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ioddlyon Show HN: Nanostyled – a 1kB library for styling React components with atomic CSS

I was thinking about this recently. I've somehow avoided CSS-in-JS up to this point. I generally find functional CSS frameworks to be the most readable in that I like to be able to look at the classes and know essentially what's going on. I'm glad you made it and I'm bookmarking it for later.

ioddlyon Did I just waste 3 years?

Not sure what OP's background is, but if he's not in the tech industry and wrote a complex C++ game engine, plus a website with Flask+SQL on his own, I'd say he has a potential career as a software developer there.

ioddlyon Ask HN: Decent and cheap hosted email services?

I'm using pobox.com and pretty happy with it. I have the mailstore account which is $50/yr so about $4/mo.

ioddlyon John Urschel Goes Pro

> I would really like a job where I can hang around and think and learn interesting stuff about tech and science.

If you achieve financial independence, can't you do that without a job?

ioddlyon Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

I found the TypeScript type checker pretty hard to read through, though it may be my lack of, well, almost any knowledge about type theory. I didn't dig much into the other parts of the codebase however. What parts of it do you enjoy reading?

ioddlyon Ask HN: How do I choose between a job offer from Google and a promising startup?

I'd say take the Google option, live like you took the startup offer and bank the rest of the money. Then you'll have runway to do whatever the you please for a while, and the Google name/network backing you up.

ioddlyon Ask HN: What was the one book that you read and it actually changed your life?

It's actually his personal diary, written often while he was on campaign. From that perspective I think it's impressive how insightful he managed to be in short bursts. But if you are looking for something more long-form, you might try Seneca's Letters or Epictetus Discourses.

ioddlyon Ask HN: How did you find your first freelance gig?

> I am bit scared/worried about maintaining a constant flow of work to pay bills.

You should be! The key to paying bills is not to get a constant flow of work, which will take a while, it's to live off of a portion of your income and save the rest. IMO you should have at least 6 months of expenses in the bank before you start freelancing. This also ameliorates a lot of the stress related to finding work, and means you won't feel pressured to accept or pursue bad work.

I got my first freelance gig by posting on the HN whoishiring thread, which I do recommend doing.

ioddlyon Show HN: 2048.cpp – Play 2048 in directly your terminal

Not sure how OP did it, but I use peek. Pretty handy for readmes, even for showing clients stuff without having to deploy.

ioddlyon Ask HN: Is the new MacBook Pro worth its value for a developer?

> The touchbar is fairly useless, but I was able to bind escape to caps lock very easily, muscle memory though is still a problem

I started using a 2017 Macbook Pro last week. First thing I did with the touch bar was set it to be all function keys rather than app-specific stuff. I still miss the feedback of hitting the escape key, but otherwise it's okay.

ioddlyon Ask HN: Why is Gmail trying to change its UI?

I switched because I figured they'd turn the old one off eventually and I might as well get used to it. No issues on my end, and I'm not sure if it was there before but there's an option to make composing new emails take up most of the screen rather than the tiny popout, which I like.

Guess I'm not much of an advanced email user though, I use probably 3 other mail apps for various accounts and don't take advantage of any other features.

ioddlyon Ask HN: Which types of tech jobs are best for people that can't handle stress?

> have something to do on evenings. Something for yourself, something not related to your job

I'm curious what everyone does for this. I've attempted to find a few things but nothing has strongly clicked with me. Most of my interests right now are on the computer, which makes it hard to disengage, and I definitely need to do more to get a handle on it.

ioddlyon Ask HN: Do you maintain two laptops for work and life?

I do as of a couple a weeks ago.

Benefits as far as I can tell: mental compartmentalization (this is big; I wish I could write this in 24-pt red Impact font), makes writing off the laptop simple rather than having to estimate personal vs. business use.

Downsides: Travelling with two laptops is going to be annoying, expensive if you're paying for the laptops out of pocket.

This situation was kind of an accident for me, but I like it, enough that I might go to the trouble of maintaining it.

ioddlyon Ask HN: Help me find an online hangout for freelancers and remote people?

https://www.reactiflux.com serves that purpose for me. It's React-focused, but lots of knowledgeable, helpful people in there including the great #jobs-advice channel.

ioddlyon Ancient public library discovered in Germany

The scrolls from Herculaneum definitely contain a lot of non extant works, the problem is figuring out how to read them

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/buried-ash-vesuvius-s...

ioddlyon Ask HN: If you could work a 3 day week for 60% pay, would you?

Well, I currently freelance and take significant amounts of time off (although I generally work 40hrs/week when I am working).

Freelancing of course comes with its own challenges and downsides, if I was offered a salaried gig that provided the level of flexibility I want, I'd probably take it.

That aside, it's fantastic, I heartily recommend trying to find a way out of the 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year lifestyle.

ioddlyon Ask HN: How do you backup your files without depending on a third party service?

