Hacker News Reader

I generally agree and expect this to be the case from a legal perspective.

Legal questions of authorship are going to have to be established in terms of doctrines like SSO [0] and AFC [1]. Currently the incredibly sparse caselaw around this has yet to involve such non-literal notions of copyright.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction–filtration–compari...

williamcottonon Choose Boring Technology (2015)

It’s pretty boring at this point.

williamcottonon Flock updates privacy, accountability, security, and transparency safeguards

Seems like there is some caselaw that supports your theory based on US Supreme Court rulings in Kyllo v. United States (2001) (thermal imaging), United States v. Jones (2012) (GPS tracking) and Carpenter v. United States (2018) (tracking via cell site data).

williamcottonon Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas

I've been to one EA meetup and it wasn't my thing but this seems nothing like the discussions I had. It's where I found out about GiveDirectly.

The biggest issue for me was the AGI/ASI doomerism. But then again, fast-forward five or six years and we've got "unaligned" AI agents blindly following reward functions...

williamcottonon Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

This is markedly better than the USPTO website, FWIW.

williamcottonon Mistral Patent for "Code implemented tool calls"

> but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit

Or an Inter Partes Review!

williamcottonon Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating

Are you after learning or an accredited degree?

williamcottonon U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war

IP at the margin?

williamcottonon Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

Safari is my default browser and it seems to be working just fine!

williamcottonon Authorize, don't authenticate

It’s a memorable quote from the movie Kindergarten Cop.

williamcottonon Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

So a stringly typed JSON-based DSL without a linter or LSP?

williamcottonon Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

> They even wrote a book about how they went about it (not that it speaks to the quality of the API)

Wilkinson’s Grammar of Graphics inspired ggplot. The textbook doesn’t even mention ggplot.

Shameless plug for my own GoG inspired DSL, Algraf:

https://williamcotton.github.io/algraf/demos

There’s a Minard plot in the demos!

williamcottonon The lost civic life of movie rental stores

Do you mind sharing which ones?

williamcottonon AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying

Tangentially,

> "Add up all US spending on candidates, PACs, lobbying, think tanks, and advocacy organizations – liberal and conservative combined – and we’re still $2 billion short of what we spend on almonds each year."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

williamcottonon Measuring developer productivity with the DX Core 4

What about measuring management productivity?

williamcottonon Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

Article Title: Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-i...

williamcottonon Show HN: Watch bots interact with an SSH honeypot in real time

So we're getting Rickrolled?

williamcottonon DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs

I agree. What is missing from the discussion about DSLs are the importance of tooling such as linters, LSPs, etc, to give the LLMs further context.

For example, charts/plots are often stringly typed with regards to column names and a DSL specific to plotting could give immediate feedback to an LLM.

williamcottonon Control the Ideas, Not the Code

https://williamcotton.github.io/datafarm-studio/

https://williamcotton.github.io/algraf

https://williamcotton.github.io/pdl

https://github.com/williamcotton/algraf

https://github.com/williamcotton/pdl

Check out the /docs dir in the repos for each plan file and the language specs.

They are my 4th and 5th DSLs and I learned quite a bit along the way, most importantly how to separate a WASM runtime wired up to a Monaco editor “lsp” with the same crate for editor-services that works with the actual system binary LSP.

williamcottonon Don't you mean extinct?

Why? Trial and error is a pretty important component of creativity.

williamcottonon How version control will evolve for the agent boom

I’ve had good luck with this approach:

https://github.com/williamcotton/algraf/tree/main/docs

There’s also some tests in place to make sure some things from the master spec are up to date, eg, error codes.

williamcottonon Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark

Funny enough, I just published this blog post yesterday:

The Discoverable Evidence of AI-Assisted Software Porting

https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-discoverable-evidence...

williamcottonon Statistics that live in your SQL

The plotting aspect of this seems very similar to:

https://opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04-20_ggsql_alpha_rele...

williamcottonon Plotnine

A big part of the motivation was that something like this...

  $ which ggplot
  ggplot () {
          if [[ "$1" == "-f" ]]
          then
                  shift
                  rush run --library tidyverse "$(cat "$1")" -
          else
                  rush run --library tidyverse "$@" -
          fi
  }

  $ echo "one,two,three\n1,2,3\n4,5,6\n,7,8,9" | ggplot 'ggplot(df, aes(one, two)) + geom_col() + theme_minimal()' | imgcat

...is just very slow. Booting R just to run ggplot2 was not cutting it compared to a custom DSL written in Rust!

BTW, that "R on the command line" tool was inspired by:

https://datascienceatthecommandline.com

williamcottonon Plotnine

I really like to build things that build other things!

williamcottonon Plotnine

I've always liked the ggplot2 and the Grammar of Graphics approach to plotting so much so that I wrote my own DSL based on it - it is standalone, written in Rust, has WASM bindings (as you can see on the website) and more:

https://williamcotton.github.io/algraf

It pairs well with a related data translation DSL:

https://williamcotton.github.io/pdl

And you can see the two working together here:

https://williamcotton.github.io/datafarm-studio

There's LSPs for both, LSP clients for VS Code, and even language diagnostics for standalone Monaco editors in the browser.

Of note is that the same language diagnostics are exposed via the WASM as via the LSP interface allowing for the same friendly red squiggles to look and work the same in both your browser with Monaco and your editor with the LSP!

williamcottonon Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)

In the last few weeks I've been working on a couple of custom data transformation and chart visualization DSLs that pair well together, as you can see here:

https://williamcotton.github.io/datafarm-studio/

One of the DSLs is:

https://williamcotton.github.io/pdl/

The other is:

https://williamcotton.github.io/algraf/

Full LSP that is built into the binaries and compile to CLI and WASM. Full LSP support in the Monaco text editor npm packages that use the same static analysis crate as the VS Code LSP client.

Native GIS with GeoJSON and Shapefile support for both languages.

williamcottonon How a new DSL may survive in the era of LLMs

>So really, if you want to do something you'd normally use a DSL for, you should be talking to your AI, and telling the AI to encode it into computer-speak. Binary files, libraries, programs, composeable piped applications. The AI can take what you think and turn it into a regular old computer program, just as easy as you would write a DSL. But you don't need a DSL to do this; the AI can already program.

I use LLMs to write DSLs that I write all the time! What else is an LLM doing when it is stringing together a bash pipeline than coordinating a number of DSLs? jq is what, 15 years old? I see LLMs using it all the time. Who knows, maybe there are a few more tools that have yet to be made that will further bridge the expressivity gap between human language and computers.

williamcottonon Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

Legibility has a time and place, for example, global health data around pandemics.

williamcottonon Do the Hardest Thing

Well what if you take on an extremely ambitious project like writing a programming language complete with DAP step debugging, a full LSP, etc, etc?

That takes a lot of quality time to just figure out the right syntax and semantics, let alone having to figure out how all of these complex pieces fit together!