$ echo '{ "hello": "world" }' | python3 -m json.tool
    {
        "hello": "world"
    }

The best part about sharing your config or knowledge is that someone will always light up your blind spots.

I've found that pedantic conversations here seem to actually have a greater potential for me to learn something from them than other forums/social platforms. On other platforms, I see someone providing a pedantic response and I'll just keep moving on, but on HN, I get curious to not only see who wins the nerd fight, but also that I might learn at least one thing along the way. I like that it's had an effect on how I engage with comment sections.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45649771

OTOH I don’t like flagging stories because good ones get buried regularly. But then HN is not a great place for peaceful, nuanced discussion and these threads often descend into mindless flame wars, which would bury the stories even without flagging.

So, meh. I think flagging is a moderately good thing overall but it really lacks in subtlety.

On stories however, I think the flag system is pretty broken. I've seen so many stories that get flagged because people find them annoying (especially AI-related things) or people assume it will turn into a flame war, but it ends up burying important tech news. Even if the flags are reversed, the damage is usually done because the story fell off the front page (or further) and gets very little traction after that.

In short, I've never seen somebody flagged simply for having the wrong opinion. Even controversial opinions tend to stay unflagged, unless they're incredibly dangerous or unhinged.

I agree that most dead posts would be a distraction and good to have been kept out.

Can you back this up with data? ;-)

I see citations and links to sources about as little as on reddit around here.

The difference I see is in the top 1% comments, which exist in the first place, and are better on average (but that depends on what other forums or subreddits you compare it to, /r/AskHistorians is pretty good for serious history answers for example), but not in the rest of the comments. Also, less distractions, more staying on topic, the joke replies are punished more often and are less frequent.

- either critique is solid and I learn something

- or commenter is clueless which makes it entertaining

there is very seldom a “middle”

People who agree with an article will most likely just upvote. Hardly anyone ever bothers to comment to offer praise, so most comments that you end up seeing are criticisms.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

...aaand less directly (though referenced in the wikipedia article)...

https://xkcd.com/386/

Yes! I will take this as a chance to thank every people who shared their knowledge on the Internet. You guys are so freaking awesome! You are always appreciated.

A big chunk of my whole life's learning came from all the forums that I used to scour through, hours after hour! Because these awesome people always sharing their knowledge, and someone adding more. That's what made Internet, Internet. And all is now almost brink of loss, because of greedy corporates.

This habit also helped me with doom-scrolling. I sometimes, do doomscroll, but I can catch it quickly and snap out of it. Because, my whole life, I always jumped in to the rabbit holes, and actually read those big blog posts, where you had those `A-ha` moments, "Oohh, I can use that", "Ahh, that's clever!".

When, browsing, do not give me that, by brain actually triggers, "What are you doing?"

Later, I got lazy, which I am still paying for. But I am going to get out of it.

Never stop jumping into those rabbit holes!! Well, obviously, not always it's a good rabbit hole, but you'll probably come out wiser.

In powershell I just do

    > echo '{"foo": "bar"} | ConvertFrom-Json | ConvertTo-Json
    {
        "foo": "bar"
    }

https://github.com/nivekuil/rip

Does all the right things and works great.

There’s a similar tool that works well on Linux/BSDs that I’ve used for years, but I don’t have my FreeBSD desktop handy to check.

1: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/08/26/the-trash-command/

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Instead of being rude to a fellow human making an inoffensive remark, you could’ve spent your words being kind and describing the scenario you claim exists. For all you know, maybe they did ask ChatGPT and were unconvinced by the answer.

As a side note, I don’t even understand how your swipe would make sense. If anything, needing ChatGPT is what demonstrates a lack of imagination (having the latter you don’t need the former).

> vim [...] I select a region and then run :'<,'>!markdownquote

Just select the first column with ctrl-v, then "i> " then escape. That's 4 keys after the selection, instead of 20.

> u+ 2025 returns ñ, LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE

`unicode` is widely available, has a good default search, and many options. BTW, I wonder why "2025" matched "ñ".

     unicode ñ
    U+00F1 LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE
    UTF-8: c3 b1 UTF-16BE: 00f1 Decimal: ñ Octal: \0361

Since the author is using zsh, `cat =foo` is shorter and more powerful. It's also much less error-prone with long commands, since zsh can smartly complete after =.

I use it often, e.g. `file =firefox` or `vim =myscript.sh`.

It's not installed by default on macOS or Ubuntu, for me.

  $ unicode
  Command 'unicode' not found, but can be installed with:
  sudo apt install unicode

That was my thought. I use jq to pretty print json.

What I have found useful is j2p and p2j to convert to/from python dict format to json format (and pretty print the output). I also have j2p_clip and p2j_clip, which read from and then write to the system clipboard so I don't have to manually pipe in and out.

> Any reason to not simply use `uuidgen`, which ships with macOS and likely your Linux distro?

I also made a uuid, which just runs uuidgen, but then trims the \n. (And maybe copied to clipboard? It was at my old job, and I don't seem to have saved it to my personal computer.)

    % cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid
    464a4e91-5ce4-47b6-bb09-8a60fde572fb