Down to -4. Is this generic LLM-dislike, or a reaction to perceived over-self-promotion, or something else?
No matter how much you hate LLM stuff I think it's useful to know that there's a working proof of concept of this library compiled to WASM and working as a Python library.
I didn't plan to share this on HN but then MicroQuickJS showed up on the homepage so I figured people might find it useful.
(If I hadn't disclosed I'd used Claude for this I imagine I wouldn't have had any down-votes here.)
I think many subscribe to this philosophy: https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-...
Your github research/ links are an interesting case of this. On one hand, late AI adopters may appreciate your example prompts and outputs. But it feels like trivially reproducible noise to expert LLM users, especially if they are unaware of your reputation for substantive work.
The HN AI pushback then drowns out your true message in favor of squashing perceived AI fluff.
Yeah, I agree that it's rude to show AI output to people... in most cases (and 100% if you don't disclose it.)
My simonw/research GitHub repo is deliberately separate from everything else I do because it's entirely AI-generated. I wrote about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/async-code-research/#th...
This particular case is a very solid use-case for that approach though. There are a ton of important questions to answer: can it run in WebAssembly? What's the difference to regular JavaScript? Is it safe to use as a sandbox against attacks like the regex thing?
Those questions can be answered by having Claude Code crunch along, produce and execute a couple of dozen files of code and report back on the results.
I think the knee-jerk reaction pushing back against this is understandable. I'd encourage people not to miss out on the substance.
And again you're linking to your site. Maybe try pasting the few relevant sentences instead of constantly pushing your content in almost every comment. That's what people find annoying. Maybe link to other people's stuff more, or just write what you think here on HN.
If someone wants to read your blog, they will, they know it exists, and some people even submit your new articles here. There's no need to do what you're doing. Every day you're irritating more people with this behavior, and eventually the substance won't matter to them anymore, so you're acting against your own interests.
Unless you want people to develop the same kind of ad blindness mechanism, where they automatically skip anything that looks like self promotion. Some people will just see a comment by simonw and do the same.
A lot of people have told you this in many threads, but it seems you still don’t get it.
I'm determined to normalize linking to one's own writing, provided it's relevant to the conversation.
I think you're misreading what the "normalization" problem actually is and why my comment got a lot of upvotes.
You're not pushing against an arbitrary taboo where people dislike self links in principle. People already accept self links on HN when they're occasional and clearly relevant. What people are reacting to is the pattern when "my answer is a link to my site" becomes your default state, it stops reading like helpful reference and starts reading like your distribution strategy.
And that's why "I'm determined to normalize it" probably won't work because you can't normalize your way out of other people's experience of friction. If your behavior reliably adds a speed bump to reading threads forcing people to context switch/click out and wonder if they're being marketed to then the community will develop a shortcut I mentioned in my previous comment which basically is : this is self promo so just ignore.
If your goal is genuinely to share useful ideas, you're better off meeting people where they are: put the relevant 2-6 sentences directly in the comment, and then add something like "I wrote more about it on my blog" or whatever and if anyone is interested they will scroll through your blog (you have it in your profile so anyone can find it with one click) or ask for a link.
Otherwise you're not "normalizing" anything, you're training readers to stop paying attention to you. And I assure you once that happens, it's hard to undo, because people won't relitigate your intent every time. They'll just scroll. It's a process that's already started, but you can still reverse it.
No, I'm determined to normalize it. I would like a LOT more people to have personal websites where they write at length about things, and then share links to what they have already written where it is relevant to the conversation.
I'm actively pushing back against the "don't promote your site, don't link to it, restate your content in the comments instead" thing.
I am willing to take on risk to my personal reputation and credibility in support of my goal here.
There might be a bit of growth-hacking resistance here, and maybe some StackOverflow culture as well. Neither should be leveled at you, IMHO. I've followed and admired your work since Datasette launched, and I think you're exhibiting remarkably good judgment in how you discuss topics with links to deeper discussion, and it's in keeping with a long tradition of good practices for the web. Thanks for working to normalize the practice.
