The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
For the past two years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a passive aggressive win-back campaign from Dropbox. The feud originally started when I migrated away from Dropbox and hence canceled my subscription while leaving them saddled with over a terabyte of my data to carry forever, like a camel in the digital…
Reproducible builds configured in Lua
There was a time when software (and games! Games are just software for fun!) were distributed on DVD. A physical disk that you would insert into your system ...
Programming today is stressful — way more stressful than I remember it in the 90s and early 2000s when I was just starting out.
Most speakers emit sound in all directions because they are relatively small compared to the wavelength. Audible sounds have wavelengths of up to several meters, so an acoustically "large" speaker might not even fit in your house.
T here is a wide range of input mechanisms for computers, starting with keyboards (which are relatively mature) and extending to various types of neural interfaces (currently under research). Speech lies somewhere on this spectrum with a lot of promises but still not much to show for. Keeping accessibility aspects…
6 Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Shell Scripts
Ongoing According to Repology , the latest packaged Git for Windows is version . To keep up with releases of Git for Windows, which includes Git Bash and the Mintty terminal emulator , see github.com/git-for-windows/git/releases or groups.google.com/g/git-for-windows .
Different weights are cool, but the real question is whether your font can swash.
It's hard to make progress on side projects sometimes. Getting started is easy when we see the bright future of the project. Then somewhere in the middle, we get stuck in lists of tasks to do, a long way in and still a long way from the finish line.
Over the past few years, it seems like the rate at which new CLI tools are being written has picked back up again, accelerating after seeing relatively little activity between ~1995 and ~2015. I’d like to talk about this trend I’ve noticed, where people are rewriting and rethinking staples of the command line…
When I was a kid, my sister and I had a tower of VHS tapes we watched endlessly. Fast-forward to today, and my children's movie collection is vastly different. It's completely digital and dispersed across services. I wanted to recreate the tangibl...
I am Dan, full stack software engineer.
For a few years now I have been working on the Haskell Language Server (HLS), and the lsp library for the LSP protocol and writing LSP servers. Unsurprisingly, I have developed some opinions about the design of the LSP! Recently I gave a talk about HLS and LSP at the Haskell Ecosystem Workshop at Zurihac 2024. One…
Keeping your codebase searchable will make your maintenance life easier in the long run. A collection of guidelines to keep your code base greppable
The 10 most frequent letters in English are ETAOINSRHL . This layout gets most of those letters onto the home row while making use of existing muscle memory. According to Carpalx , QWERTY-Flip scores about as well as the famous Dvorak layout, but while Dvorak is very hard to learn, with QWERTY-Flip you'll be up and…
From time to time, people ask me what I use to power my blog, maybe because they like the minimalist form it has. I tell them it’s a bad idea and that I use the Erlang compiler infrastructure for it, and they agree to look elsewhere.
There are several popular meta schemas out there. Open Graph may be the best supported, but if you want your meta data to be picked up by a particular service you might need to do a bit of research. Or support them all.
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
I’ve tried Notion, Obsidian, Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, Jotter and endless other tools to keep me organised and sure, Notion has stuck around the most because we use it for client stuff, but for todo lists, all of the above are way too complicated. I’ve given up this week and gone back to paper […]
Like Heroku, but you own it.
You know the nagging feeling that your product, project, or company has become more complicated than it needs to be? You can solve many problems and get better results by doing something unthinkable to many: removing parts that once seemed essential. My crusade against complexity continues with this short story
About a month ago [1] , I was onboarding a friend into one of my side project codebases and she asked me why I was using a particular type of UUID. I'd heard about this type while working on that project, and it's really neat. So instead of hogging that knowledge for just us, here it is: some good uses for different…
I’ve long been enamored of the sparkline, a graphical device which its inventor Edward Tufte defines thusly: A sparkline is a small intense, simple, word-sized graphic with typographic resolu…
Generate calendar entries from an image using Anthropic Claude 3.5. Convert lesson dates in an image to a calendar ICS file
Reuniting AirPods with a few clever tricks
Aerc is a TUI email client. It had its first release ~4 years ago. This makes it a “baby” compared to most of its “competitors” (Pine was released in 1992, Mutt in 1995). I heard about this program shortly after its first release but ignored it at the time, because I was still reasonably happy with Thunderbird and it…
My thoughts on Rye and uv.
A journey through text editors and how I landed on Zed after years of Neovim
