Hacker News: awalGarg

21 Years Living Off-Grid on a Remote Island in a Self-Built Cabin and Homestead [video]

awalGarg — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:17:57 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THAupOYwJTs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47313100

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: JSON spreadsheets with vi bindings (proof of concept)

awalGarg — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 22:59:54 +0000

Hi folks! I'd like to share a proof of concept for an idea I've thought about for a long time. Think of a new form of spreadsheets where the primary data structure is not a rigid grid but a free-form JSON-like structure (but with first class tables support of course). I'm linking here a demo which uses vi style hotkeys for interaction, although of course the idea is not limited to that mode of interaction.

The addresses end up being JSON paths. The layout is currently rigid because it's just a PoC but ideally you'd have much more control over it, kind of like a canvas.

Expressions can refer to other cells via their JSON based address, even relative to their current address. There is no expressions support in the PoC yet but a table in the example does show a dynamic column. Since you have arbitrarily nested arrays/hashes anyway, you can reserve tables to represent arrays of homogenous records, and some of the columns can be dynamically calculated (or have a default dynamic calculation) based on other columns. The expressions are just JavaScript functions, but they can be anything that works with JSON types.

This is very far from finished. I'm just been trying to share early these days and I think many of you'd find the idea itself interesting.

Why? I think spreadsheets are great but they are underutilized because of their rigidity. They are not suitable for version control, being authoritative data sources, powering APIs etc. I don't know if this is the right direction either. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts!

The code is 100% manually written by me (except for the CSS background which I copied from SO). If there is sufficient interest in collaboration, I'd be happy to put up the source on codeberg.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772908

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A (mostly) POSIX-compatible make implemented in Rust

awalGarg — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:05:40 +0000

Article URL: https://code.boringcactus.com/makers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632702

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by awalGarg in "Date bug in Rust-based coreutils affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates"

awalGarg — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:15:38 +0000

> I can assure you that the core utils have all already went through static analysers doing more checks than the Rust compiler.

I'd be very interested in reading more about this. Could you please explain what are these checks and how they are qualitatively and quantitatively better than the default rustc checks?

Please note that this is about checks on the codebase itself - not system/integration tests which are of course already applicable against alternative implementations.

Default Search Engine: Wikipedia

awalGarg — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 17:35:29 +0000

Article URL: https://paste.sr.ht/~awal/2310cfca431e9f723df281d02558eaebd77e2091

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45067069

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Default Search Engine: Wikipedia

awalGarg — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 16:35:36 +0000

Article URL: https://paste.sr.ht/~awal/2310cfca431e9f723df281d02558eaebd77e2091

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45054186

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by awalGarg in "Indian Sign Painting: A typeface designer's take on the craft"

awalGarg — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 10:44:57 +0000

Sounds like a reasonable theory but do you have an actual example? The one you gave:

> For example, a typical bilingual speaker of Indian English and Hindi will replace instances of the /æ/ phoneme (as in "blast" or "fast") with another phoneme like /a:/ (as in "father"). Which isn't that unusual since /æ/ is pretty uncommon among languages.

does not apply to Indian languages because most of them have daily-use-words with the /æ/ sound.

New comment by awalGarg in "Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI"

awalGarg — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 22:25:59 +0000

The headline already rubbed me the wrong way, but seeing this made me immediately cancel my Duolingo subscription. I encourage others to do the same.

New comment by awalGarg in "F-Droid Awarded Open Technology Fund's FOSS Sustainability Grant"

awalGarg — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 17:24:29 +0000

To add insult to the injury, they claim that most people should stick to Play Store - a malware repository controlled by an ad distribution company - for better privacy. We're supposed to take this seriously.

New comment by awalGarg in "Our structure"

awalGarg — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 14:26:42 +0000

I understand why the other comments would be flagged, but this one is legibly reasoned and I've vouched for it.

It is obvious that historical advancement of technology has caused widespread cultural changes, and a sizable percentage of them are considered negative by a large portion of the population. To state that commercially viable AI could cause such effects as well does not seem necessarily unhinged to me, but in fact worthy of discourse on this forum.

New comment by awalGarg in "Debugging tricks in the browser"

awalGarg — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 14:34:47 +0000

You can just hit F8 and the debugger will pause at the next instruction. Works in both Chrome/FF.

End Server License Agreement

awalGarg — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 17:07:08 +0000

Article URL: https://codeberg.org/awal/ESLA

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37037316

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by awalGarg in "I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone"

awalGarg — Tue, 17 May 2022 19:06:57 +0000

Can you release the kernel sources? Thanks.

New comment by awalGarg in "Tell HN: Reddit was showing “Blocked” when accessed with Firefox"

awalGarg — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 19:10:00 +0000

Removed incorrect information, sorry folks!

There are 46,537,992 domains being hosted on the (Cloudflare) ASN AS13335

awalGarg — Sat, 23 Oct 2021 12:15:12 +0000

Article URL: https://host.io/asn/AS13335

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28967689

Points: 5

# Comments: 3

New comment by awalGarg in "Request for comments regarding topics to be discussed at Dark Patterns workshop"

awalGarg — Sun, 02 May 2021 20:26:10 +0000

I'm always amazed reading that this isn't already the case in the US. In India, every charge requires SMS based 2fa. Starting a bank mandate (ECS/NACH) for automatic transfers needs me to physically sign a paper. It can be revoked any time by the user without any involvement of the receiving party, and can be done online as well.

New comment by awalGarg in "Fish Shell 3.2"

awalGarg — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:53:23 +0000

As someone with a teeny tiny commit in this release and a maintained personal fork, I feel compelled to say that the biggest benefit of fish over bash/zsh for me is not just the OOTB completions UX etc., but also how much more approachable it is to hacking. I would never even bother reading the source code of bash again, let alone try to patch it, because I have 0 confidence that something completely unrelated is not gonna break.

New comment by awalGarg in "Ask HN: Cool stuff that's still completely unregulated?"

awalGarg — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 08:27:17 +0000

I am not sure why this comment was marked dead without any responses, and hence I am "vouch"-ing for it. Can someone point to laws related to license plate tracking?

It seems to me that having a huge database of known locations of vehicles could be used to do some cool (but likely immoral) things, specially coupled with the fact that several state agencies all over the world make it free and easy to retrieve licensing and ownership information for vehicles. It'd also be relatively much easier to do compared to facial recognition.

Cross-platform clipboard manager with history support

awalGarg — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 14:31:07 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/ikouchiha47/clippy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417147

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Nokia is violating GPLv2, and other issues with the mobile phone market

awalGarg — Sun, 25 Mar 2018 19:56:18 +0000

Article URL: https://gist.github.com/awalgarg/3c7fff4a3aca5c6b645fb9b446dbc149

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16674197

Points: 4

# Comments: 0