Well, that's your choice. You can do whatever you want with your reputation, but you can't change human nature and that's essentially what you're trying to do. People don't want HN to turn into another LinkedIn style feed full of AI slop, spam and self promotion. That's exactly what your attempt to "normalize" this behavior would encourage (and I'm confident it won't catch on, sorry).
If everyone starts dropping their "relevant content" in the comments, most of it won't be relevant, and a lot of it will be spam. People don't have time to sift through hundreds of links in the comments and tens of thousands of words when the whole point of HN is that discussion and curation work in the opposite direction.
If your content is good, someone else will submit it as a story. Your blog is probably already read by thousands of people from HN, if they think a particular post belongs in the discussion in some comment, they'll link it. That's why other popular HN users who blog don't constantly promote or link their own content here, unlike you. They know that you don't need to do it yourself, and doing it repeatedly sends the wrong signal (which is obvious and plenty of socially aware people have already pointed out to you in multiple threads).
Trying to normalize that kind of self promoting is like normalizing an annoying mosquito buzz, most people simply don't want it and no amount of "normalizing" will change that.
This is simonw though. I look forward to his thoughts on a topic and would find it annoying if he was forced to summarize his research in a HN thread and then not link to it.
The difference between LinkedIn slop and good content is not the presence or absence of a link to one’s own writing, but the substance and quality of the writing.
If simonw followed these rules you want him to follow, he would be forced to make obscure references to a blog post that I would then need to Google or hope that his blog post surfaces on HN in the next few days. It seems terribly inefficient.
I agree with you that self-promotion is off-putting, and when people post their competing project on a Show HN post, I don’t click those links. But it’s not because they are linking to something they wrote. It’s because they are engaged in “self-promotion”, usually in an attempt to ride someone else’s coattails or directly compete.
If simonw plugged datasette every chance he got, I’d be rolling my eyes too, but linking to his related experiments and demos isn’t that.
Counterpoint to the sibling comment: posting your own site is fine. Your contributions are substantial, and your site is a well-organized repository of your work. Not everything fits (or belongs) in a comment.
I'd chalk up the -4 to generic LLM hate, but I find examples of where LLMs do well to be useful, so I appreciated your post. It displays curiosity, and is especially defensible given your site has no ads, loads blazingly fast, and is filled with HN-relevant content, and doesn't even attempt to sell anything.
> can it run in WebAssembly?
You can safely assume so. Bellard is the creator of jslinux. The news here would be if it _didn't_.
> What's the difference to regular JavaScript?
It's in the project's README!
> Is it safe to use as a sandbox against attacks like the regex thing?
This is not a sandbox design. It's a resource-constrained design like cesanta/mjs.
---
If you vibe coded a microcontroller emulation demo, perhaps there would be less pushback.
It is because you keep over promoting AI almost every day of the week in the HN comments.
In this particular case AI has nothing to do with Fabrice Bellard.
We can have something different on HN like what Fabrice Bellard is up to.
You can continue AI posting as normal in the coming days.
Forget about the AI bit. Do you think it's interesting that MicroQuickJS can be used from Python via FFI or as a compiled module, and can also be compiled to WebAssembly and called from Node.js and Deno and from Pyodide running in a browser?
... and that it provides a useful sandbox in that you can robustly limit both the memory and time allowed, including limiting expensive regular expression evaluation?
I included the AI bit because it would have been dishonest not to disclose how I used AI to figure this all out.
It's interesting but I don't think it belongs as a comment under this post. I can use LLMs to create something tangential for each project posted on HN, and so can everyone else. If we all started doing this then the comment section will quickly become useless and not on point.
Tangential would be “I wrote a Fibonacci function in this and it worked, just like it said on the tin!”
