Hacker News Reader

kbdon Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

Ugh that "Zig has function coloring" post again. The misunderstanding that post makes is that function coloring refers to at compile time. In other words, in Zig you don't need to write two versions of a function to use it in async vs sync context. Obviously the functions will have different runtime representations, so if you do something that cares about runtime calling conventions or w/e then yes you do need to worry about how the function is used, which is unavoidable.

kbdon Cheat Codes for Life I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 26

This is a bunch of fluff:

> 20. The best life experiences make you nostalgic later on.

Oh really!

> 21. Taking things for granted is a slow demise into madness. Be grateful.

Gratitude. So insightful.

Flagged.

kbdon Shumai: Fast Differentiable Tensor Library in TypeScript with Bun and Flashlight

It's interesting that this was built for Bun (vs other js runtimes) because of its specific properties. Cool to see Bun emerge early as Zig's "killer app".

kbdon Integrating with Fastmail

I’ve been meaning to switch to Fastmail from Google Apps forever, I really need to get on that…

kbdon How to Learn Modern Rust

I've been meaning to dig my teeth into rust for a long time. JT's intro to Rust videos[1] are first on my list for when I can devote the uninterrupted hours.

[1] https://youtu.be/gesNaLkUJeA

kbdon Go Developer Survey 2022 Q2 Results

Surprised to see language satisfaction so high. Error handling is very painful, and Go's own tools don't work together (eg. go mod tidy doesn't work properly with `go.work` since being released in 1.18). So many things in the language feel bad for no reason. At least they finally added generics!

kbdon Zig, the Small Language

> It’s a very appealing language to the modern low-end (and not only) applications

Current $work language is Go, which is so painful to use. I often look wistfully at all of Zig's features that improve on what Go does (particularly with regard to error handling). I hope in the future I can use Zig as a Go replacement and not just a C/C++ replacement.

kbdon Lapce Editor, Release v0.2.0

> how would you have avoided excessive startup times?

I don't think it's a problem? kitty terminal is programmed half in Python and is fast.

kbdon The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Makefiles

Just seems neat, but except for the dependencies it's just a way to package multiple shell scripts into one file, no?

I've thought about trying it out a few times but can never see its value over scripts in ./bin.

kbdon Asdf Performance

I've been avoiding using asdf because I hate its global shims. asdf-direnv may have a configuration now that doesn't require them, I need to take another look.

kbdon JiraCLI

I wan't happy with any of the existing tools so I started writing my own using https://github.com/andygrunwald/go-jira

JiraCLI seems to spend most of its code budget translating in between CLI args and JQL; that's the easy part.

Because every org uses Jira differently, it seems hard to write a generic tool that works well with your org.

kbdon Rust 1.63

> This contrasts with say, Bash developers [who] will write for what is actually available on the OSes people are running.

This is obvious, right? Rust is compiled with what you have on your machine, while Bash is interpreted and so depends on the capabilities on the target machine.

kbdon Litetree – SQLite with Branches

Came here to post this. I'm super interested in versioned databases. They provide so many things "you're going to want" (audit log of changes over time, point in time queries, undo/redo) "for free". Dolt is the one I'm most hopeful for.

kbdon Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

> at least there I can return in store

The return process through my nearby Kohl's is super easy.

kbdon Cheap junk flooding Amazon has brand names like MOFFBUZW

Happy to see this discussed on HN because I've constantly been stressing about this whenever I shop on Amazon. "All these brands are Chinese with random combinations of characters for a name"

I've looked at laptop cases. Here is a sampling of brand names: Lacdo, Voova, KINGSLONG, NIDOO, tomtoc, MOSISO, INVZI, XMBFZ, Arvok, Kinmac, Londo...

I've bought cases for my ipad and work laptop from Lacdo and one for my upcoming MBA from Voova. They're actually great, but I worry they're made with Uighur slave labor or toxic materials or something.

I'd prefer not to support Amazon, but where else am I supposed to find stuff like this? Do I buy my electronics (eg. Hue lights recently) from Best Buy instead, which has a worse return policy and whose Geek Squad worked with the FBI to violate customers' rights?

Edit: Also, a few days ago I went on a search for a desktop organizer. Here are some brand names: DALTACK, ARCOBIS, DEZZIE, Hossejoy, Greenco, AMERIERGO, SONGMICS, X-cosrack, Marbrasse, Citmage, Samstar, Beiz. It goes on forever.

