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kugurerdem

628 karma · joined September 2, 2022

Do not hesitate to contact me, I always like getting to know new people!

Website: rugu dot dev

E-mail: ugur at rugu dot dev

Github: kugurerdem

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kugurerdem··on Show HN: Mark Scroll Positions
Thanks!

I was not aware that Vimium could already do what I tried to accomplish but to give you an answer: I made it possible that marks can be properly re-named and have their note taking place. You also have a management page where you can see all the marks that you have set for all different sites. Other than these, nothing so fancy.

There is still lots of room for improvement to make the UI/UX better.

kugurerdem··on Show HN: Mark Scroll Positions
Wow, I did not know this despite using it for a long time. It perfectly makes sense though. Thanks for letting us know :)
kugurerdem··on Banned for Self-Promo
I think the important point of the essay was that as long as you are not exploiting anything and trying to add value to the platform, it should not matter whether you are promoting yourself or not.

And yeah, I think HN does a good job of balancing the measures taken against spammers/exploiters vs. providing a place for you to share your essays.

kugurerdem··on Banned for Self-Promo
Yeah, I think the important thing here (and the point of the essay as well) is that whether the content you share is yours or others' should not matter much as long as you provide value to the platform.

This being said, I also understand having some measures against spammers, and so on...

I think HN does a good job of balancing the measures taken against spammers vs. providing a place for you to share your essays. Especially compared to some of the internet communities I've seen or heard so far. As long as you are an active community member who is not here only to promote yourself, sharing your essays occasionally seems to be perfectly ok.

kugurerdem··on Show HN: YouTube Is Great Again
Just checked Stylus and it seems exactly what I needed before! There are always some UI elements that you want to get rid of. :)
kugurerdem··on Rust for JavaScript Developers (2019)
Thanks! :)

Currently reading the well-known "The Rust Book". But, I will read this as a quick guide as well.

kugurerdem··on Ask HN: What's your favourite programming language? And why?
TLDR: I like Javascript because it is the PL that allows me to get things done in the fastest way. But other than that, I like Go, because of its simplicity. And also like the mindset that functional programming languages like Haskell provide.

---

I like Javascript. Not because it is elegant, performant, or a well-designed programming language, to the contrary, it is one of the programming languages that are full of foot guns. I like Javascript because it is one of those PLs where you have no problems with finding the libs you need, can get things done in a very fast & efficient manner (once you know your stuff), and so on.

I try to avoid side effects as much as possible and JS is not the best PL when it comes to it, but the thing is it is elastic enough that you can still write the way you like to work. I can still follow the "functional core imperative shell" mindset, and use the "good parts" [1] of the language.

I also like Go, because of its simplicity. And find the mindset that is provided by functional programming languages interesting.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Good-Parts-Douglas-Crockfo...

kugurerdem··on Think Twice, Code Once
Nice essay. I too like to write and rethink before starting implementation stuff.

I think one issue here is that it is very hard to predict domain-specific problems until you encounter them. If you're working in a domain you are already experienced in, a top-down approach will likely work fine. However, if you are attempting something new, you're bound to run into unforeseeable implementation problems. This is why I believe improving your skills related to iteration speed is just as important as planning.

People often think that the top-down approach is just better than the bottom-up approach, but I think there are lots of cases where the bottom-up approach is just as important as the top-down approach. See the "Top Down versus Bottum Up" section from The Art of UNIX Programming book. [1]

[1]: https://www.arp242.net/the-art-of-unix-programming/#id289955...

kugurerdem··on Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals
That's one of the problems with the concept of "anticharity" conveyed in the essay that costco shared.

Using positive/negative punishment (a thing being taken from you or a bad thing happening to you) can cause more harm than good especially if the harm caused exceeds the benefits obtained from achieving the goal.

kugurerdem··on Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals
I think you are right. In this case, knowing that money will go to a neutral actor instead of a charity might be a better solution. Interesting.

Good essay by the way.

kugurerdem··on Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals
I think sending the money lost on funds to charities makes more sense as sharing the money on the pot among the ones who succeed could result in bad actors trying to exploit the system by always checking their goals as completed.

By sending lost money to charities you eliminate the positive reward factor of the game (which is the main incentive for exploiters).

kugurerdem··on Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals
Interesting idea. At first, I thought you could only lose money if you didn't accomplish your goals. But then I realized that money was being shared among the people who joined the same challenge. This mechanism not only disincentivizes not accomplishing your goals but also incentivizes accomplishing your goals.

