Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

tritium.legal

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 171 posts

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#141

Post by a_e_k »

chrismorgan wrote: post #88

If you want people to use it on the web: do not under any circumstances use the pure-canvas approach. You must use real DOM, or it will be an endless frustration that turns many people away. I’ve written about the problems quite a few times, look through https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=chrismorgan+pure+... if you’re interested. If you’re not intending it to be used via the web, don’t worry. But it’s a gene…

This is explicitly called out in the canvas spec's best practices section with a laundry list of things you'd have to re-implement [1].

> Authors should avoid implementing text editing controls using the canvas element. Doing so has a large number of disadvantages:

> [...]

> This is a huge amount of work, and authors are most strongly encouraged to avoid doing any of it by instead using the input element, the textarea element, or the contenteditable attribute.

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/canvas.html#best-prac...

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#142

Post by z3t4 »

panzi wrote: post #128
z3t4 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do get a lot for free with the DOM, but it's messy, works differently between different browser and you have to constantly fight it. With your own rendering engine it's more work but you have much more freedom and can get better performance.

With DOM you get accessibility integration. At least in the EU if you provide a web service you have to be accessible, otherwise you can get sued.

IANAL,afaik the accessibility law is only for government monopoly services. But I don't think it matters, because if you use the DOM you still need to test if the app works in screen readers etc, even normal websites have trouble with accessibility.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#143

Post by fl0id »

piker wrote: post #95
wiseowise wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it requires shipping an entire web browser That’s a moot point and completely irrelevant for 99.99% people.

Perhaps that is an accurate percentage, but lawyers are in that .01%. If you're competing with Microsoft Word on performance you'd better be stupid fast and lightweight. Transactional lawyers routinely have dozens of Word documents and PDFs open at a time. Not long-term viable with something like Electron.

Word has the worst performance ever. So I don't think competing with Word on performance should be hard.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#144

Post by cosmic_cheese »

cAtte_ wrote: post #133
piker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps that is an accurate percentage, but lawyers are in that .01%. If you're competing with Microsoft Word on performance you'd better be stupid fast and lightweight. Transactional lawyers routinely have dozens of Word documents and PDFs open at a time. Not long-term viable with something like Electron.

VS Code, the aforementioned very performant Electron-based IDE, would like to differ

VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app. It benefits from having some of the best talent available working on it and has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance, both of which Microsoft is willing to pay for because VS Code entrenches them in the software development world in ways it wouldn’t be otherwise.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#147

Post by ezst »

cAtte_ wrote: post #133
piker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps that is an accurate percentage, but lawyers are in that .01%. If you're competing with Microsoft Word on performance you'd better be stupid fast and lightweight. Transactional lawyers routinely have dozens of Word documents and PDFs open at a time. Not long-term viable with something like Electron.

VS Code, the aforementioned very performant Electron-based IDE, would like to differ

People praising VSCode's performance are probably better defined by having too fast computers than anything else, by all measures VSCode really isn't particularly lightweight nor performant.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#148

Post by pclmulqdq »

philsnow wrote: post #46
philsnow wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pine for a DSL for legal documents, both because it’s tedious and tiresome to parse prose like this: > Except for persons who manufacture, process, produce, or initially transfer for sale or distribution self-luminous products containing tritium, krypton-85, or promethium-147, and except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, any person is exempt from the requirements for a license set forth in section 81 of…

.... I think it means that you can make self-luminous products without needing a license, as long as you got them from somebody who does have a license.

I think that's pretty much it but IANAL. Tritium vials are available for sale for use in self-luminous products. The vials themselves are pretty expensive for what they are, and they come with documentation about who initially created the vial (or how it was imported).

I have a gun with a tritium-based night sight (so the sight dots glow with no light), and it came with documentation about the provenance of each of the three tritium vials.

I also believe it is a crime to break open a sealed tritium vial.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#149

Post by gamblor956 »

piker wrote: post #103
gamblor956 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word has offered redline merging for over several decades... There's a reason it's still the standard in the legal industry. The funny thing is that Word has tons of functionality that techies aren't aware of because they don't actually use it so they keep building products around features Word has had for years. And then they wonder why their startup failed to get any traction.

No, it doesn't work. I'm a long-term lawyer (and a techie), so I'm fully aware of Word's features and shortcomings. Most corporate lawyers use a product called Litera which is pretty good but a clunky COM add-in.

As I said in another comment: you're basing your entire product around doing one feature, but your competition is the entire package.

Redline doesn't appear to be working in Firefox in the web demo you have available. As that is supposed to be your killer feature I would say that your product isn't yet in MVP state. Also, the UI is quite bad and not the slightest bit intuitive; it's the kind of UI that only makes sense once you already have been using it for a while. As you pointed out, most firm lawyers already know and use Litera, so you need to not just be better at your one chosen feature but you also need to be easier and more intuitive to use and you're not.

It's okay for you to be offended by this criticism; this is your baby. But I'm being realistic here. You can choose to ignore critiques and die stillborn, or address these complaints (which other comments have also pointed out) and actually make something that a small but sustainable niche of lawyers will happily use.

Re: Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

#150

Post by brudgers »

piker wrote: post #135
brudgers wrote: post #131

I'm excited for the prospect of lawyers running Linux as their daily driver This does not benefit your customers in any way. It does not benefit their clients, either. And brain activity around it is a distraction from what your business does. At best. Good luck.

That's a fair take at surface level, but building a cross-platform application does allow for a broader class of contributors who can also dogfood the product. I'll have to do another write-up about it sometime, but a lot of Tritium's automated tests are written in docx files. So building for Linux as an afterthought allows an employee to develop from their preferred platform (if it's Linux) while still getting the f…

If your target customers care about linux and rust, you have probably over segmented the market.
Post reply on HN