Hacker News Reader

nathellon What if database branching was easy?

It appears that Datahike [0] is a Datomic workalike that supports branching. I haven’t tried it out myself (yet), but the documentation suggests it’s possible [1].

That said, I’m adding xitdb to the list of tech to try out. Thank you for building it!

Oh, and thanks for linking to my article :-)

[0]: https://github.com/replikativ/datahike

[1]: https://datahike.io/notes/the-git-model-for-databases/

nathellon Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug

Gentle reminder about this excerpt from HN Guidelines:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

nathellon Haunt, the 70s text adventure game, is now playable on a website

Mine is ‘Anchorhead’ (1998), by Michael Gentry. I think it’s actually my favourite game of all time, of all genres.

I’ve played the old, text-only, Z-code version back in high school, around 1999, and the experience was so vivid and immersive that to this day I can draw a map of Anchorhead from memory and recite the lineage of the Verlac family. I think it’s still my favourite game of all time (although I spent much more time on some others).

These days, an illustrated version can be bought on Steam for something like $10. Highly recommended!

nathellon Haunt, the 70s text adventure game, is now playable on a website

Ligatures in the retro terminal kill the illusion.

nathellon The Miller Principle (2007)

Joel Spolsky in 2000 [0]: „Users can’t read anything, and if they could, they wouldn’t want to.”

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...

nathellon Claude mixes up who said what

I don’t think so, at least not in this particular case. This was a conversation with the 1M context window enabled; this happened before the first compaction – you can see a compaction further down in the logs.

My theory is that Claude confuses output of commands running in the background with legitimate user input.

nathellon Claude mixes up who said what

I’ve hit this! In my otherwise wildly successful attempt to translate a Haskell codebase to Clojure [0], Claude at one point asks:

[Claude:] Shall I commit this progress? [some details about what has been accomplished follow]

Then several background commands finish (by timeout or completing); Claude Code sees this as my input, thinks I haven’t replied to its question, so it answers itself in my name:

[Claude:] Yes, go ahead and commit! Great progress. The decodeFloat discovery was key.

The full transcript is at [1].

[0]: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2026/03/26/claude-nlp/

[1]: https://pliki.danieljanus.pl/concraft-claude.html#:~:text=Sh...

nathellon ML promises to be profoundly weird

The post is just a prelude to a 10-part article, most of which is not yet released (but will be shortly). Judging by the table of contents, the things you expected will be elaborated on in subsequent parts.

nathellon How to get better at guitar

Can attest to this.

I picked up singing 4 years ago (I’m 42 now), starting from nothing, and I’ve been taking regular lessons. I still suck. But I suck slightly less than I did when I was starting, and what motivates me is the sheer joy that it brings. I just hope it lasts.

nathellon Claude Code login fails with OAuth timeout on Windows

HN’s guidelines say ‘Don’t editorialize’. The original title here is ‘[BUG] Claude Code login fails with OAuth timeout on Windows’, which is more specific and less clickbaity.

nathellon In the next version of Bun, Bun goes ad supported

Can we ban April’s Fools?

nathellon VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS

I almost overlooked this, and then when I didn’t, I almost dismissed this as Yet Another Linux Distro with a custom skin. But no, there’s novelty and exploration in here. There’s attempt to venture off the local maximum. This is a breath of fresh air.

nathellon Why I forked httpx

No. Even if it’s a central piece of infrastructure, any and all maintainership effort is still a token of good will of the maintainer – and needs to be appreciated, rather than expected.

If you need stronger guarantees, pay someone to deliver them.

nathellon Why I forked httpx

Congratulations on forking!

