jeswin

I am the one who disputed the claim and later deleted - I was conflicted between keeping HN largely free of political reddittery (and chose to downvote instead), and fact-checking.

> The current prime minister of India once announced that he has Ph.D. in "all of the political science".

This didn't happen, at least publicly and on record. The previous dispute was around his distance education Masters; which isn't hard to believe or hard to get. They don't attend regular classes.

Personally I think hard plastic (like on ThinkPads) is more resistant to damage than metal cases. Also, the textured surface is less slippery. And - ThinkPad repair (especially old models) is usually cheaper because businesses by so many of them.

I've been a ThinkPad user forever, and I wouldn't buy another one if they "upgraded" to metal like everyone else. If I were to guess, most serious ThinkPad users would want the current shell, the dated appearance, and the keyboard to not change much or at all.

At the moment, we have to use Microsoft's debugger on the generated code. I have it as a todo - but I don't think I'll get to it soon.

Thanks.

I've just improved it, but still more to do. Will look at it this week.

Wow, I never came across it - thank you.

There are key differences though. What tsonic offers: (0) broad data type support, stack allocated types etc (1) nodejs and js compatibility libs, (2) the availability (in tsonic) of the entire .Net BCL, Asp.Net and EF Core as d.ts files (for example, in @tsonic/dotnet) so that tsc would still run, (3) bindings generator (tsbindgen) for any .net dll etc.

What tsonic is missing: (1) interpreter, (2) compile to .Net IL. Tsonic will only do native code; and does so by converting ts to c# and then using the NativeAOT chain on generated C#. SharpTS is compiling straight to IL (I think), something I considered but decided not to for the time being.

I think these are two different approaches. With pros and cons for both.

Well, there are some additions - thought it can be compiled via tsc into js that would never run. This is still useful though for IDE and tooling support, language servers etc.

The most important thing is that you have these types you can import. For example the "int" below:

  import { int } from "@tsonic/core/types.js";
  
  function fibonacci(n: int): int {
  
    if (n <= 1) {
      return n;
    }
  
    return fibonacci(n - 1) + fibonacci(n - 2);
  }

Instead of making it a keyword, I decided to export these from core/types.ts - so that the code can still be compiled with tsc, and all the tooling would still work. Similarly (among others), you'd use ptr<long>, if you wanted a pointer to a long.

Hi dang, done. Thank you!

Your feedback on the other thread was very helpful - just the right thing to add, irrespective of HN visibility.

I did a Show HN for a language called Tsonic yesterday, which is a variant of TypeScript (all tsonic is valid typescript) requiring stronger typing which compiles to x64/ARM native code via .Net/NativeAOT. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46604308

It didn't appear in Show HN at all. Perhaps because another user posted it as a regular topic just a few minutes earlier, which drops off very quickly (within minutes) - but I think the issue is wider.

For a while now, I've felt that the new topics stream requires you to promote the topic outside of HN to be seen on HN - sometimes by adding a "Discuss on HN" link in the blog, or on social networks etc. The problem is quite fundamental: the "Show" link gets a small fraction of clicks. The "Show New" (two clicks away) probably gets tinier, miniscule fraction of clicks. The intersection of people who are interested in the project and those who have clicked "Show New" would be very nearly null. So upvotes will have to come from outside.

Well ... I was going to do a Show HN. Can you edit the title? :) @todsacerdoti

Actually TypeScript is an excellent language (in my view) for targeting native code. It reads cleaner than Java, C# and even golang in many cases - at least to me.

For example, JS/TS's file-path based imports are more intuitive; several languages do it via explicit namespaces when well-written code is already organized into directories. Of course, all of these design choices are subjective. In fact, disagreement with a few people in the C# user community is one of the reasons I started this project.

Another example - top level functions, being able to export them trivially etc.

> At what point do JavaScript developers need to realise that this is all convoluted, and begin to use languages better suited for the job.

I'd like to know what makes TS convoluted. Here's an example of multi-threading: https://github.com/tsoniclang/proof-is-in-the-pudding/blob/m...

Yes performance is a big issue, and so is security (or the lack of it). I'm attacking this from another angle: https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsonic

Write TypeScript, compile to native code via CLR's NativeAOT. We're almost there, you can see some examples here: https://github.com/tsoniclang/proof-is-in-the-pudding

You get everything; real multithreading, stack allocated types, single binary output (x64, ARM64 for Linux/MacOS) etc.

I have a GM1, it's truly a standout camera. GM5 makes it even better. It's quite funny nobody wants to attempt similar sizes, even when the market has voted for pocketable cameras.

Especially OM - with all their troubles, if it were me I'd have pivoted the company to sizes that do justice to the mount's inherent size advantage. They have a rich legacy of amazing small cameras (Trip, Pen, XA series, and the overrated mju ii) - yet it's fuji selling an order of magnitude more x-halfs than anything OM is producing.

> Is a really weird way to say that you built a native compiler for typescript.

Well, the Typescript team is rewriting their compiler (landing in v7) in go, and some ppl call it the native compiler. I think my statement is clearer? But then English is not my first language, so there's that.