Also curious about whether there is any form of verification of whether someone accomplished their goal. If not, this could result in bad actors trying to exploit the system by always checking their goals as completed. One potential way of getting rid of exploiters would be to remove the positive reward factor of the game, for example, the money lost by the participants could be sent into verified charity funds instead of being shared among the people who joined the pot.

I also have some doubts about the efficiency of mixing external motivations (in this case losing money or increasing a bit) with internal motivations (the goal itself). But this is another topic for discussion.

Anyway, this is a very interesting idea nonetheless. Good job! :)

kugurerdem··on My Gnome Workspace Tips
My system with dwm tiling manager is similar to this workflow. Quick workspace switching, keyboard shortcuts, and instant app launching are valuable regardless of your desktop environment.

I remember having a friend who was using a MacOS and was not even using a shortcut for focusing/opening the app launcher, it was so frustrating to watch him clicking stuff. :D

kugurerdem··on Importance of Intentionality in Digital Consumption
This is an essay where I try to combine my thoughts on mindfulness, intentionality, and focus with respect to devices we use regularly.

I would also like to hear other peoples thoughts on this matter. What actions do you take to protect your mind and reduce distractions?

kugurerdem··on Can Toxic Tech Projects Make You a Stronger Person? [video]
This reminds me a quote of a Stoic philosopher:

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials. – Seneca.

kugurerdem··on Put That Framework Down Before Someone Gets Hurt
I liked the distinction made between frameworks and libraries, especially with regards to their level of engagement. Once you start using frameworks, you become more dependent on them than you would if you were using libraries. Nowadays, people often choose frameworks for everything so it's started to become very common to get absorbed in the details of the framework you are working with rather than the actual problem at hand.

> It’s easy to add complexity as you need it to accomplish your goals. It’s much harder to remove it.

Very good saying.

kugurerdem··on Pandoc
My problem with this method is that it's not convenient especially when there are lots of paragraphs. When you highlight all the paragraphs and press shift J, it unwraps everything into a single line. This results different paragraphs ending up on the same line. You also need to undo the changes you made to avoid disturbing the original file content.
kugurerdem··on Pandoc
> I had a script that piped to curl to send, Mail.app for downloading via POP and Vim to read/write

Wow, this is very interesting, and I might even try it at some point. It might have been a bit challenging to sync and read the emails though, but the sending part seems nice.

Was the reason for why you gave up related to syninc emails?

kugurerdem··on Pandoc
A very interesting coincidence indeed. Nice to see that others have also thought about the same problem and have found solutions similar to mine. :)
kugurerdem··on Pandoc
Nice point! I agree that it's a bloated method, however, this was the best solution I could come up with at that point of time. I am certain that there are better solutions, it's just me who could not find it. I went with this solution anyways since it was still an improvement compared to my previous method in vim which involved setting the text width to a large number like 9999, highlighting the text I wanted to unwrap and then typing 'gqq' for formatting, and then yanking it. And of course, I had to re-wrap the text if I wanted to maintain the original format of the text file.

You are absolutely right and I understand what you mean though. I am open to trying other alternatives and I should try to come up with a better method to workaround this problem.

Never tried Emacs, just went with Vim so far. Did not know that Emacs had already an elegant solution for this problem. Nice! :)

kugurerdem··on Pandoc
Whoa, I use Shellcheck a lot and did not even know it was written in Haskell.
kugurerdem··on Pandoc
I used to use Mutt, but now I don't because my email has its own special domain, and the email hosting service I use doesn't let me export IMAP and POP3 details unless I pay them.

Currently, I just open vim in the terminal, write what I need, then copy the text. I open dmenu using a shortcut, type something like "unwr", which is sufficient for selecting the "unwrap-clipboard" script of mine, press enter, which unwraps the text on the clipboard. Finally, I paste it in the email client.

I know it might seem a bit tricky, but it's better than what I did before. I used to set the textwidth to a really large number like 9999, highlight the text I wanted to unwrap, and then type 'gqq' for formatting. And don't forget, you also have to wrap the text back if you don't want to change the original format of the text file you wrote.

