News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

mjsir911

Re:The Hardest Program I've Ever Written (2015) on Saturday November 01, 2025 @05:16PM (#45785460)
yeah, I've come to terms that I mostly do programming-as-an-art and that includes how my code is structured, and I'm on exactly the same page.

In pragmatic business environments it's not worth the fuss but I never feel great about anything I make in those kinds of environments anyways, and I always appreciate being able to shine when there's no enforced code formatting.

Re:Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years? on Friday September 19, 2025 @06:32PM (#45307543)
I made a bunch of friends in the local rave & queer community, helped start organizations including founding a hackerspace, met the love of my life, and now am part of a very healthy community that has been helping me cope and get through this shitty tech sector hiring slump.

Taking breaks has been very good for my soul, and I've quieted the fear of instability with surrounding myself with people who I know will be there for me when things get rough.

It's surprising how cheaply you can survive when push comes to shove and you have to make concessions, live with roommates, live in small housing, going to the foodbank or getting on food stamps.

Although, runway is slowly dwindling and am unsure what's next for my future. I'm not too worried, though.

Re:Self-Guaranteeing Promises on Monday August 11, 2025 @11:46AM (#44865533)
Sure, but the primary difference between what you're talking about is ecosystem lock-in vs file lockin.

both can be postured as a labor-saving measure, exposing user data to users is an additional burden on developers. Designing an extension system that is easy for other products to use is an additional burden on developers (& developer relations! And marketing! Other products won't just adopt your extension system willy-nilly)

But switching from obsidian to something else is so much easier on a file-level than say, google docs or whatever other super-proprietary system that's being used.

I'm very wary about adjusting my workflows to depend on flimsy or proprietary ecosystems. I don't really use vim with any plugins. I don't really use obsidian with any plugins, although I'm slowly trying to ease up to using a couple that would be big QOL improvements.

Striving for standard interfaces/workflows is a good thing, but I don't think emacs is that. vim isn't that. They've just cemented themselves as the de-facto.

I'm using vim bindings in obsidian, for what it's worth. I'm not re-learning a whole other set of keyboard shortcuts (although obsidian's is quite lacking)

Re:Ask HN: Advice for Starting a Hacker Space? on Sunday July 06, 2025 @09:52AM (#44480829)
Hi pkdpic!

As one of the founders of the hackerspace you've visited out in seattle & a fellow recurser that you might've heard about the space from, I can drop to you some of my notes & learnings from two years in of devhack.

the biggest piece of advice by far that I pulled from a bunch of european-style hackerspaces (& HacDC, my formative hackspace) has been: Just do it. Find a physical space, start doing meetups, promote it a bit and cool folks will find you.

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/attach...

We at devhack took a very word-of-mouth based approach to promotion and that has prevented what a lot of comments here are trying to mitigate in terms of attracting the wrong crowd too quickly -- although I think there's lots of value in creating a space which supports eccentric folks / ppl with diverse backgrounds.

Founding a hackspace is a very learn-as-you-go experience, has been very fulfilling and has had plenty of hiccups that we've had to react to as they come. The most important part is to have fun and create a fun space for you and your friends.

Also, put a roller rink in your space. very important and wish we had that

Re:Start a Computer Club in the Place That You Live on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:08AM (#43139054)
There are welcoming hackerspaces around for those with the eyes to find them ;-)
Re:Mixxx: GPL DJ Software on Monday January 20, 2025 @02:50PM (#42772350)
I've had a lot of fun setting mixxx up for DJing on my steam deck, with fully scriptable (in javascript) USB hid bindings, I've been able to reverse engineer the steam deck's control schemes to be able to mix quite portably.
NPR did a recent expose about a local renegade spot & the shows it supports in my scene:

https://www.kuow.org/stories/under-the-bridge-a-portrait-of-...

With mixed results, it kind of burned the spot by virtue of being talked about in too wide an audience but I think it's also important to make it known to the mainstream that this kind of stuff is happening.

All that's needed to make a rave happen is music & speakers, scale and quality is all configurable. Humans will always find spaces to congregate: whether it's their own houses, local parks, abandoned warehouses, industrial districts, or deep in the woods. I hope we're not losing our drive to be around eachother and dance, it's been such a integral part of my life story (as a fairly young person!) and has let me find my people.

