Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library • Hacker News Board

Re: Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

#71

Post by avsm » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 3:43 PM UTC

aquariusDue wrote: post #18

avsm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a full terminal implementation of Bonsai as well. I actually use it in my personal workflow these days to manage my contacts database! https://anil.recoil.org/notes/aoah-2025-9

Unrelated but what do you use to manage your personal website? I love how everything is interconnected.

Custom infrastructure; I use my site as a playground for various things over the years. It ran as the first MirageOS unikernel for many years, and recently it's been running on a zero-allocation OxCaml webserver https://anil.recoil.org/notes/oxcaml-httpz to help me get to grips with the new extensions.

Re: Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

#72

Post by monooso » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

phplovesong wrote: post #57

cachius wrote: post #55

What does JaneStreet do besides sponsoring nerdy Youtube channels and writing UI libraries?

[flagged]

This doesn't seem quite as clear-cut as you're making out.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) have accused Jane Street (JS) of market manipulation, JS claims it was legitimate arbitrage, and the case is still ongoing [1].

As I understand it, the ban only applied to Indian securities (not Asian markets as a whole), and was lifted back in July 2025 after JS paid ~$560 million (the alleged ill-gotten gains) into an escrow fund. They don't appear to have resumed trading, though [2].

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-trading-firm-jan...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

Re: Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

#73

Post by wbl » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

phplovesong wrote: post #57

cachius wrote: post #55

What does JaneStreet do besides sponsoring nerdy Youtube channels and writing UI libraries?

[flagged]

Trading the underlying to offset your derivative position isn't fraud.

Re: Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

#74

Post by andor » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

morkalork wrote: post #58

cachius wrote: post #55

What does JaneStreet do besides sponsoring nerdy Youtube channels and writing UI libraries?

Print money?

Governments print money, high frequency traders extract money. They would say that they provide liquidity to the market as a service.

Re: Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

#75

Post by tjoff » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

ambicapter wrote: post #53

jackcarter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any professional software that wouldn't benefit from high information density? Most software design is optimized for the non-users who have to approve it.

"non-users" are also big targets for software. If you run a software business, chances are you want people who've never used your software to start using your software. In that case, discoverability trumps high information density.

It only adds discoverability for the things that fit the screen. In other words, you have to make it simple. I.e. the lazy way to make something "user-friendly", do as little as possible and force the user to adapt to your ways instead.

Re: Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

#76

Post by vovavili » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

phplovesong wrote: post #57

cachius wrote: post #55

What does JaneStreet do besides sponsoring nerdy Youtube channels and writing UI libraries?

[flagged]

>Janestreet PR team is downvoting. Like always, radio silence and just downvotes.

You're being downvoted for having a needlessly confrontational underinformed hot take on a quant trading firm that is essentially a market maker.

Re: Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

#77

Post by bsmith89 » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

There's a great Signals and Threads (Jane Street's Podcast) episode about this work: https://signalsandthreads.com/building-a-ui-framework/

Re: Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

#78

Post by Onavo » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

Considering how ridiculously verbose their library is compared to React/Vue it's a good thing we have LLMs to deal with the boilerplate now.

Re: Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

#79

Post by vips7L » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

philipwhiuk wrote: post #13

flufluflufluffy wrote: post #11

> And because Bonsai is written in OCaml, it becomes possible to use the same language and types on both the backend and frontend. Finally! I was waiting for this to become possible!

Similar attempts include Scalajs. The general challenge becomes integrating the fractional front-end code written in your backend-language that compiles to JS with the rest of the JS ecosystem. JaneStreet have a love of writing their own stuff from scratch so it doesn't apply to them but it might to you. Hence most people end up with frontend-as-backend rather than backend-as-frontend.

KotlinJs and ClojureJs too. You always end up having to write wrappers or dealing with problems that would just work if you just used normal js/ts.

Re: Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

#80

Post by strongly-typed » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

bsmith89 wrote: post #77

There's a great Signals and Threads (Jane Street's Podcast) episode about this work: https://signalsandthreads.com/building-a-ui-framework/

A framing from that podcast that helped me better understand the role of Bonsai is that it's really a framework for building incremental distributed state machines.