Compiling this to wasm and calling it from python as a sandboxed runtime isn’t tangential. I wouldn’t have know from reading the project’s readme that this was possible, and it’s a really interesting use case. We might as well get mad at simonw for using an IDE while he explored the limits of a new library.
but there is signal in what people are inspired to do upon seeing a new project-- why not simply evaluate the interestingness level of these sorts of mashups on their own terms? it actually feels very "hacker"-y to go out and show people possibilities like this. i have no particular comment on how "interesting" the derivative projects are in this case, but i have a feeling if his original post had been framed more like "i think it's super interesting how easy it is to use via FFI on various runtimes X & Y (oh btw in the spirit of full transparency: i used ai to help me. and you can see more details at <link>). especially because i think everyone who peruses HN with some regularity is likely to know of simon's work in at least some capacity, and i am-- speaking only for myself-- essentially always interested in any sort of project he embarks on, especially his llm-assisted experiments and stuff. but hey-- at the end of the day, all of this value judgment is realized as plainly as possible with +1 / -1 (up- and down-vote) and i guess it just is what it is. if number bad, HN no like. shrug.
I agree that there is signal, and that phrasing his original post as you pointed out would have been better.
My issue is that the cost, in terms of time, for these experiments have really gone down with LLMs. Earlier, if someone played around with the posted project, we knew they spent a reasonable amount of time on it, and thus care about the subject. With LLMs, this is not the case.
That’s true - the assumed time is different now. We have to judge it on the content/findings of the experiment, rather than the fact that someone experimented with it. I share your frustration with random GitHub repos though. Used to, if someone could create a new GitHub repository with a few commits, there was likely to be some intelligence or quality behind it, but I commonly stumble across vibe coded slop with AI-slop READMEs. So maybe you are describing a similar reaction here in HN posts.
Offtopic but I went to your website and saw that you created hackernews-mute and recently I was commenting about how one must have created such an extension and ranted about it. So kudos for you to have created it earlier on.
Maybe we HN users have minds in sync :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359396#46359695
Have a nice day! Awesome stuff, would keep an eye on your blog, Does your blog/website use mataroa by any chance as there are some similarities even if they are both minimalist but overall nice!
I have something like that but as a userscript and with a toggle, it works pretty well for my needs.
Maybe someone finds it useful: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/rD6Dz7hN2V/
Awesome stuff :D
Thanks for sharing it.
Thank you! I don't use Mataroa but I can see the similarities. My current blog setup is a Python script that parses content written in markdown and emits HTML. The CSS is inspired by the other minimal blogs I see here.
Thanks a lot for checking out my blog/project. Have a great day!
Software system is released, comments talk about how to integrate it with other software systems. Seems on-topic.
Usually I watch your stuff very closely (and positively) because you're pushing the edges of how LLMs can be useful for code (and are a lot more honest/forthwright than most enthusiasts about it Going Horribly Wrong and how much work you need to do to keep on top of it.) This one... looks like a crossbar of random things that don't seem like things anyone would actually want to do? Mentioning the sandboxing bit in the first post would have helped a lot, or anything that said why that particular modes are interesting.
Yeah, I failed completely to explain the context here.
I'm currently on a multi-year side-quest to find safe ways to execute untrusted user-provided code in my Python and web applications.
As such, I pay very close attention to any new language or library that looks like it might be able to provide a robust sandbox.
MicroQuickJS instantly struck me as a strong candidate for that, and initial protoyping has backed that up.
None of that was clear from my original comment.
I had been in a similar boat and here are some softwares that I recommend or would discuss with you
https://github.com/libriscv/libriscv (I talked with the author of this project, amazing author fwsgonzo is amazing) and they told me that this has the least latency out of any sandbox at only minor consequence of performance that they know of
Btw for sandboxing, kvm itself feels good too and I had discussed it with them in their discord server when they had mentioned that they were working on a minimal kvm server which has since been open sourced (https://github.com/varnish/tinykvm)
Honestly Simon, Deno hosting/the way deno works is another good interesting tidbit for sandboxing. I wish something like deno's sandboxing capabilities came to python perhaps since python fans can appreciate it.
I will try to look more into your github repository too once I get more free.
It is depressing the age of llm coding power came during python and JavaScript.
Unfortunately it means those languages will be the permanent coding platforms.
> Unfortunately it means those languages will be the permanent coding platforms.
not really,
I suspect training volume has a role in debugging a certain class of errors, so there is an advantage to python/ts/sql in those circumstances: if, as an old boss once told me, you code by the bug method :)
The real problems I've had that hint at training data vs logic have been with poorly documented old versions of current languages.
