Hacker News Reader

xk3on I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C

I misread this as "I bought a £16 _sandwich_ just because it used USB-C" so I await that future blog post...

xk3on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

I see paper towels but no toilet paper? I think toilet paper is the most confusing one

edit: also this doesn't seem correct:

Everything above will save you $57.65 on 33 fl oz

https://popgot.com/shampoo?attributes=scalp_concern%3Adandru...

xk3on Elvish – Scripting language and interactive shell

I'm also a fish fan and largely agree--but if you are forced to use Windows and you don't care for WSL, nushell is likely your best option. It's pretty good! Almost feels like Unix but you're in Windows. I don't think fish shell will be ported over to Windows anytime soon...

xk3on A faster way to copy SQLite databases between computers

Git works pretty well for syncing binary files. You can even do this:

    $ cat .gitattributes
    *.db       diff=sqlite3

And you can know how the sqlite files changed between commits--but yeah if you make commits while a process is writing new rows or updating data then you'll have data loss if you make a commit on another machine--better to use something like litestream in that case

xk3on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2025)

    Location: Macomb, IL, United States
    Remote: yes, or hybrid
    Willing to relocate: Willing to discuss relocation
    Technologies: Python (incl. argparse, scripting, web frameworks like Django/Flask/FastAPI), SQL, Rust, Go, Bash, Cloud Platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Pulumi, Terraform, Docker, Ansible, CI/CD (GitLab CI, Jenkins), Machine Learning/AI (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, Hugging Face Transformers, Keras, NLTK, SpaCy, OpenCV), Data Science (NumPy, Pandas), Databases (PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Redis), Linux, Git, JavaScript (Vue, Node.js)
    Résumé/CV: https://unli.xyz/resume.pdf
    Email: chapmanjacobd [at] gmail

xk3on Google Cloud Rapid Storage

The gods strip off interesting bits of URLs when you submit it

xk3on Python as a second language empathy (2018)

The first example is a generator. If you wanted to keep that just use `()` instead of `[]`:

    ((name, value) for name, values in map_of_values.items() for value in values)

xk3on Fish 4

This is nice! But you should probably use $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR or /run/user/1000 instead of /tmp

xk3on Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

I don't think this is FRED but rather Gergely making the implications but yes

FRED is just a descriptive tool: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/business/economy/fred-eco...

xk3on Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

> Devs spot and fix hallucinations immediately, dismissing incorrect autocomplete suggestions

Some hallucinations stay in codebases longer than others! If there were zero hallucinations there would really be no novel output. Some hallucinations are useful and some are not.

xk3on Ask HN: What is the best method for turning a scanned book as a PDF into text?

Calibre's ebook-convert is the best PDF to X that I've found. Of course, it's not perfect but PDF is a really hard format to convert from.

xk3on Some terminal frustrations

sounds like Pharo

xk3on Build a link blog like Simon Willison

If I feel like I truly learned something novel I'll add a link here:

https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/journal/blob/main/lists/kno...

xk3on Mathesar – an intutive spreadsheet-like interface to Postgres data

You should take a look at Ultorg--not the best name (then again Mathesar is not much better...) but there is a lot of powerful and intuitive UX stuff in that project.

xk3on A simplified analysis of the Chernobyl accident (2021)

The disaster was a result of fuzzy testing :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Safety_test

xk3on Oh Shit, Git?

> 2. Avoid `reset --hard` at all costs

Sounds like you might be looking for `git reset --keep`

xk3on I algorithmically donated $5000 to Open Source

Wow! I was surprised to see myself on the list. Sure enough, I see a donation and it will take 90 days to pay out the first time.

Interesting project

xk3on An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

> they measure attributes that correlate with performance. If you interfere with these measurements (e.g. through fraud), you break those correlations

Not necessarily... You just get the people that are technically competent enough and are self-corruptable enough to pass the test. There is still a correlation with performance but it is a weaker signal and you are more likely to miss out on people with equal ability but higher morals.

xk3on Infinite Git repos on Cloudflare workers

right... they should call it Cloudflarelip /s

xk3on Rip2 – A safer, rust-based rm

which, it usually is... tmpfs

xk3on We need more zero config tools

I do this too!

    function zg --argument branch
        if test "$branch" = -
            git switch -
        else
            git checkout (git branch --list | fzf --query $branch --select-1 --exit-0 | string trim)
        end
    end

xk3on Bop Spotter

It uses solar power, right? So I think it was built with that in mind. charge during the day and run until it loses power at night

xk3on Autossh – automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels

closing ssh doesn't close the ports if they are being used, at least with ControlMaster. You need to run something like this to force the ssh daemon to close the port

    ssh -O cancel -L 4102:localhost:4000 pc

but if ControlMaster is stuck maybe autossh is better in that case, or use this:

    Host *
        ServerAliveInterval 11

xk3on Autossh – automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels

> ssh process stuck

systemd's RuntimeMaxSec should help in this case but I've never had trouble with sshd personally

To add more context I use the above service to ssh from my phone to my laptop via my desktop PC. The service runs on my laptop and binds port 22 of my laptop to port 7070 of my PC but wiregaurd would probably work similarly

xk3on Autossh – automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels

The default of ServerAliveCountMax is already 3

xk3on Autossh – automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels

If you have systemd, you could do this:

    [Unit]
    Description=look ma, no autossh
    After=network.target
    
    [Service]
    Type=exec
    ExecStart=/usr/bin/ssh -o ServerAliveInterval=60 -o ExitOnForwardFailure=yes -Nn -R 7070:localhost:22 pc 'sleep 20m'
    Restart=always
    RestartSec=20
    RuntimeMaxSec=30m
    
    [Install]
    WantedBy=default.target

xk3on A Spreadsheet and a Debugger Walk into a Shell

nushell has `open file.xlsx | explore --peek` which can be used to interactively select a cell contents from an Excel spreadsheet and pipe it into another command. It would be cool if there were similar tools for editing table data.

See also the `inspect` command... I feel like they could add a lot of neat Smalltalk-like interactivity (Bret Victor-level observability)

xk3on Show HN: Wordllama – Things you can do with the token embeddings of an LLM

With a large corpus (10,000+ sentences--each sentence is a "document" in my usecase) I can get similar results by kmeans clustering TF-IDF spmatrix vectors but it looks like this has a lot of utilities for making the kmeans part faster (binarization, etc).

Looking forward to doing some benchmarking over the next couple weeks

xk3on Show HN: Wordllama – Things you can do with the token embeddings of an LLM

Interesting... looks like this uses pymagnitude

https://github.com/plasticityai/magnitude

xk3on Using rsync to create a limited ability to write remote files

hmm this still seems like a bug to me. File ownership and file permissions are a filesystem construct. Whether you use chmod 777 or 755 doesn't change a file's md5sum, for example. It's up to your service to not apply file permissions that don't make sense. If backups are write-only with no mechanism for reading they may as well be to /dev/null