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silasdb

340 karma · joined August 1, 2019

silas.net.br
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silasdb··on Show HN: Chawan TUI web browser
Wonderful! Thanks!

I see you don't use termcap/ncurses anymore. Do you perform terminal handling yourself directly?

Thanks again!

silasdb··on If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
This is a great website—it reminds me of To Scale: The Solar System [1], a mini-documentary where people attempt to build a true-to-scale model of the Solar System. It makes me feel like a tiny speck of dust, floating in the vastness of nowhere...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg

silasdb··on EmpireMUD: A player-driven city-builder
Game webpage: https://empiremud.net/
silasdb··on Ask HN: Good Books on the History of Technology?
Any suggestions about the history of navigation? I have always been amazed by caravels and ~1500 advances on ships and navigation technology, but never dived into the subject.
silasdb··on Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)
For an alternative implementation that aims to be compatible with POSIX (not necessarily compatible with GNU coreutils), see: https://github.com/GrayJack/coreutils
silasdb··on Austral: A systems language with linear types and capabilities
Hi. Thanks for the great work and great write up!

At a first glance, I only see advantages with this approach. What would be the caveats of using Austral instead of Rust (disregarding the ecosystem and toolchain factors)?

silasdb··on Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
Matrix Docker Ansible Deploy [1] allows me to unify all chat networks that I use under one single server (and, therefore, one single client), avoiding switching windows. I do believe it saved me hundred of hours...

[1] https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

silasdb··on MikeOS – simple x86 assembly language operating system
Can you provide the link to Mike's podcast?
silasdb··on Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?
Others have said that, but I'd like to put emphasis on getting everything in source control. If other developers don't know about source control (!) they will love it. I'd spawn my own local source control solution for my own control and after a few changes, show them the advantages.

Second: making a change without tests is like walking in the dark without a flashlight. Having tests is a very important thing.

Read Working Effectively With Legacy Code", by "Michael Feathers, one of the best books I've read that really can help in situations like that. In summary, it boils down to having tests to aid your changes you need to make.

silasdb··on Uno platform: Build single-codebase applications across all platforms
Is it somehow comparable to Haxe? (https://haxe.org/)
silasdb··on Ask HN: How to level up your technical writing?
Suggestions:

https://diataxis.fr/

https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/09/teach-dont-tell/

silasdb··on Emacs for Professionals
After years using vim and variations (vis), I decided to give Emacs another try, this time using Spacemacs.

I'm a bit surprised nobody mentioned Spacemacs (https://www.spacemacs.org) as a very good alternative for vim users that want to learn Emacs. I'm very satisfied with it, although it is slow to start, but I'm going to try Emacs server/client that I just heard about in this discussion.

Have anybody tried Spacemacs?

silasdb··on An example of why RSS is useful and important
https://pypi.org/project/rss2email/
silasdb··on Analog: A simple productivity system
A nice "analog" producvity system with gameficiation features: https://thetodaysystem.com/
silasdb··on The enigmatic Portuguese R (2013)
After TV has became almost universal, there is indeed a unification of accents. I believe it also happens in other countries as well. For Brazil, I believe it is not "accent-free brazilian portuguese" popularized by the media, but rather accent from the southeast region, specially Rio-São Paulo (the most economically developed region) and totally excludes beautiful accents like northeast (Nordeste) and south (Sul) ones which rarely find a way on media with exception of local TV shows.
silasdb··on My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)
I'm a heavy user of todotxt. For me, the greatest thing about keeping everything in a txt file is that it is very easy to build your own extensions with a combination of sh, awk, grep, etc.

For calendars, the problem is a bit more problematic, though. Yes, there are things like calendar[1] and remind[2], but nobody seems to use them nowadays and in the mobile world there is no app to process them. Do you know of any existing solutions for calendars that work like todotxt?

