Hacker News: Smylers

New comment by Smylers in "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss"

Smylers — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 16:02:04 +0000

That “gradual decline” is an artifact of your maths, in which you're gradually changing the weight of recent years.

Consider a sequence with an extreme drop-off: 100, 100, 100, 100, 40. Taking averages of all the numbers, then all but the first, all but the first 2, and so on, yields: 88, 85, 80, 70, 40. That might look like it includes a gradual decline, but clearly there's nothing gradual in the underlying data.

New comment by Smylers in "Neovim 0.5 is overpowering"

Smylers — Thu, 27 May 2021 13:25:41 +0000

Some of my stuff is in Raku, which indeed supports Unicode operators. But other coding isn't, and it'd be nice to use ligature fonts for those.

New comment by Smylers in "Neovim 0.5 is overpowering"

Smylers — Thu, 27 May 2021 11:02:31 +0000

Thanks. I'd previously tried and failed a couple of times to get a NeoVim gui installed, mainly because I wanted to try one of those ligature fonts that display -> as → and the like. There seemed to be a few different options, in various states of being abandoned, or unpackaged, or needing libraries not in my OS, or ...

Turns out now all that's needed for Ubuntu is sudo apt install neovim-qt. Thank you for prompting me to look at this again.

However, on running it, the window seemed very wide, so one of the first things I tried was `:set columns=80` — and nothing happened. Checking :h 'co`, it looks like it's supposed to work.

Ah, and it seems the (released version of) QT gui doesn't support ligature fonts yet. The FiraCode website says it works with NeoVim-gtk: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode#user-content-editor-compa...

Maybe I'll give that another go ...

New comment by Smylers in "Mutt email client 25 years old"

Smylers — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 16:19:00 +0000

I avoid that by replying inline, discarding the history of multiple-quoted emails from top-repliers. Everybody else uses Outlook, but nobody has yet complained.

For sending emails with formatting (italics, headings), I use Markdown in Vim then press H in Mutt before sending, which pipes it through an appropriate filter:

set send_multipart_alternative_filter=html_alternative send-hook . 'set send_multipart_alternative=no' macro compose H ':set send_multipart_alternative=yes' 'add HTML alternative'

New comment by Smylers in "Mutt email client 25 years old"

Smylers — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 16:10:43 +0000

One of my main reasons for using Mutt is precisely the opposite: with mbsync I have copies of all emails on my laptop, so I can read, search, and compose emails when I don't have an internet connection.

New comment by Smylers in "Tell HN: Archive.is inaccessible via Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1)"

Smylers — Sun, 05 May 2019 06:35:52 +0000

In what way doesn't it work? This is with my ISP's DNS (using which I can visit https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/ in a browser):

  $ host -t a lancaster.ac.uk
  lancaster.ac.uk has address 148.88.65.80

and this is with Cloudflare's:

  $ host -t a lancaster.ac.uk 1.1.1.1
  Using domain server:
  Name: 1.1.1.1
  Address: 1.1.1.1#53
  Aliases: 
  
  lancaster.ac.uk has address 148.88.65.80

Looks the same to me.