Always remember that open-source is an author’s gift to the world, and the author doesn’t owe anything to anyone. Thus, if you need a feature that for whatever reason can’t or won’t go upstream, forking is just about the only viable option. Fingers crossed!

nathellon Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords

The title kind of implies that silent sudo passwords have been a part of Ubuntu for the last 46 years.

nathellon Implementing a Z80 / ZX Spectrum emulator with Claude Code

Counterpoint: in December, a Polish MP [0] has vibe-coded an interpreter [1] of a 1959 Polish programming language, feeding it the available documentation. _That,_ at least, is unlikely to have appeared in the model’s training data.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zandberg [1]: https://sako-zam41.netlify.app/

nathellon XHTML Club

It’s ironic that the very site in question, despite claiming XHTML compliance, is served as text/html instead of application/xhtml+xml, so the browser will never parse it as XML.

To quote [0]:

> All those “Valid XHTML 1.0!” links on the web are really saying “Invalid HTML 4.01!”.

Although the article is 20 years old now, so these days it’s actually HTML5.

Edit: Checked the other member sites. Only two are served as application/xhtml+xml.

[0]: https://webkit.org/blog/68/understanding-html-xml-and-xhtml/

nathellon Why I don't have fun with Claude Code

This resonates with my own anxiety: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2025/12/27/llms/

nathellon ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

Well there's aalib and libcaca, but I'm not sure about their fidelity compared to this.

nathellon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://danieljanus.pl

Contains the links to my blogs, my poetry translations, and some other assorted stuff.

nathellon 2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?

Java in the terminal works exquisitely well already, and it’s called Babashka. Clojure rocks, Bash reaches, and Java provides a rock-solid foundation.

nathellon Online interpreter of SAKO, a Polish 1959 programming language

About SAKO: [0]

Written (vibe-coded, I think) by Adrian Zandberg [1], a prominent Polish politician.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAKO_(programming_language)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zandberg

nathellon I program on the subway

Another GPD MicroPC owner here. It’s not quite as comfortable as a normal-sized keyboard, but much more comfortable than it looks. It’s quite decent for occasional recreational programming, and I’ve also used it to write daily blog posts from a long-distance cycling trip.

nathellon I program on the subway

A few years ago, I spotted a guy on the underground in Warsaw, hacking on some code in a language I didn't recognize, but it was definitely assembly of some sort. Being shy, I resorted to throwing curious glimpses at his laptop for a few stations, but eventually curiosity got the better of me and I asked ‘sorry, is this ARM’? To which the guy replies, smiling, ‘ah no, it’s MIPS!’

Now I program casually in public spaces, including the underground, on my GPD Micro PC [0]. It, too, has attracted numerous glimpses and been a conversation starter on some occasions.

[0]: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/08/18/i-love-my-gpd-micro-p...

nathellon What will enter the public domain in 2026?

Which key pieces of IP are worth the exponential fees?

nathellon Installing Java in 2025, and Version Managers

Fortunately, the Java ecosystem isn’t JS where breakage is so common that you have to be extra careful about the version of Node you’re using. As a Clojure programmer, I have never seen a case where it mattered which vendor my JVM was coming from, and 95% of the time I don’t care which version I’m using, as long as it’s reasonably recent.

For the remaining 5%, on macOS, my JVM version manager is this zsh one-liner:

    jvm () { export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home -v $1`; }

nathellon Ask HN: Anyone else use FreePascal as their low level language?

Don’t even mention COBOL.

nathellon Zoo of array languages

Is this written by Arthur Whitney himself?

nathellon Haiku Validator

Authentic haiku

needn't have seventeen morae

in total, either.

See, e.g., Bashō's crow haiku, arguably one of the genre-defining poems [0]. Plus, English is on average terser than Japanese; I've read somewhere that, in English, 3-5-3 syllables pack roughly the same amount of content as the Japanese 5-7-5.

[0]: https://matsuobashohaiku.home.blog/2020/11/21/upon-a-withere...

nathellon Folks, we have the best π

It’s Verdana.

Fun fact: the article uses U+03C0 GREEK SMALL LETTER PI (π), but Unicode also has several pi codepoints meant to be used specifically for math. E.g., U+1D6D1 MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL PI (let’s see whether HN strips it: [edit: it does, see [0]]).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_(letter)#Unicode