You can use soft-wrapping in vim, but I don't prefer it. Soft-wrapping is not as convenient to me as hard-wrapped text when using vim shortcuts. For instance, if you are using soft-wrapping in vim and you press 'o,' the insertion mode will start at the end of the paragraph because vim will consider the entire paragraph as a single line. However, there are many situations where I only want to insert text in the middle of a paragraph. You will also most likely set j to act like gj and k to act like gk, to make the cursor move between lines that are visually separated but actually form a single line. I don't like this either.

kugurerdem··on Pandoc
This is one of the most useful programs that I use.

I use it for turning .md files into .html or .pdf.

I use it for creating slides with it.

I even use it for fixing the hard-wrapped text I write in vim before sending emails. When I write in vim, I prefer the text to be hard-wrapped, but for emails, I like it better when the text is not wrapped. I recommend arp242's essay explaining the problem with hard-wrapping [1], but basically the way I workaround this problem is using a local script which uses pandoc at some point [2].

Overall, pandoc is really good.

[1]: https://www.arp242.net/email-wrapping.html

[2]: https://github.com/kugurerdem/dotfiles/blob/2d68357273e1bc30...

kugurerdem··on If Lisp is so great
I actually really liked the rhetoric made in the essay. The only problem is that the title may imply that this essay is about Lisp, while it's more about the ambiguity that are caused by words like "best".

The key takeaway of the essay is that: When someone questions why something supposed to be "best" isn't widely used, the answer is not solely technical. It also have sociological, philosophical, economic, and political aspects.

kugurerdem··on No one wants to read your tutorial, until they do
This essay was quite good that I will even share it with my friends who are interested in writing.

I have a few points to add though.

> People don't read tutorials unless they need them. Average people, that is. Some people will be superfans and read everything, and that's great. Your average reader only wants solutions when something's broken, much like going to the doctor only when sick.

I believe that many people's tutorials are not getting much attention exactly due to this reason. Most of the time, people choose topics that have already been extensively covered by numerous other people on the internet; this not only creates competition but also makes their tutorials redundant.

When creating tutorials, either you need to do a better job than everyone else, or choose a topic that has not been widely covered yet, or add a unique style to your tutorials. Otherwise, you are not likely to success.

> Write clearly, keep it focused and short, avoid stories and anecdotes

Sure, but this isn't always the case. Stories and anecdotes often make your essays unique and reinforce the point you're trying to make. For example if you're telling your audience to stop using a certain practice and to adopt a better pattern, it's often best to illustrate your point with interesting stories and anecdotes.

> Longreads, on the other hand, are written for those dedicated followers---and to gain new ones. They're the articles you should share with everyone, and share again when it's been a while. They're what you should include in your email newsletter, what should be featured on your blog's RSS feed if you have one. They should get shared in any community where you think they'll get an audience.

It's smart to make a clear distinction between longreads and tutorial essays, particularly from a marketing perspective. I appreciate it a lot.

Based on my observations, most people who consistently follow me do so because they enjoy my writing style and the topics I discuss. Unless you are creating a systematic series of tutorials or content that you believe people actually need, it is your style that will attract followers.

kugurerdem··on 85% of YouTube videos are less 1000 views. Search over least viewed ones
It's actually a very interesting idea.

It would be great if a similar product exists that essentially performs the same task but with respect to specific criteria. This could prove to be useful in identifying potential gem-like channels that are not yet discovered.

kugurerdem··on Why the tech media taste all the same?
The essay starts by making an interesting distinction between various aspects of technological markets, but then it suddenly ends.

Personally, I would like to hear more about how "discussing the social implications of technology, is more relevant than focusing solely on products like iPhone, Android, or macOS."

kugurerdem··on Much Ado about Null
Didn't expect to read something so enlightening.

I particularly liked the emphasis made on the difference between total functions and partial functions. It explains really well how errors could be managed either by using sentinel values or by throwing errors, the advantages of null, the problems about it, and how Monads can help it.

kugurerdem··on Yet Another Dotfiles Manager
I was searching tools for managing dotfiles, and I came across yadm. I still haven't tried it, but I am considering to give it a shot. It's git-based, supports system-specific files or templates, private data encryption, bootstrapping and hook mechanisms.
kugurerdem··on Debloating My Android Phone with ADB
I use the same approach for maintaining a list of the Arch packages I use. This makes it very easy for me to install the programs that I use alot on a fresh system.
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