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jeff-hykin

37 karma · joined August 2, 2024

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jeff-hykin··on PeppyOS: A simpler alternative to ROS 2 (now with containers support)
Take a look at github.com/dimensionalos/dimos. We are a team making - not only a replacement for ROS - but one that can be easily vibe coded, and one with compatibility with ros and containers.

Always looking for testers and feedback if you want to influence the design/API.

jeff-hykin··on PeppyOS: A simpler alternative to ROS 2 (now with containers support)
As someone who has used ros2, I feel fine passing judgment; it is terrible. If its easier to write your own stack, do it. Your own stack will be easier to add to and maintain long term. The conceptual design (nodes) is great, its just the execution that is awful.
jeff-hykin··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
There's lots of alternatives. Others have mentioned invites and proof of work, and I'll mention a third alternative: a voucher system.

E.g. I make a new hackernews account, and say "just ask wikipedia, they will vouch for my new hackernews account". Then wikipedia checks if any of their accounts vouch for this new hackernews account. If a user with enough reputation on Wikipedia (e.g. your friends or one of your own wikipedia accounts) vouches for this new hackernews account then wikipedia tells hackernews "yes, that account is legit".

Hackernews knows the minimum amount possible about the new account. And while wikipedia knows something, they know WAY LESS than a full ID check. People can have multiple Wikipedia accounts.

And its a two way street; Wikipeida could ask hackernews about new accounts. Both sites would benefit from the collaboration.

Karma could actually become meaningful/useful for reputation checks.

The only unfortunate aspect is I'm not aware of any software tooling for such a system.

jeff-hykin··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
Using a real identity doesn't fix that problem either though: advertisers just pay real people in India to do ID checks.
jeff-hykin··on Exe.dev
I guess I'm the only one that appreciates the extremely minimal site design. Main page was interesting, clicked about, understood the idea, clicked login, enjoyed having no password, added a passkey, spun-up a server.

Did have an issue with auto-generated server name being taken (and similar names being taken). So there could be even less friction on that aspect. But I like the idea of not talking/listing features or showing diagrams, just give me access.

I mean I do need to know pricing, usage limits, uptime etc. But just let me easily find that after giving access.

jeff-hykin··on Show HN: Sparktype – a CMS and SSG that runs entirely in the browser
One of my long term goals is generating tauri builds on the web. E.g. click "build" and wasm cross compiles a .exe, a .app, and a .appimage which start downloading. Theres a long way to go before that's possible, but theres been pretty steady progress. Especially now that clang was compiled to wasm theres a real avenue to bootstrap everything.
jeff-hykin··on You can't parse XML with regex. Let's do it anyways
I ran into many similar problems, sadly I don't think your example is an outlier. I had to write my own simple HTML bundler (https://github.com/jeff-hykin/html-bundle), not cause I want to or because I care about bundling, but just to know that it was done correctly.

This is why I basically never trust npm packages unless I know the authors, like the standard library from the Deno team, or people like Ryan Carniato or Evan Yu.

jeff-hykin··on Show HN: I made an Animal Crossing style letter editor
For a full experience, you could combine this with animalese! A library that makes animal crossing talking sounds in the browser. https://github.com/jeff-hykin/animalese
jeff-hykin··on Knowledge-based society, my ass
They exist, I work with some of them. Its just unfortunate that they're the exception.
jeff-hykin··on Knowledge-based society, my ass
> The US can.

> Elsewhere, you are at risk of wasting important years of your life.

Unfortunately, as a 5th year PhD student in the US at a tier-1 STEM research university I'm disappointed to say: students here are very very very much at risk. I can't compare to universities in Europe, but I can say OP's story is the story of most students I know.

While I personally know a solid handful of exceptions, don't expect the US to meaningfully avoid what the OP describes. Regardless of country or university, your advisor is the ultimate decider of whether or not you will be a doll for them to "play scientist" with or be pushing the boundaries of science.

Of the exceptions I do know, while they are intelligent, it was not their intelligence or work ethic that allowed them to be exceptions.

jeff-hykin··on Knowledge-based society, my ass
> that account is eerily similar to the vast majority of technical PhD stories amongst my friends.

As a PhD student in my 5th year at a tier-1 U.S. STEM research university, I know a good handful of exceptions, exceptions who are not "playing scientist".

But, ...they are the exception. Sadly this story is painful, uncanny and downright spooky for how similar some of the details are to students I know too.

jeff-hykin··on Ask HN: How did you learn Regex?
What prompted you to read it?
jeff-hykin··on Ask HN: How did you learn Regex?
For context, AFAIK, I maintain the largest Textmate (read as "regex document") grammar in the world; the C++ textmate grammar for VS Code. (Don't mistake that as bragging, its a literally-unfixable dumpster fire) It has pretty much forced me to regularly use every regex feature, from recursive named backreferences to atomics and time complexity of lookahead's combinatorial explosions.

https://regexr.com/ is one of the most amazing interactive resources, I can't recommend enough. Back in the day I used it to go from beginer to intermediate. And while I never used this next site to learn, https://regex-vis.com/ is a great place to check out. From intermediate to master I've pretty much relied on rexegg.com/ for discovering the advanced stuff and engine differences. After that https://regex101.com/ was helpful for performance analysis. I first learned regex just mucking around in the CLI with some guidance from a programmer friend. Pure trial and error learning.

While I am inclined to say "the only way to learn regex is to use it", after reading the comments I must agree it would've been nice to have examples of pitfalls and misconceptions. There's a lot of them that can take a very very long time to learn without direct examples. I've never even heard of Jeff Fried (not till this post at least). So props to people who can actually read those kinds of books.

jeff-hykin··on Why CSV is still king
And they still don't fix the escaping problem. You might as well use a niche utf8 emoji as a separator. Editors at least know how to consistently render an emoji.
jeff-hykin··on Why CSV is still king
> Efforts to standardize them

I actually just finished a library to add proper typed parsing that works with existing CSV files. Its designed to be as compatible as possible with existing spreadsheets, while allowing for perfect escaping and infinite nesting of complex data structures and strings. I think its an ideal compromise, as most CSV files won't change at all.

https://github.com/jeff-hykin/typed_csv