Re:Emacs Info Expressions on Monday April 15, 2024 @10:25AM (#40040927)
pydoc has saved me many times! And doesn't require me dropping down into a shell too. help() is still invaluable, especially in debug shells when tab completion isn't helping me as much as I'de hoped.
Re:WireViz: Easily document cables and wiring harnesses on Monday April 15, 2024 @08:22AM (#40039607)
I've been looking for the same, and the closest I've come to is the protocol utility & the more-maintained protocol-go re-implementation.

https://www.luismg.com/protocol/ https://github.com/ryungmin/protocol-go

The culmination of my commmunity college's CS103 class was learning the ins and outs of an ISA called MARIE. only 8 instructions & an editor+simulator written as a java app.

I had a lot of fun spending most of my time in that class writing an entire development stack for that architecture: assembler, simulator, debugger, and eventually a very barebones forth!

Re:Make Atomic Git Commits on Tuesday February 07, 2023 @03:25AM (#34690163)
I tend to use `git add -p` for exactly this purpose ;-)
Re:Trying Out Flipper Zero on Monday January 02, 2023 @10:28AM (#34218890)
The flipper zero does have a (pcm?) speaker! It comes with a music player by default with the marble machine sample notes.
Re: on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @04:40PM (#33615421)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this what `git revert` is for?

Harder with an amend due to having to get the difference of commits within the reflog, sure.

Re:Memray: a memory profiler for Python on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @04:56PM (#31102891)
I've had good luck with yappi for debugging asynchronous code, not really focused on memory usage but walltime & such.

https://pypi.org/project/yappi/

Re:Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @08:18PM (#31091169)
Looking over the app in-depth, I see a lot that could be done depending on how much you want to do ;-)

- The initial import can be done pretty easily, `ledger bal` reports my current balances, so for example I can do `ledger bal Assets` and it will report back totals on my `Assets:<Bank>`, `Assets:Retirement:401k`, `Assets:Retirement:Roth 401k`, etc.

- You could potentially get a very in-depth "progress points" import with `ledger reg`, which just shows the history of my ledger. `ledger reg Assets:<Bank> --monthly --collapse --total-data` gives me a monthly tally of my savings since forever.

- It would be possible but harder to infer future events & spending I think. I can somewhat figure out how much I spend monthly looking at my data, but you'de need heavy processing to get anything useful out of that.

I think maybe a more reasonable request rather than supporting ledger is to just support a general purpose plaintext import. The above `--total-data` command for example just gives me:

    2018-06-01 10000
    2018-07-01 11000
    ...
Re:Show HN: I built a simulator for personal finance on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @07:27PM (#31090722)
Wow, this seems cool!

Would love some integration with [plain text accounting](https://plaintextaccounting.org/) so that I don't have to re-document all my finances though, even just a simple `ledger equity` import.

Re:Vim Creator Bram Moolenaar Interview on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @03:53AM (#30270468)

    /bin/bash: line 1: markdown: command not found
I've been trying to get into the rave scene recently and I've found it a bit hard to find "underground" events as somebody not so socially adept..

Got any tips?

Re:Ask HN: What Niche Language to Learn? on Monday November 15, 2021 @08:20PM (#29235417)
XSLT too!
Re:Ask HN: Do you listen to anything while working? on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:52PM (#29234624)
I basically have to constantly rotate through new music, once I get used to songs I start being able to predict them and they take up mental energy. Doubly so if they have lyrics.

I've found SiIvagunner works well for this, they release like ~10 new song mashups a day and maybe half of them are good. Just load up some random youtube playlist consisting of thousands of songs and I won't recognize a single one of them.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ecwl3FTG66jIKA9JRDtmg

Re:Truths about video game stories on Sunday October 31, 2021 @04:18PM (#29060013)
It's been mentioned around on other comments but take a look at Outer Wilds if you have the time, you and I seem to have very overlapping preferences and I was surprised not to see it on your list.

Appreciate the suggestions! Will have to take a look at the few that I haven't yet.

I mean, it's not amnesty international, but a UN Special Rapporteur on Torture claimed:

"Mr. Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture."

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

Re:uBlock Origin review on Friday September 03, 2021 @11:13PM (#28411779)
Ironically, ublock origin does not work on this blog page & allows scripts such as google analytics to run because it is hosted under the umbrella domain addons.mozilla.org

I wish the exception for add-ons not working on the addons site would only apply to the actual add-on download portion of the site, and they don't host random non-addon-download content on the same domain.

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