I just started experimenting with Syncthing because Dropbox no longer meets my needs.

So far I'm pretty happy and impressed, it's a decentralized piece of software that Just Works (TM). My plan for backups is to spin up a VPS somewhere and have them back it up.

I also love that it can use LAN; I can finally sync up my giant mp3 collection.

ioddlyon Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?

I use an app that I wrote, meditations, in order to break down goals into daily habits: https://github.com/ioddly/meditations

e.g. "I want to run a marathon" becomes a daily "Exercise" habit. It's good for both progress and logging; now if I want to know what program I was running on June 28, 2015 for example I just filter for Exercise and go back to June 2015.

It was originally a Trello board so it's got an obviously kanban-ish look to it, but it's got things built in to collect things like time spent on habits overall, streaks.

I'm still working on the best flow for longer-term projects and "negative habits" (i.e. losing weight, not compulsively using the internet).

ioddlyon What are good linux laptops for 2018?

I bought a refurbished Thinkpad X230 earlier this year and I'm very happy with it.

What tipped me over the edge is the repairability and modifiability of the laptops. After an ASUS laptop broke and I was only able to fix it because some random eBayer was selling a working keyboard, I swore off non-business laptops. There's a whole community of people who do nothing but mod Thinkpads, and companies that just refurbish ones (which have often been sitting in some office somewhere and are in great condition). Linux runs fantastically on it as well.

As for the trackpad...well, it's not great, but I use the trackpoint which I've always preferred. The keyboard on the other hand is amazing.

ioddlyon Ask HN: What are the things keep in mind while giving/preparing for a tech talk?

If you're showing code, use way less code than you initially want to.

ioddlyon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2018)

SEEKING WORK - Houston, TX / Remote / Travel OK

I am a full-stack web developer writing front-ends with React, Redux & TypeScript and back-ends with Python, Django or Flask, and postgresql.

I'm comfortable doing anything from simple maintenance & feature addition to creating an MVP for your project.

Some technologies I have experience working with:

    Backend => Python/flask or django, golang, node.js

    Frontend => React, Redux, Gatsby, preact, riot, SASS, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript

    Storage => postgresql, sqlite, redis

    Cloud & devops => AWS, Google Cloud, Docker, dokku

    Longshot => TypeScript compiler API

I cut my coding teeth writing compilers in C++ and Scheme, so I'm happy working with pretty much anything. Recent client testimonials: "Solid & dependable", "top notch coder and a compiler ninja"

You can check me out further at:

My website: https://upvalue.io

My GitHub: https://github.com/ioddly

If you're interested in working with me, you can contact me at phil@upvalue.io - my phone # is available on my website.

ioddlyon Ask HN: Locked out of Google services with no recourse or explanation

And particularly, you can still access things like password reset on other accounts tied to that email.

ioddlyon Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read?

I've never tried to read the Go documentation from the top down, but godoc is pretty excellent.

ioddlyon Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?

I use ledger, along with a couple scripts I've wired up (if I hit Win-Shift-B I get a desktop notification with my current balances).

I actually appreciate the manual nature of it -- knowing I'll have to go to the ledger and enter something after making a purchase has cut down on stupid purchases.

The only thing I'm missing is a nice GUI summary with some pie charts. There's a couple on GitHub but they either aren't up to date or I can't get them to work like I expect. But I haven't looked too hard -- would appreciate a pointer if there is one.

ioddlyon The state of type hints in Python

I think there's a fair bit to be said for API discoverability. I was working with the TypeScript compiler API earlier this year, which is an excellent piece of software but not particularly well documented, and I was able to discover a fair bit of what I needed through Intellisense and well-named functions.

Python is also fairly good in this regard, though not quite as convenient, with the help() function (it's been a long time since I saw one of these but I do recall a handful of libraries breaking help with "clever" metaprogramming).

Ceteris paribus, I'd rather have the nice completions.

ioddlyon Ask HN: Your favorite syntactic sugar from any language?

Scheme's expression comments are really quite handy, but only possible to implement in languages where everything is an expression.

For those not familiar, you can have the reader just discard an expression, so like (list 1 #;2 3) becomes (list 1 3), but you can handily comment out a giant function call or if expression or something while you work on it.

Scheme's nestable multiline comments are also nice. I'm not sure which language was first, but I think more languages are getting them now (Kotlin has them IIRC).

ioddlyon How to GraphQL – A Fullstack Tutorial for GraphQL

Have you looked at Hasura's postgres offering at all?

I haven't used either yet, but I spoke to one of the founders a while back and auth difficulties was one of the things we talked about. I believe they're open sourcing their data layer soon.

ioddlyon React is the new jQuery

I think Rails used to include it as a default.

ioddlyon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (June 2018)