To me, the most amazing capability is not the code they generate but the facility for natural language analysis.
my experience is that agent tools enable polyglot systems because we can now use the right tool for the job, not just the most familiar.
Ah, reading this comment makes your original post 10x more interesting. I guess this is "start with why" in action. :)
Simon although I find it interesting. And I respect you in this field. I still feel like the reason people call out AI usage or downvote in this case is that in my honest opinion, it would be also more interesting to see people actually write the code and more so (maintain) it as well and create a whole community/github project around microquickjs wasm itself
I read this post of yours https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/ and although there is a point that can be made that what you are doing isn't a job and I myself create prototypes of code using AI, long term (in my opinion) what really matters are the maintainance and claim (like your article says in a way, that I can pin point a person whose responsible for code to work)
If I find any bug right now, I wouldn't blame it on you but AI and I have varying amount of trust on it
My opinion on the matter is that for prototyping AI can be considered good use but long term it definitely isn't and I am sure that you share a similar viewpoint.
I think that AI is so contrasting that there stops existing any nuance. Read my recent comment (although warning, its long) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359684)
Perhaps you can build a blog post about the nuance of AI? I imagine that a lot of people might share a similar aspect of AI policy where its okay to tinker with it. I am part of the new generation and trust be told I don't think that there becomes much incentives long term unless someone realizes things of not using AI because using AI just feels so lucrative for especially the youngsters.
I am 17 years old and I am going to go into a decent college with (might I add immense competition to begin with) when I have passion about such topics but only to get dissuaded because the benchmark of solving assignments etc. are done by AI and the signal ratio of universities themselves are reducing but they haven't reduced to the point that they are irrelevant but rather that you need to have a university to try to get a job but companies have either freezed hiring which some point out with LLM's
If you ask me, Long term to me it feels like more people might associate themselves with hobbyist computing and even using AI (to be honest sort of like pewdiepie) without being in the industry.
I am not sure what the future holds for me (or for any of us as a matter of fact) but I guess the point I am trying to state is that there is nuance to the discussion from both sides
Have a nice day!
I don't know why people are downvoting your comment, but it could be considered a low-effort post: here's (a link to) something I prompted AI with, here's (a link to) what it produced (the whole repo).
I would guess people don't know how you expect them to evaluate this, so it comes off as spamming us with a bunch of AI slop.
(That C can be compiled to WASM or wrapped as a python library isn't really something that needs a proof-of-concept, so again it could be understood as an excuse to spam us with AI slop.)
I downvoted because I'm tired of people regurgitating how they've done this or that with whatever LLM of the week on seemingly every technical post.
If you care that much, write a blog post and post that, we don't need low effort LLM show and tell all day everyday.
Here you go: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/23/microquickjs/
No I mean post it as an HN post and if anybody cares to see it, they'll upvote that and comment in there. That, instead of pigging backing on other posts to get visibility.
I genuinely don't think it's interesting enough to warrant a top level post. It's interesting enough to be in a comment though!
And people think is not interesting enoug and downvote you.
I love it, I find the note interesting, educational, and adds to the discussion in context. Guess you're bound to get a few haters when you share your work in public, but I for one appreciate all your posts, comments, articles, open-source projects.
I think the people interacting with this post are just more likely to appreciate the raw craftsmanship and talent of an individual like Bellard, and coincidentally might be more critical of the machinery that in their perception devalues it. I count myself among them, but didn’t downvote, as I generally think your content is of high quality.
Thank you for sharing.
A lot of HN people got cut by AI in one way or another, so they seem to have personal beefs with AI. I am talking about not only job shortages but also general humbling of the bloated egos.
> I am talking about not only job shortages but also general humbling of the bloated egos.
I'm gonna give you the benefit for the doubt here. Most of us do not dislike genAI because we were fired or "humbled". Most of us dislike it because a) the terrible environmental impacts, b) the terrible economic impacts, and c) the general non-production-readiness of results once you get past common, well-solved problems
Your stated understanding comes off a little bit like "they just don't like it because they're jealous".
