Hacker News Reader

techtalskyon Mago: A fast PHP toolchain written in Rust

It's more like `ruff` for PHP.

techtalskyon Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system

I was really excited when I read your post. I've long looked for a good MarkDown -> PDF or RTF workflow, so I gave KeenWrite a quick try. At first glance I really thought I'd be exactly the user for this tool, but quickly realized that the discoverability of KeenWrite isn't nearly good enough.

Upon launch, I'm presented with three panes. I've got a MarkDown authoring interface and an output preview. Great. I drop in some markdown and it renders.

Then I have a "variables.yaml" pane open with three little controls, "Create", "Rename", and "Delete". Ok... I'm editing a YAML file. But it's a clunky nested node editor. People can edit a MarkDown file but you don't think it's faster to simply let people edit YAML in text?

So, I get it, I'm editing a YAML file that stores metadata about... SOMETHING about my document output. Except I don't have a single example of a variable. Not a single one. I have no idea what variables are available and exploring every single menu option tells me nothing. Help only provides a small about page with no link to the documentation.

So, I go to keenwrite.com and click documentation. It takes me to a single GitLab readme that talks about different command line launch options, and then finally how to begin to use metadata, but the options all revolve around creating an .Rmd file and using R or creating a "definitions.yaml" instead of a "variables.yaml" in a seperate editor.

This is the moment I realize there's no chance this tool is going to be useful for me.

techtalskyon A password generator inspired by the Xkcd password spec

A note that if you have "uv" installed you can execute arbitrary python packages with the "uvx" command without needing to clone a repo:

    uvx --from git+https://github.com/beala/xkcd-password xkpa -h

techtalskyon Show HN: A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify

There's proof!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vskQsSJ_IJg&ab_channel=hirud...

Watching a playthrough I was surprised to see I'd never seen anyone get past level two.

techtalskyon The Atlantic Did Me Dirty

The author clearly needed to write the article they pitched, even if that wasn't supported by this source.

techtalskyon Amazon Pharmacy

Probably not. PillPack is MDP: multi-dose packaging, which is little packets containing multiple medications. All they're advertising here is regular bottled medications, which is a much easier-to-solve mail-order prescription problem.

techtalskyon You Don't Batch Cook When You're Suicidal (2020)

At the same time, Reddit exists, and this is a community of people created by a VC company explicitly to have wonky tech discussions with other professionals called "Hacker News". It's fine every once in a while but I don't want this to be filled with generic human interest stories.

techtalskyon Interesting Programming Languages

Good call on Inform. It's certainly both novel and useful.

techtalskyon Joy of Being a Woman in Her 70s

Your anecdotal experience isn't an effective counterpoint though. Here's a citation in the neighborhood: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/12/05/americans-see-diff...

techtalskyon Joy of Being a Woman in Her 70s

It's actually really common for women who have experienced sexual assault to take steps (gaining weight, wearing loose baggy clothing) to avoid the male gaze.

techtalskyon Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended

Technically, yes, as I understand the legislation.

techtalskyon TextQL: Execute SQL Against CSV or TSV

However this is something you can put in /use/local/bin and use alongside other command line tools with pipes

techtalskyon Front-End Checklist

OWASP guidelines are a good start.

techtalskyon Deutsche Bank makes source code publicly available for the first time

Muliline style /

techtalsky on Omnispeak – A Commander Keen Reimplementation

Even though the second Keen trilogy had richer graphics, I really loved the first Keen trilogy for the gameplay. The jumps and movement felt so much more physical. Keen would make this tiny pause as if winding up for a jump each time he jumped. The later Keen just did big floaty isometric jumps that didn't have the same snap. That said, I loved and played every single one of those games.

techtalsky on Ask HN: How Is Developing on a Linux VM in Windows?

+1 for using Vagrant. This lets you bring instances up and down much more easily. Also, for most things you need (like say a Rails/nginx stack, or a LAMP stack) there's a prebuilt Vagrant box you can start from.
Also, some modern IDE's have Vagrant support natively, which allow you to work transparently in whatever Windows IDE you like, and operate your VM from there.

techtalsky on The story behind NetHack's first update since 2003

Yeah, some aspect of Spelunky's spirit are obviously pulled from NetHack (Derek Yu, the creator, explains so specifically in the book about Spelunky).

techtalsky on Amazon Snowball

I'm sure they don't cost Amazon $200 to produce, and assumably they can just bill corporate customers for them if they're not returned. Some amount of loss is probably included in the cost to consumers.