I checked Walmart and Target too, but wound up buying this one from "Lavatino" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PL59RL6 The product is actually awesome. The compartments are the perfect size to hold my coasters and I organized everything that was loose on my desk with room to spare.

So, it feels great to get something I needed, but the whole process still feels bad somehow.

kbdon New in Calibre 6.0

https://github.com/kbd/binrun

I just wrote it today and still need to package it. I was tired of alt+tab + up arrow + enter constantly to execute builds etc. in my terminal. It calls out to a kitty wrapper script I wrote[1] that (eg) queries kitty for its running windows so that when I launch from vscode it can find the right kitty window for the vscode workspace and execute there...

Point is, Kovid Goyal is awesome and the extensibility he wrote into kitty makes all that possible. I didn't know he was also the author of Calibre for a long time.

[1] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/master/HOME/bin/kw

kbdon New in Calibre 6.0

Yeah kitty is amazing. I've been meaning to donate as a thank you. It's made so many things possible. In fact, because of it's flexibility, today I wrote a vscode extension that can use some of kitty's remote control features so I can execute things in my terminal of choice straight from my editor of choice.

kbdon New MacBook Air with M2

I can't see the value in getting the 2-port adapter over the 67w fast charge one. You could always charge your phone through your laptop if you really don't have a second power brick.

kbdon New MacBook Air with M2

I compared the 14" Pro to the M2 Air and here's how it looks to me:

    MBP 14 base M1 Pro, 32G ram, 512hd = $2400.
    MBA upgraded M2,    24G ram, 512hd = $1900.

Note the Air is almost a pound lighter!

kbdon New MacBook Air with M2

I bought a Mac Mini in 2018 to replace my 2010 Macbook Pro. So that laptop lasted 8 years. The only reason I didn't buy a laptop instead of the Mini is I refused to buy anything with a touch bar. This is my first new personal laptop in 12 years and I'm so excited.

kbdon Gun owners’ private information leaked by California Attorney General

Gun advocates: "registration is problematic for many reasons as the data can be abused/leaked"

prediction comes true

Gun control advocate: "good job now they'll use this as an example"

Yep.

kbdon Xlite: Query Excel and Open Document spreadsheets as SQLite virtual tables

> Do you have a workaround workflow in the meantime?

Yeah in the VisiData ticket I link to a post[1] with some code to handle hidden rows and columns in Pandas+openpyxl.

[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-load-excel-files-with-...

kbdon Xlite: Query Excel and Open Document spreadsheets as SQLite virtual tables

Sweet. Here’s my open issue with VisiData about this: https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/issues/1398

There’s a sample file at the end of that thread.

kbdon Xlite: Query Excel and Open Document spreadsheets as SQLite virtual tables

Do any of these tools take into account hidden Excel rows? It’s a constant frustration.

kbdon Deno raises $21M

> I never want to write Go that interacts with a database again.

Why? I’ve been using sqlx and it seems fine.

kbdon Association between ADHD medication and depression: A 10-year follow-up

This was positive at least:

> After MPH treatment discontinuation... returned to baseline levels by 31 to 60 days

kbdon Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

Totally. In fact, if expressions are the very first example of “if” in the Zig manual

https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#if

Also, Zig is so into expressions over statements that they plan to remove “function definition as statement”, which I think is awesome. In other words, conceptually function definition is a compile-time expression that creates the function.

Edit: here’s that Zig rfc:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1717#

kbdon Hexwords: Hex colors that are similar to words

#A55E55 (asses) is brown. Oh... wait.

kbdon Joy: A maximalist web framework for Lisp aficionados

I too really enjoy Fennel. I never want to write plain Lua again.

> It doesn't introduce any extra complexity, perf, or debugging concerns;

Well, in my experience line numbers in error messages still don't always line up :(

kbdon Kagi search and Orion browser enter public beta

I was going to say that unfortunately Vimium, Dark Reader, and 1Password support are non-negotiable, but the browser evidently has its own built-in dark mode, and they claim to support both Chrome and Firefox extensions as well?

I'm happy to provide non-Chromium traffic from either Firefox or something else; I'm increasingly running into things (often corporatey things) that only work in Chrome.

It also sounds like they use your icloud for syncing things like bookmarks and sharing tabs and use the built-in password manager, so if you're Apple-only this is a great fit. I hope the tab sharing will be more reliable than Firefox's has been.

Waiting until I can brew install, but looks promising.