook Neo
* Max storage is 512GB instead of 4TB.

I currently have 1TB and I'm pretty happy with it, but I've had 256GB and 512GB in the past and I was not happy with those. This might be the only reason I would not consider this laptop.

franciscop··on Moldova broke our data pipeline
This very clearly seems like a bug either in their DMS script, or in the DMS job that they don't directly control, since CSV clearly allows for escaping commas (by just quoting them). Would love to see a bug report being submitted upstream as well as part of the "fix".
franciscop··on AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
The blog post was 404ing for me, it seems to be this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260211225255/https://crabby-ra...

franciscop··on How to make a living as an artist
I've seen too many times in real life people who do arts and want to try to sell it not understand that once you switch from a hobby to a business, you need to spend at least 50% of your time on the business/marketing/logistics/etc side of things, hence failing miserably. The best possible outcome that I've seen is that they miraculously hit a nerve on the first hit, become famous, and at some point realize they need to pay taxes and do so in a decent timeframe.

So I found this article great to explain those things, and also how it's not just "you", but it's "the part of you that people need to buy" to make it into an actual business the thing that it's important. I'll be sharing it a bunch, I'm so happy fnnch wrote this!

franciscop··on AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
I've seen some discussions and I'd say there's lots of people who are really against the hyped expectations from the AI marketing materials, not necessarily against the AI itself. Things that people are against that would seem to be against AI, but are not directly against AI itself:

- Being forced to use AI at work

- Being told you need to be 2x, 5x or 10x more efficient now

- Seeing your coworkers fired

- Seeing hiring freeze because business think no more devs are needed

- Seeing business people make a mock UI with AI and boasting how programming is easy

- Seeing those people ask you to deliver in impossible timelines

- Frontend people hearing from backend how their job is useless now

- Backend people hearing from ML Engineers how their job is useless now

- etc

When I dig a bit about this "anti-AI" trend I find it's one of those and not actually against the AI itself.

franciscop··on An Update on Heroku
I loved Heroku, but moved away a couple of years back. Tried 3 major "alternatives" (dokku, Render, Fly.io), and the big clouds, and the only thing that made me happy at the end was Coolify. I do keep Netlify for FE-only projects though.
franciscop··on Nova Launcher added Facebook and Google Ads tracking
Please update here if you find any good alternative? I'm stuck in the same place
franciscop··on Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)
Yes, but I didn't read the full file, I kept the File reference and read the bytes in pages of 10MB IIRC to find all of the line break offsets. Then used those to slice and only read the relevant parts.
franciscop··on Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)
I have a funny story I need to tell some day about how I could get a 4GB JSON loaded purely in the browser at some insane speed, by reading the bytes, identifying the "\n" then making a lookup table. It started low stakes but ended up becoming a multi-million internal project (in man-hours) that virtually everyone on the company used. It's the kind of project that if started "big" from the beginning, I'd bet anything it wouldn't have gotten so far.

Edit: I did try JSON.parse() first, which I expected to fail and it did fail BUT it's important that you try anyway.

franciscop··on GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
I was going to comment exactly the same thing, thanks for expressing it so well and here's my upvote. I think part of why I wanted to comment the same, is that for me this IS exactly the reason I make open source! It is my gift for everyone, please use it well.

I do think it would be nice to get paid anything at all, but that wouldn't change at all how I do things/release code. In fact, unless it'd be really no-strings-attached, I'd prefer to keep the current arrangement than being paid a pittance per month and then have extra obligations.

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