techtalsky on OnHub

Looks like the advantages as listed are: - Very simple visual configuration software - Ability to view a graphical representation of device usage and prioritize a device - Ability to update the device without interrupting the connection - Sends setup information to Android devices via an audio tone

techtalsky on F*** those popups – signing up those who deserve it

You know, the age of ACTUAL pop-up windows really sucked, and it was amazing when browsers rendered them largely obsolete by limiting how websites could launch another window but at least all of those had the X in the SAME EXACT PLACE.
The new crop of lightboxed modal popups that are now ubiquitous are 100 times worse since they:
- are modal
- often work poorly on mobile
- have as many different dismiss mechanisms as there are popups
- web marketers love them

techtalsky on Ask HN: Reddit vs. HN

I "extensively monitor" both channels and find that they have their own advantages and disadvantages.
When an important technology is announced, or there's some important tech event, I really want to see what HN says first. It's more likely to be a focused and civil discussion due to the way it's moderated, and it's extremely likely that an engineer involved in the project or its history will come and personally contribute to the discussion. When I read a huge HN thread on an important topic, I feel like I'm largely educated about what experienced thinkers and specialists on the topic would say.
That said, Reddit has more breadth. There's not just /r/programming, there's subreddits for every specific language, technology, and specialty. Some are better curated and moderated than others but it's a deeper and richer set of information. There might occasionally be a story about OpenBSD around here, but reddit has http://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd.
I probably follow HN more closely, but I do like to see what bubbles up in specific subreddits as well.

techtalsky on Appropriate Uses for SQLite

The main limitation is number of clients here. If you have a RESTful API, some ETL loaders, and several webservers running on EC2 all talking to your database, then you need a real client-server architecture.
However, if you're running your website on Apache, on a single webserver, then there's really only ONE client for your database, in which case SQLite works great, even if there's a heck of a lot of load.
SQLite is fundamentally a C library talking to a binary file format, so it's orders of magnitude faster than making a network connection to a client and then issuing SQL.
I've run medium-sized websites on an MVC framework talking to SQLite MANY times, and it works great.

techtalsky on Positioning in the web explained with GIFs

That would be wonderful. I have several friends who really struggle with CSS right now, and this kind of illustration is super useful. Floats are such a fundamental and confusing CSS concept. Any illustration of it would be useful.

techtalsky on Positioning in the web explained with GIFs

Really cool way of visualizing some CSS concepts but I would have loved to see "float". I think that's the one that gives people the most trouble. I think it would probably take several gifs to illustrate though. I do appreciate that the author kept his presentation very simple.

techtalsky on NYT: How Expensive It Is to Be Poor

A pretty decent Time magazine article outlining the basic reasons: http://business.time.com/2012/11/20/why-so-many-americans-do...

techtalsky on Why is Golang popular in China?

Well I always get a chuckle when I see people talking about 'eek'ing out a living, but I kind of get it. Eek! can be an exclamation of alarm, so eeking out a living would be just barely making it in a constant state of alarm. It changes the meaning of the term but lets you use it in a contextually similar way.

techtalsky on Why is Golang popular in China?

Thought it might interest you that the term is "burying the lede". One of those weird terms like "champing at the bit" or "eke out a living" that uses a word that sounds like a modern English word but is actually a slightly arcane word. In this case lede is "the introductory section of a news story that is intended to entice the reader to read the full story".

techtalsky on Show HN: Headphone Enhancer for Techno and 5.1 Movies

It seems like there's a possibility you could work with one of these artists in some kind of promotion deal. You could have limited distribution of their track as a test app, and they could get a little promotion along with your cool space-age idea. I bet a nice email to their PR people would be worth it.

techtalsky on Learning to code kept me sane when I was a diplomat

I haven't seen much discussion of a more ideal way to solve this problem (to say: as a one-off like the author was doing, not reusable software), so I thought I'd just think about how I'd do something similar.
Luckily there are libraries that are great at interacting with a web page or multiple pages at the same time without needing to actually have a browser instance open. There's selenium and its various scripting environments, which are meant for browser testing but work just fine for many automation tasks: http://www.seleniumhq.org/
And, newer, are headless technologies like phantom.js: http://phantomjs.org/ and Dalek.js: http://dalekjs.com/
This is SO much easier than using Javascript to find purple links on a page, and so much more reliable.
He could have looked up each link on DB1, then used the data to look up the DB2 information.
In any case, what he did saved him hours and hours of time and started him on a lifelong interest in programming.
Also, obligatory relevant XKCD's: http://xkcd.com/1319/ & http://xkcd.com/1205/

techtalsky on First Infocom Z-machine implemented in hardware

Yeah, or you could just play candy crush on your phone. There's always going to be a cool level of dorky absorption that's great as a learning opportunity and obsession for people so inclined.