Hacker News: agateau

New comment by agateau in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

agateau — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:50:43 +0000

The code is the present truth, the commit messages can inform you about how it got turned into this truth. Interestingly, I recently wrote a short article about this: https://agateau.com/2026/on-commit-messages/

New comment by agateau in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

agateau — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:22:38 +0000

I wonder if the spare fiber connections could be use to mesh houses together, in a kind-of decentralized way?

Commit Messages

agateau — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:26:10 +0000

Article URL: https://agateau.com/2026/on-commit-messages/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47617368

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by agateau in "Contextual commits – An open standard for capturing the why in Git history"

agateau — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:08:55 +0000

I disagree with this: commit messages should explain the Why. For the What, I can read the diff. Sadly, many commit messages are about the What.

New comment by agateau in "Contextual commits – An open standard for capturing the why in Git history"

agateau — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:06:19 +0000

I guess it does not help that I dislike conventional commits :)

New comment by agateau in "Contextual commits – An open standard for capturing the why in Git history"

agateau — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:03:06 +0000

Would be curious to know if it works better than writing the Why as human-friendly paragraphs in the body of the commit message.

New comment by agateau in "I'm helping my dog vibe code games"

agateau — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:10:09 +0000

Most LLM articles depress me. At least this one made me smile, even if it's more about turning a dog into a random generator and generating games from random input.

New comment by agateau in "Falsehoods programmers believe about languages (localization)"

agateau — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:23:23 +0000

Another one: depending on the language, 0 is either singular or plural. In French it's singular and it's always fun to see the denial in the eyes of my French colleagues when I tell them that 0 is plural in English.

New comment by agateau in "Ask HN: Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)?"

agateau — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 20:12:06 +0000

> I have a very long regular expression (email validation of course) that doesn't fit on one line but no solutions I have found properly break the lines on page overflow.

Have you considered manually splitting the regular expression into multiple lines in the source document, using something like the `VERBOSE` mode from Python re module [1]?

[1]: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/regex.html#using-re-verbose

Show HN: Regex Night: regular-expression pretty printer and linter

agateau — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 07:32:30 +0000

Article URL: https://gitlab.com/agateau/regexnight

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42397037

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by agateau in "Scooter: interactive find and replace in the terminal"

agateau — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 17:24:36 +0000

Looks handy!

New comment by agateau in "DB48X: High Performance Scientific Calculator, Reinvented"

agateau — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 21:44:07 +0000

I loved my HP 48G when I was in school (even if it was much slower than the Ti 81 it replaced when it came to graphing). I regret throwing it away because of the nostalgia, but I don't feel a need for using it these days.

As such I am genuinely curious about what rewards you get from using an engineering calculator in your work. That's an honest question: I would really like to have an excuse to get my hands on a 48G again!

New comment by agateau in "Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork"

agateau — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 09:10:35 +0000

Sounds like an character from the Asterix comic book :)

New comment by agateau in "Mozilla's new Firefox Linux package for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives"

agateau — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 22:14:32 +0000

Shameless plug: I wrote a tiny script to install Firefox from their tar.gz, without requiring root access: https://github.com/agateau/tmfi.

Clyde: A cross-platform package manager for pre-built applications

agateau — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 17:39:17 +0000

Article URL: https://agateau.com/2023/introducing-clyde/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38893366

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by agateau in "The Awk book’s 60-line version of Make"

agateau — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 12:31:13 +0000

I would find it easier to read with more sensible, non-abreviated variable names.

The gentle art of making patches easier to review

agateau — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 21:35:12 +0000

Article URL: https://agateau.com/2023/making-patches-easier-to-review/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36649005

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by agateau in "Self-Replace: A Utility For Self Replacing Executables"

agateau — Tue, 16 May 2023 06:52:23 +0000

A little known fact about executables on Windows is that while it's not possible to remove a running executable, it's possible to rename it.

I use this in Clyde [1]: on Windows, when clyde needs to upgrade itself (which means uninstalling vN and installing vN+1) it renames itself from `clyde.exe` to `_clyde.exe`. I leave the old `_clyde.exe` around, but a nicer implementation could remove on the next start.

[1]: https://github.com/agateau/clyde

Fairbuds XL Headphones – repairable headphones

agateau — Thu, 11 May 2023 15:04:17 +0000

Article URL: https://shop.fairphone.com/en/fairbuds-xl

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35903231

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by agateau in "PSone.css – Playstation 1 style CSS Framework"

agateau — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 19:44:19 +0000

They should draw the complete d-pad and highlight the button to press instead.