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

I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

j0nah.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 483 posts

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#291

Post by chongli »

hedgehog wrote: post #254
chongli wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but why is the compositor dealing with this? Shouldn't the compositor simply be deciding which windows go where (X, Y, and Z positions) and leave the rendering to another API? Why does every different take on a window manager need to re-do all this work?

Turning the question around, what other part of the system _could_ do this job? And how would the compositor do any part of its job if it doesn't have access to both window contents and displays? I'm not super deep in this area but a straight-forward example of a non-managed app and a color-aware graphics app running on a laptop with an external display seems like it is enough to figure out how things need to go toge…

I'm questioning the idea that people should be writing compositors at all. Why doesn't Wayland itself do the compositing and let everyone else just manage windows?

It's like going to Taco Bell and they make you grind your own corn for your tortillas.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#292

Post by chrisweekly »

shomp wrote: post #263
chrisweekly wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember building really complex layouts w nested tables, and learning the hard way that going beyond 6 levels of nesting caused serious rendering performance problems in Netscape.

Six nesting levels for tables? Cool, what were you making?

Upromise. com -- a service for helping families save $ for college. Those layouts, which I painstakingly hand-crafted in HTML, caused the CTO to say "I didn't know you could do that with HTML", and was served to the company's first 10M customers.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#293

Post by handoflixue »

jacquesm wrote: post #178
andsoitis wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your test. Should we also apply to specific humans? We all stand on the shoulders of giants and learn by looking at others’ solutions.

That's true. But if we take your implied rebuttal then current level AI would be able to learn from current AI as well as it would learn from humans, just like humans learn from other humans. But so far that does not seem to be the case, in fact, AI companies do everything they can to avoid eating their own tail. They'd love eating their own tail if it was worth it. To me that's proof positive they know their output…

Equally, of course, all six year olds need to be trained by other six year olds; we must stop this crutch of using adult teachers

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#294

Post by handoflixue »

fpoling wrote: post #155
bsaul wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting hypothesis : that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code. Do you have papers to back this up ? That was also my reaction when i saw some really crazy accurate comments on some vibe coded piece of code, but i couldn't prove it, and thinking about it now i think my intuition was wrong (ie : LLMs do produce original complex code).

Pick up a book about programming from seventies or eighties that was unlikely to be scanned and feed into LLM. Take a task from it and ask LLM to write a program from it that even a student can solve within 10 minutes. If the problem was not really published before, LLM fails spectacularly.

It's telling that you can't actually provide a single concrete example - because, of course, anyone skilled with LLMs would be able to trivially solve any such example within 10 minutes.

Perhaps the occasional program that relies heavily on precise visual alignment will fail - but I dare say if we give the LLM the same grace we'd give a visually impaired designer, it can do exactly as well.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#295

Post by handoflixue »

jacquesm wrote: post #233
_heimdall wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very anecdotal, but interesting, counterexample. I recently asked Gemini 3 Pro to create an RSS feed reader type of experience by using XSLT to style and layout an OPML file. I specifically wanted it to use a server-side proxy for CORS, pass through caching headers in the proxy to leverage standard HTTP caching, and I needed all feed entries for any feed in the OPML to be combined into a single chronological…

Why do you believe that to be a counterexample? In fragmentary form all of these elements must have been present in the input, the question is really how large the largest re-usable fragment was and whether or not barring some transformations you could trace it back to the original. I've done some experiments along the same lines to see what it spits out and what I noticed is that from example to example the programm…

> In fragmentary form all of these elements must have been present in the input

Yes, and Shakespeare merely copied the existing 26 letters of the English alphabet. What magical process do you think students are using when they read and re-combine learned examples to solve assignments?

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#297

Post by handoflixue »

moron4hire wrote: post #270
bsaul wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting hypothesis : that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code. Do you have papers to back this up ? That was also my reaction when i saw some really crazy accurate comments on some vibe coded piece of code, but i couldn't prove it, and thinking about it now i think my intuition was wrong (ie : LLMs do produce original complex code).

No, the thing needing proof is the novel idea: that LLMs can produce original code.

What's your proof that the average college student can produce original code? I'm reasonably certain I can get an LLM to write something that will pass any test that the average college student can, as far as that goes.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#298

Post by dweekly »

thecr0w wrote: post #210
anorwell wrote: post #147

The article does not say at any point which model was used. This is the most basic important information when talking about the capabilities of a model, and probably belongs in the title.

Whoops, I'm very dumb. It's Opus 4.1. I updated the blog post and credited you for the correction. Thank you!

That model does not exist. Do you mean Opus 4.5?

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#299

Post by mmanfrin »

manbash wrote: post #202
wilsmex wrote: post #187

Well this was interesting. As someone who was actually building similar website in the late 90's I threw this into the Opus 4.5. Note the original author is wrong about the original site however: "The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element, and a tiling starfield GIF background.". This is not true, the site is built using tables, not positioning at all, CSS wasn't a th…

Ah, those days, where you would slice your designs and export them to tables.

I yearn for those days. CSS was a mistake. Tables and DHTML is all one needs.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#300

Post by jdironman »

I am going to give this a shot, but using a method I have been using lately with subagents. Basically, what I do is have it create an Architect, Executor, Adjudicator subagents. Architect breaks any ask down into atomic and testable subtasks that take 1-3 minutes 'dev' time. Executor (can spawn more than one) implements them. Then adjudicator reviews that they are to spec / requirements. This all happens in subagent files + a runbook.json in the .claude folder of a project. Its based on a paper* that was featured on here a while back actually [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09030

Post reply on HN