I'm constanly encountering this "bloated ego" argument every time the narrative is being steered away to prevent monetary losses for AI companies.
Especially so when it concerns AI theft of human music and visual art.
"Those pompous artists, who do they think they are? We'll rob them of their egos".
The problem is that these ego-accusations don't quite come from egoless entities.
It is not about artists per ce, it is about manipulative entities. For any manipulation to succeed, one has to create a fog, disorientation, muddy waters.
AI brings clarity. This results in a lot of pain for those who tried to hijack the game in one way or another.
From the psychological point of view, AI is a mirror of one's personality. Depending on who you are, you see different reflections: someone sees a threat, others see the enlightenment.
AI brings clarity.
Do you mean that kind of clarity when no audio/video evidence is a proof of anything anymore?
> This results in a lot of pain for those who tried to hijack the game in one way or another.
I'm not quite sure if any artists, designers, musicians and programmers whose work was used to train AI without their consent tried to manipulate anyone or hijack anything. Care to elaborate?
It is not that clarity as in a "positive happy life". It is the clarity that frees you from perceptual distortions - if everything can be faked, one starts to question themselves what kind of information they are consuming.
Programmers willingly put their projects to the open source, and it's their consent by default unless there is a prohibitive license that explicitly denies AI training.
Artists, designers, musicians - I agree here, but this is the point where inflated egos usually enter the room.
When was the last time you have heard a song without autotune? If it was a machine all along for the last 20 years, why we should care now? Why we should care if 99% of artists do not care about us by pushing subpar materials down to our throats to "make it" (for them, of course)?
AI rebalances those asymmetries by bringing them to ground 0. Some people consider it as destruction, but some see a breeding ground for the future.
> When was the last time you have heard a song without autotune?
Right now, 2025-12-25, 09:00 UTC, I'm listening to a song without autotune.
Everything But The Girl - Missing (Todd Terry remix)
And I can also find thousands of songs without autotune that were released on Spotify yesterday. Seek and thou shall find.
Also it's not clear how autotune is related to ego. No one pretends that autotune makes one a singer. It's but an effect, and quite artsy on its own when used properly. Does compressor relate to it too? Delay? Reverb?
"This song has too much ego, the reverb is 6dB louder than the dry signal"...
How does a sheer number of subpar artists caring only about money (which is of course a thing, but nowhere near a 99% thing, and maybe a problem for those who are too lazy to discern and search themselves) justify robbing truly sincere artists who share their soul with the listener?
Because it adds nothing to the conversation. Im
How does executing MicroQuickJS from Python not have anything to do with MicroQuickJS?
I appreciate all your work and I did not downvote you. One suggestion, though, is that the README looks very AI generated, which makes the project feel low effort, like you just said “hey Claude do a security analysis of this package”. I don’t think this is actually what you did, but it’s hard to know. It’s also very difficult to identify the highlights. Just a few handwritten sentences would be better.
The README is indeed AI generated, as is everything else in that simonw/research repository - it's my public demo of the asynchronous research process I use.
(I'm going to add disclaimers to the top of every one of those posts, currently you have to navigate to the report homepage to find that out.)
Update - added that here: https://github.com/simonw/research/pull/53
Your tireless experimenting (and especially documenting) is valuable and I love to see all of it. The avant garde nature of your recent work will draw the occasional flurry of disdain from more jaded types, but I doubt many HN regulars would think you had anything but good intentions! Guess I am basically just saying.. keep it up.
I didn't downvote you. You're one of "the AI guys" to me on HN. The content of your post is fine, too, but, even if it was sketch, I'd've given you the benefit of the doubt.
I appreciated it. I have no idea why someone would downvote it other than spite
I was hoping you experimented with this! I am right there with you, hoping for an easier wasm sandbox for LLMs.
(Keep posting please. Downvotes due to mentioning LLMs will be perceived as a quaint historic artifact in the not so distant future…)
On the contrary, it's pretty possible that LLMs themselves will be perceied as a quaint historic artefact and join the ranks of mechanical turks, zeppelins, segways, google glasses and blockchains.
If you can operationalize this I’ll happily take a bet against this, and offer you great odds.
That is extremely unlikely.