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evacchion Show HN: Fun tool that cut my family and friends tech support time in half

I think it's from Raymond Chen's blog, The Old New Thing

It's interesting how my opinion is completely opposite. I feel like chat apps tend to get "featuritis" as soon as they become more popular.

evacchion Listening, Growing and Adapting

Have they fixed their problems with VPNs?

evacchion Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system (2013)

I'd say it produces enough. At the cost of the health of the researchers. Many people (including me) leave not because they do not like research, but because they have grown to hate the environment.

evacchion Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

That's not what I meant. What I meant is that it is harder to guess how to pronounce it to people that do not know French!

evacchion Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

IMO it's unintuitive how to pronounce it to most non-French-speaking people.

evacchion Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

so, neither?

Edit to reflect parent: I do think that's probably easier to pronounce for English-speaking people than both French and Spanish

evacchion Marp: Markdown Presentation Writer

Hey that's pretty cool. Is this available anywhere for trying?

evacchion Dotty: a next generation compiler for Scala

I think they refitted the acronym into "Scala Build Tool" a few years ago

evacchion Dotty: a next generation compiler for Scala

Strongly agree. SBT really is puzzling and (IMO) overcomplicated. Someone is working on an experimental alternative called CBT which is pure Scala (as in: less DSL like syntax)

evacchion Show HN: Slide – an open-source plain text presentation maker

This is nice.

A bit OT: on the subject of presentation tools, I'm struggling to find something that suits me.

I really like Deckset[0], but found it sometimes limiting. For instance, I found that very few themes suite my style of presentation; and I often wish I could choose different color palettes, or left-align the text in a centered layout (e.g. when using bullet lists)

I generally dislike HTML-based presenting tools; I do not like the idea of using the browser; the PDF export is usually hit and miss, and I would not risk going to a venue with broken slides.

I have also tried to experiment with (La)TeX. Unfortunately I find LaTeX very boilerplate-y, and the de-facto standard for presentations, Beamer, is not easy to customize; even the most modern themes are designed with lots of text in mind, and I'd like Deckset-like layout with little text, many headings/large fonts (sometimes more than one section in one slide) and mostly source code.

I have experimented with `lecturer.tex` and even plain TeX [1]. The idea would have been to use it as a compilation target for Markdown (maybe using Pandoc). Unfortunately I could not find a satisfying way to typeset source code with syntax highlighting in plain TeX [2], and also working with modern fonts (TTF/OTF) in TeX is generally a pain (e.g. lecturer.tex doesn't play well with XeTeX; LuaTeX on the other hand is slightly less convenient with fonts)

[0] http://www.decksetapp.com/

[1] https://twitter.com/evacchi/status/738018333228978176 , https://github.com/evacchi/lecturer-playground

[2] http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/312249/listings-for-p...

evacchion iTerm2 version 3 beta released

The one thing I miss from Terminal.app is the proxy icon. I use it all the time to open a finder window (by right clicking on it)

evacchion Bash on Ubuntu on Windows

since you are already up and running may I ask what friends have been asking me? Can you apt-get install zsh ?

evacchion Docker for Mac and Windows Beta

I wonder if (and hope that!) this fixes the issues[1] with (open)VPN. I can't use xhyve (or veertu) at work because of this.

[1] https://github.com/mist64/xhyve/issues/84

evacchion Systemd mounted efivarfs read-write, allowing motherboard bricking via 'rm'

OS X had been UNIX certified, at some point, though. Don't know if that is still true

evacchion Simplifying Docker on OS X

> Updating the routing table seems to temporarily fix it,

can you share a link ? thanks

evacchion Simplifying Docker on OS X

Unfortunately it seems that Xhyve cannot connect to the Internet when traffic is routed through OpenVPN. Otherwise I would use it at my job. I tried https://github.com/coreos/coreos-xhyve, https://github.com/ailispaw/docker-root-xhyve and Veertu, and they all won't work.

Apparently is a known issue https://github.com/mist64/xhyve/issues/84 ; it might have to do with Hypervisor.framework

evacchion Why we choose Java instead of a polyglot stack

You won't be able to implement type classes. There might be something in that direction after 1.0; still, Kotlin is not supposed to be a contender with Scala w.r.t. expressive power. It is just Java with more concise syntax, and with most design patterns turned into language features: singleton, delegates, lambdas/sam, "utils" classes (extension methods).

evacchion Why we choose Java instead of a polyglot stack

> you can "understand" them quicker in Kotlin, but you can't change how they work or use them to implement a new structure.

I'm not sure that extension methods are a particularly fitting example here.

Scala adds a lot of boilerplate for — in my view — very little gain. Of course, Scala's extension methods are actually a special case for implicit conversions; yet, the Scala we write today in my experience tends to avoid implicit conversions per se.

E.g., I'd rather be explicit about a type conversion when that is what I want to achieve: for instance, I'd rather read `javaListMethod(mySeq.asJava)` than `javaListMethod(mySeq.asJava)`. Thus, I'd rather have a first-class construct for extension methods rather than having to write `implicit class RichSeq(val s: Seq) extends AnyVal { def asJava = ... }`

In this case I do prefer Kotlin.

evacchion Why we choose Java instead of a polyglot stack

could you expand further on this? I actually believe Kotlin to be much simpler than Scala

evacchion The Secret Ingredient in Orange Juice

not very surprising. Dasani is purified then mineralized

evacchion The Kotlin Language: 1.0 Beta Is Here

to be fair, I presented that before Kotlin hit 1.0. A few things that I liked are no more (like the @-less syntax for annotations). But all in all I believe it is still a good commentary.

evacchion Object-oriented techniques in C

and even if compilers were those that generate machine code (and they're not), what's wrong with (source-to-source) translator?

evacchion Show HN: A Python with Hindley-Milner-like type annotations, compiling to C

Correct me if I'm wrong but IIRC HM is not applicable with class-based inheritance. How do you (plan to) deal with this?

BTW I really like the idea of a typed, compilable Python, keep it up!

evacchion Erik Naggum on Attributes in SGML, XML, Lisp (2001)

I believe his point was that what you are losing there does not really carry any extra information

evacchion Don't Be a Jerk: The Open Source Software License

"IBM, its customers, partners, and minions" (which is the most hilarious part)

see e.g.: http://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code

evacchion TXL: a language for text structural transformation, analysis and verification

With respect to Program Transformation, I'd point out Stratego/Spoofax [1] and Kiama [2]

  [1] http://strategoxt.org/Spoofax  
  [2] https://code.google.com/p/kiama/

evacchion Show HN: Black Friday deals for developers

Deckset is 50% off!

evacchion Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

I was just going to look for something to backup my photos... I was thinking OneDrive but I'm not sure about its security...

evacchion Java 9 features announced

You can setup your build process to "delombok" your sources, so that the dependency would only be compile-time (which is pretty neat). Also, Lombok has @Data http://projectlombok.org/features/Data.html