I spent ~$1500 (and a bit more than two months) building a compiler that translates typescript to native binaries. I think I'll be able to do a Show HN later this month. It's the best $1500 I've ever spent on anything related to software development or computers.

You're not addressing the idea in the post, but the person. What the author achieved personally is irrelevant. What's important is that a very large and important industry is being completely transformed.

Add: if I did it without LLMs it would have taken me a year, and would have been less complete.

> that the company who helped champion the network effects of the internet and surface truly useful search results...

The amount of data on the web crossed the threshold of organic discoverability some time before the AI boom started. AI makes it go from really bad to really, really bad (99% to 99.99%). As far as I am concerned it doesn't change anything.

The same mechanisms to find good content would work today as well - following humans and networks.

> Rust-level performance > JS → Rust compilation pipeline

There's a JS to Rust transpiler? How? If this is true, this is the most impressive part. The web server/framework almost irrelevant.

The AI generated documentation is very confusing.

> For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools.

That's not the threat model. The threat model is that they won't have to - at some point which may not be right now. End users want to get their work done, not learn UIs and new products. If they can get their analysis/reports based on excels which are already on SharePoint (or wherever), they'd want just that. You can already see this happening.

I'm building a TypeScript to native code compiler, via the Dotnet CLR toolchain and Native AOT. This lets you use the excellent Dotnet std library - which in addition to being faster is also much safer than the npm ecosystem. There's also a node compat library, which exposes Node APIs but with CLR underneath.

The end result will be a binary (linux and mac for now) which you can run without NodeJS. Simple programs already work, and I have web apps very nearly running.

It's ok now, at least for me. There are still challenges around theming and styling because of styling boundaries (which makes Web Components powerful, but still). A part of it is about tooling, which can be easier to improve.

Try my tiny web components lib if you want to keep JSX but not the rest of React: https://github.com/webjsx/magic-loop

True. But willing to cut anyone under 21 some slack.

There are several countries which use a single ID for all government interfacing. For that matter, Aadhaar is almost there already. I am not suggesting that private companies should use it, or should be allowed to use it. But a single ID will limit babudom arbitrariness a bit.

> whose attributes can't be changed

Many IDs (outside India) have similar issues, options to change attributes, and various redressal mechanisms.

These are neither simple, nor easily doable. But the bigger problem is cost (time and money).

My point was that India should switch to a single card/id for everything, and get rid of everything else including the PAN card. Eventually make Aadhaar digital, and chip based so that it can hold your DL as well. It is it bad for privacy, Yes. But what a country should spend on protecting or preserving privacy is a function of where it is on the socioeconomic ladder. If a single ID helps 80% of Indians (a billion people) navigate the labyrinth of our bureaucracy, I'm ok with it, _today_.

Besides, simpler rules go a long way in reducing the power of govt departments (which we can agree on). It reduces cognitive overload for citizens, as well as for govt workers. Factor in where the rest of India stands in terms of education etc, the value of simple rules cannot be overstated.

As someone who values privacy, there are still ways to do it. You just have to invest a lot more energy and time into it though.

I may have yielded, but that happened with the acknowledgement that it's not entirely a bad thing. Other IDs have varying levels of validity and authenticity; today I am of the opinion that countries like India shouldn't waste money and time on these. In fact, I'd say ditch the PAN card as well.

If Aadhaar makes it easier for people living near poverty to get say bank accounts, it'd trump the reservations I have. That's what made UPI possible - just about everyone today has UPI, even people begging for money sometimes have a QR code handy (at least here in Bangalore).

In a country with dozens government supplied IDs, Aadhaar has been a godsend for the common man. It's one card to open a bank account, buy a SIM card, apply for a loan, enter an airport, or whatever.

I held out for many years due to privacy reasons. In the end, I changed my mind - its just immensely useful to the general public.

This is the wrong advice in my view. Senior engineers are the ones more empowered by AI than anyone else, provided they update their skills.

An early version of Claude Code did a hard reset on one of my projects and force pushed it to GitHub. The pushed code was completely useless, and I lost two days of work.

It is definitely smarter now, but make sure you set up branch protection rules even for your simple non-serious projects.

Same here. But with GPT 5.1 instead of Gemini.

To me that was Windows 2000. One day in 1999, I was at the local bookstore going over computer magazines and one of them came with CD to preview Windows 2000. I was mostly a Windows 98/RedHat user at that point, so I decided to try it out.

It almost instantly won me over with the leap in stability due to the NT kernel, but the craziest thing was this feature called "Hibernate". This was the time when booting was painfully slow, and here was a feature that not just booted rapidly, but dropped me into the previous session with all apps open! It was pure magic. I switched over to Linux exclusively a few years after that, but this was the feature that prolonged that decision for a long time. I don't think Linux ever got a useable hibernate, but the feature became not as necessary due to the advent of SSDs.

Back where?

The ecosystem and interconnected-ness has completely vanished. If you look at the late 90s or early 2000s, people had RSS readers, and sites had feeds, blogrolls, trackbacks/pingbacks, a commenting system which worked, and social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) which were somewhat mainstream.

All of this is gone. Blogs are not going to survive in the current super-noisy consumption architecture.

For blogs to be back, you'd almost need a new internet.