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nathell

6,164 karma · joined April 18, 2010

Just another Clojure hacker.

https://danieljanus.pl

meet.hn/city/52.2319581,21.0067249/Warsaw

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nathell··on A Markdown File Should Just Open
> We have made something simple unnecessarily complicated.

Oh, but Markdown isn’t simple. Easy it is, certainly, but simple it isn’t because of one feature: being able to embed HTML. So the semantics of Markdown subsumes the semantics of HTML, which has a _huge_ spec.

What one’d like in many cases would be a Markdown-without-HTML-embedding. But that’s no longer Markdown.

nathell··on Yet another way to invoke functions in JavaScript without parentheses
How Perl was created:

‘Larry, throw the cat at the keyboard!’

MEEEOW!

‘What did it type?’

‘&}Ak'>v=4%Qe}9;’

‘OK, so let’s make this a syntax for hello world.’

nathell··on Yet another way to invoke functions without parentheses
Doesn’t feel LLM-y to me. If it is LLM-generated, the LLM must have been explicitly instructed to ignore sentence capitalization and invent a persona (‘i chose...’).
nathell··on Yet another way to invoke functions in JavaScript without parentheses
I love this. This is a fun hack, but the article also hearkens back to pre-LLM days when people were still interested in _code_.
nathell··on A font recreated from photographs of classic Commodore 64 keycaps
Dunno about the original C64 (which is what this attempts to recreate), but the C64C used ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro Book according to https://github.com/FeralChild64/MechBoard64-keycaps
nathell··on Turbo Haskell
And it has to weigh in under 1 MB and have sub-second compilation times.
nathell··on Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel
In Heroes of Might & Magic 3, “several” means 5–9. 10–19 is “pack”, 20–49 is “lots”, 50–99 is “horde”, 100–249 is “throng”, 250–499 is “swarm”, 500–999 is “zounds…” and 1000+ is “legion”.

I suggest this post be renamed “A legion of vulnerabilities has been discovered…”

nathell··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
Reminds me of a C64C that, as of 2016, was used in production in a car workshop in Poland:

https://www.neoteo.com/en/a-commodore-64-stands-the-test-of-...

nathell··on Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
Ah, yeah, POKE 1,0 might plausibly have caused a hang. Sorry!
nathell··on Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
POKE 1,0 would mess up the bank switching of addresses above $A000 and switch on the Datasette motor. Probably not what you wanted. I guess you meant POKE 646,1 (white text on black screen).
nathell··on Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
I got my C64 (actually C64C) when I was 7, switched to a PC five years later just as I mastered BASIC and was starting to learn assembly.

To this day I can recite from memory a rough memory map, say which POKEs to do to switch background/border/text colors to my favourite scheme (white on black), and name the addresses of a few basic KERNAL routines.

Happy birthday, C64!

nathell··on It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell
But this way, you can handle door spam by greylisting the bell and playing it only when it is pressed by a motivated enough person; say, 5 times or more. For an average of 1 cloud service per press.
nathell··on “I just chose words carefully”
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/276/
nathell··on Polishing Cloth
No thanks, I’m Polish already.
nathell··on Every Fucking Website (2020)
No it’s not, it’s a testimony to how broken the Internet is.

There’s a perfectly valid and simple way to comply with the EU policies, including GDPR, and not impose annoying popups on your users: just don’t set cookies (if you need to have a login, you can ask for permissions at login time) and don’t collect personal data. That a lot of sites elect not to do that is an indication of how they treat the user, not of the brokenness of EU law.

nathell··on How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
I’ve found it helpful to ask LLMs specific questions about your knowledge gaps, or ask for concrete worked examples that illustrate the ideas you’re learning about.

In [0], I ask: „When applying Hidden Markov Models to POS tagging in NLP, what do the latent states and observations usually represent?” I then follow up with some specific questions and requests for walkthrough. You can’t see it from this conversations, but I have Wikipedia and a bunch of other resources open in separate pages, cross-reading, and I follow up with a handwritten toy implementation of a Viterbi-based POS tagger once my mental model crystallizes. This is very different from a 500-word summary of quantum physics, and I still had to put in effort (this is unescapable!), but I found the experience rewarding. Also note that this is relearning of a topic that was part of my uni curriculum but long forgotten.

In [1] and [2], I’m learning Spanish by reading García Lorca’s poems. Here again I’m going through the texts with a dictionary, and augmenting my learning with what a dictionary won’t tell me: given the usage of a word or phrase in this specific poem, is it something that could occur in everyday speech, or is it poetical?

[0]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a743bc7-d0dc-83eb-acc9-8f2faaffc4...

[1]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a731be6-26bc-83eb-8d21-c965da5364...

[2]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a731c01-5604-83eb-a5b8-cd1295d0ef...

nathell··on 2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026
I think the ideas worth pursuing still require substantial time and motivation, even with LLMs. Otherwise you just end up with a half-baked sloppy artifact that nobody will ever use or study, for a net negative benefit to humanity.
nathell··on Show HN: 18 Words
I guess HABIT was the expected one here.
nathell··on Show HN: 18 Words
Could I have the source code so I can plug in the Polish word list? It would make a great training app for Scrabble.
nathell··on Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter
Nice! A couple weeks ago I made a handwritten REPL for the reMarkable 2 [0] – this could serve as a better base as it apparently sidesteps xochitl.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48374552

nathell··on Clojure Hosted on Go
Another recent Clojure dialect written in Go: [0], HN discussion: [1]

[0]: https://github.com/nooga/let-go

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076815

nathell··on Loreline – Tools for writing interactive fiction
Ceterum censeo, anyone thinking to create an authoring system for IF should first read the Inform DM4 [0], preferably in its entirety but at the very minimum §24 of Chapter 3. It’s really enlightening to learn about how to model the world in a general yet simple way.

[0]: https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/DM4.pdf

nathell··on Hacker News but for independent blogs
I’ve been perusing Bubbles increasingly often since discovering that my blog is syndicated there, a few weeks ago.

It feels really refreshing compared to doomscrolling of social media, or indeed even to HN. It’s so diverse and humane. The indie blogosphere is coming to life.

Kudos to the author. A great idea, splendidly executed. I hope it grows and doesn’t change much.

nathell··on Changing how we develop Ladybird
LLMs might be part of why Ladybird is making this decision, but they aren’t the only possible one: SQLite, for example, has been developed this way pretty much forever. To each their own, I guess.
nathell··on Show HN: Papernews – self-hosted daily newspaper PDF for your reMarkable
Nice to see more reMarkable content on HN!
nathell··on Show HN: Edsger – A handwritten Clojure REPL for the reMarkable 2
I have no idea who or what a Recurser is, but I guess I’ll be checking it out. :D
nathell··on Show HN: Edsger – A handwritten Clojure REPL for the reMarkable 2
OP here. See [0] – for this post, I’ve moved from PNGs to SVGs and found an easier way to determine link coordinates, but otherwise the process is mostly the same.

[0]: https://handwritten.danieljanus.pl/2022-10-01-hyperlinks-in-...

nathell··on Chuwi Minibook X
Similar vibes as my GPD Micro PC: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/i-love-my-gpd-micro-pc/
nathell··on Haiku
Posting stuff that has been around for years makes it possible for today’s lucky 10,000 [0] to learn about that stuff.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

nathell··on 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/

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