Hacker News Reader

jakelazaroffon CSS-Tricks in Limbo

The label pretty obviously fits in this case though? No one is calling DHH racist as some sort of slur; they're just describing his system of beliefs.

jakelazaroffon Your intellectual fly is open (2025)

What is the charitable interpretation? I am not being coy or sarcastic here; it is genuinely (forgive the claude-ism) unclear to me what your arguments are.

jakelazaroffon Omarchy: 1Password and 37signals become Distinguished Corporate Patrons

"DHH's politics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. He has most recently called for citizens of western countries to be expelled on the basis of race. So while it's not exactly symmetrical, the people objecting to companies funding his project are not the only ones using their speech to put pressure on others.

jakelazaroffon Omarchy: 1Password and 37signals become Distinguished Corporate Patrons

> If the former, grow up and accept that the time of slavishly following the narrative is coming to an end, that free speech means people are free to voice their own thoughts and that you not agreeing is interesting only to you.

Consider taking your own advice here? Free speech means people are also free to object when other people with whom they disagree politically receive corporate funding. And likewise, you not agreeing with them is only interesting to you.

jakelazaroffon What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

As a New Jersey native (the single remaining state that still mandates gas station attendants) I have spent my entire life convinced this is sour grapes from other states. Why would you want to leave your warm cozy car in the winter to pump your gas?!

jakelazaroffon You don't need React: creating a minimal UI library in Vanilla JavaScript

I have no idea where this meme comes from. They're all just websites! Plenty of "web applications" make more sense as server-rendered Django or Phoenix apps than they do client-rendered React apps.

jakelazaroffon You don't need React: creating a minimal UI library in Vanilla JavaScript

> The only potential issue with immediate mode is performance, since we need to re-render the entire UI on every state change.

Notice that in the task list example, if you leave some text in the input and check off a task, your text will be erased.

If we could truly treat the DOM as an immediate-mode UI, there would be no need for React/Preact/ Svelte/Solid/etc. But it turns out there are a fair number of quirks like this that preclude such simple replacements from working correctly.

(That said: I am all for experiments like this for learning, or for fun, or to try out unexplored framework design space!)

jakelazaroffon Building on ATProto

atproto permissioned data [1] will solve the dilemma you're describing. Ultimately all the data is in the same place (your PDS) and you can always read and write any data there. If startup A goes away, startup B can read that old data and do something useful with it.

[1] https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/blob/main/0016-p...

jakelazaroffon New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices

Doing bad things is bad and people don't get a free pass just because someone is giving them money for it.

jakelazaroffon Spain Orders Blacklist of Palantir from Public and Private Companies

Au contraire, their lobbying efforts are focused on creating regulatory moats around their businesses: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/17/regulate-facebook/

jakelazaroffon Spain Orders Blacklist of Palantir from Public and Private Companies

I was specifically responding to this claim:

> Google and Facebook absolutely changed the world, not through politics, but by creating technology.

But it sounds like we're on the same page that they did change the world in part through politics?

jakelazaroffon Spain Orders Blacklist of Palantir from Public and Private Companies

If that were the case, then why do they spend millions of dollars on lobbying every year? Why does Meta have a "president of global affairs" plucked from Republican political circles? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kaplan

jakelazaroffon You might not need a service worker

While working on a small atproto OAuth client I discovered a neat service worker pattern that I don't think I've ever seen someone write about. The page makes normal fetch requests, and the service worker adds the authorization header and handles token refreshes/dpop retries/etc under the hood. https://tangled.org/jakelazaroff.com/atsw

jakelazaroffon Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

Maybe read a couple ancestor comments up to figure out the context of what I'm responding to?

jakelazaroffon Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

You're putting words in my mouth. "Public health" deals with social problems regarding health, but it's a subset of "health" which also includes problems that are not social in nature.

There are absolutely social issues around vaccines — how do we fund their development? how do we distribute them? how do we convince people to use them? — but as a technology I would say they solve a problem that is mostly independent of human relationships.*

* Obviously, you could say that vaccines actually do solve a social problem because pathogens are often passed between humans, but I think then the definition of "social problems" becomes so broad as to be meaningless.

jakelazaroffon Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

In that case, what are examples of non-social problems you can think of?

jakelazaroffon Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

"How do we remove feces from our living spaces" and "how do we stop dying from pathogens" are not social problems.

jakelazaroffon Deno Desktop

Sure, and many people also run older versions of macOS and also use Safari.

jakelazaroffon Deno Desktop

> On Mac, I use Firefox and Chrome.

Sure, but many people use Safari, which runs that exact same WebKit engine under the hood. So if your app is available in the browser in addition to Tauri, you have to support it anyway. And at the very least, you as a web developer should be used to supporting it.

jakelazaroffon Deno Desktop

This point of view always confuses me, because web developers already need to deal with platform differences. Especially if your app app also runs in a browser, like Slack and Discord — at that point, what issues do the differing system webviews cause that you don't need to deal with anyway just targeting browsers?

It's also funny to me as someone who's been building websites for 20+ years at this point, because the platform differences used to be much, much worse. Coincidentally, I just saw this article, which makes the case nicely: https://www.bram.us/2026/06/21/do-websites-need-to-function-...

jakelazaroffon Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models

Yeah, this is very much a "leopards ate my face" moment.

jakelazaroffon Midjourney Medical

What reason is there to believe that will happen?

jakelazaroffon Every Frame Perfect

No one is defending outright buggy animations. OP is just saying the idea that every frame should make logical sense on its own ignores how animation actually works (and they're correct).

jakelazaroffon Every Frame Perfect

We do this in cartoons as well. Check out this Spider-Verse animator breaking down a shot of Gwen drumming. [1] If you look at individual frames, there are all sorts of details that make no logical sense. In one frame, she actually has three hands! But it looks great if you see it in motion.

[1] https://xcancel.com/hf_rosa/status/1089675426312552449

jakelazaroffon U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse

Perhaps the Los Angeles DA stopped focusing on low-level crimes so he could focus on the gangs running rampant within the LAPD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_Los_Angeles_Count...

jakelazaroffon U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse

Let's say you're an evil capitalist bastard. How would you capture that value?

jakelazaroffon Bun Has Been Converted to Rust. Now What?

They have a gazillion such blocks today. If they still have a gazillion such blocks in a year, sure. But presumably the plan is to replace them with safe Rust.

jakelazaroffon Bun has been converted to rust. Now what?

Right, but the point is that you now have an explicit todo list of blocks to fix. You can trivially enumerate all sources of unsafety, and when a grep for unsafe blocks turns up empty you know your codebase is memory safe. When could you say the same about your Zig or C/C++ codebase?

I'm writing this as someone who doesn't even really like Rust; I'd probably prefer to write Zig! But those unsafe blocks definitely buy you something.

jakelazaroffon Bun Has Been Converted to Rust. Now What?

For one, you now know exactly where the memory unsafe code is, rather than a cloud of suspicion hanging over every line of the codebase.

jakelazaroffon Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs

Your advice to "avoid aria tags" would make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ways to make it happen:

1. A robust set of web primitives that are accessible by default, and

2. A government that will actually enforce laws (which already exist!) requiring websites to be accessible