[1] https://man.netbsd.org/calendar.1

[2] https://linux.die.net/man/1/remind

silasdb··on My collection of fun and interesting hacking/coding movies and literature
Not a hacking movie, but for a good comedy TV show about IT, I would recommend The IT Crowd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd
silasdb··on Show HN: MathLingua – A Structured Language of Mathematics
Great project. BTW, I'm more and more interested in how to produce math for blind people. Although there is some recommendation about writring math in MathML, few (none?) screenreaders actually support it. Could this project help or could you tell me other resources about it? Thanks.
silasdb··on An HTTP server in a single .c file
I'm using it as well and it is great. The well designed approach to virtual hosts and CGI is relly awesome. Zero configuration needed.
silasdb··on Fossil Chat
I decided to give it a try on a new project and, although it seemed strange at first (coming from years using git), I fell in love with it and I'm converting all my own projects to fossil. It does everything other SCMs do. It also can do everything git does, but in a saner way.

Also, the self-hosting capabilities in a few MB binary are astonishing and you just don't pay for what you don't use. In my own repositories, I don't use chat nor wiki pages, but I do use forum, the ticket system and technotes.

The community and developers are very nice to answer questions too, and are open for suggestions. There is room for even further improvement and it is more a matter of someone showing up willing to develop the specific feature of the project.

silasdb··on Git over Email? Convienence over Coolness
Thanks for the link! At the bottom part of it, there are links to other articles that are very interesting too. I'm recently more interested in leaving GitHub and focusing in email driven development so any article on this subject is welcome.
silasdb··on Edbrowse, a Command Line Editor Browser
Thanks for posting this. I've actually seen it many years ago but never tried it. I'm not blind but I'm actually interesting in making UIs for blind people and the CLI seems to look perfect for this. Can you confirm that?

BTW, do you know if TUI programs (using curses/ncurses or related) are usable for blind users?

silasdb··on Mnm – an open source project to replace email and SMTP
There are many pessimistic comments here. I'd like to go to the opposite direction.

First, I think the intention is very good. There are some problems with email that I don't know if they are possible to fix. Yes, JMAP [1] try to fix some of these problems for clients, but other flaws cannot be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility. Even unsuccesful, audacious experiments like that bring about discussions about what are the limits of current technology, what alternatives we have and what alternatives we can build.

Anyway, the best solution for asynchronous communication is still email. An incompatible solution would have to provide a compatibility layer for that. People refer Matrix here but I've always thought that, although many teams have adopted Matrix as a solution for general communication, it is a chat platform and not a replacement for asynchronous communication.

I just glanced over the site so I may sound repetitive: as a suggestion, I'd recommend adding some screenshots of client applications, diagrams explaning how mnm works, an explanation about federation and something that highlights differences to email.

[1] https://jmap.io

silasdb··on Distcc – distribute builds across multiple machines simultaneously (2006)
Not the same thing. distcc is a wrapper to a compiler that can work with any build system. Just use CC=distcc.
silasdb··on Show HN: Hystoria – a Reddit-like site where all posts must be 5+ years old
I looked for RSS but I didn't find it. Doesn't it provide any feed?
silasdb··on Can Esperanto Make a Comeback? (2015)
I find automatic translation from English to Portuguese very good, but those are not that different from each other. What is the state of automatic translation between two languages that are very far and different from each other like Chinese (a sino-tibetan language) and English (an indo-european language)? I thought that ML and all the recent research on that could close the gap in this regard even for such very distant languages.
silasdb··on NetBSD Code Study
Yes, this is just general information on x86 boot process, but it shares some things with NetBSD boot process, specially how the boot is divided in phases.

When I first started this doc, it was just personal writing, because of that some links are scattered and there are TODO entries laying around. I'll fix that one day :-)

silasdb··on NetBSD Code Study
Author here. Thanks for posting this. This is something I wanted to continue. The plan is still discussing NetBSD source code, as much as I can. Reading NetBSD code is a great way to learn operating systems! :-)
silasdb··on Server.c – 100 Lines of C in a Closet
Reddit discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/gdy2av/serve...
silasdb··on Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?
I have some stories about old code but this is a nice one: in my old job I've needed to write technical documentation about a GUI we had developed. This consisted in making numbered labels in pictures using Gimp, embedding the pictures in a LibreOffice document (at the time, OpenOffice) and writing what each item was about.

I soon got tired of drawing circles and numbers and decided to write a quick Gimp plugin that does just that:

https://github.com/silasdb/mark-number-circles/blob/master/m...

I new nothing about Scheme at the time (the script is written in an imperative style) but I still think it is one of the smallest and most useful pieces of code I've ever written and from time to time I get an email from a random person from the world thanking for this small script :-)

EDIT: fix English

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