Hacker News: evnp

New comment by evnp in "Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division"

evnp — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:26:17 +0000

Great list, thanks. Seconding Exhalation, that story in particular but also the whole collection. Guess I'm checking out Egan next.

New comment by evnp in "I used AI. It worked. I hated it"

evnp — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:38:35 +0000

I'm legitimately curious - could you elaborate on the difference? Speaking as someone who has always preferred the commit-by-commit focus of a rebase instead of all-at-once merge conflict resolution, auditing all the changes together later doesn't sound more appealing than doing things incrementally.

New comment by evnp in "The wonder of modern drywall"

evnp — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:42:09 +0000

We had our circa-1915 house checked for asbestos before lifting it. The inspector laughed after taking a chip out of the plaster because you could clearly see horse hair protruding from every side of the chip. This is apparently unlikely to overlap with asbestos, though it comes instead with a minor (?) anthrax risk. I'll take that over the dust from drywall sanding every time though.

New comment by evnp in "Nested code fences in Markdown"

evnp — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:51:50 +0000

My issue is remembering that the square brackets come first, not the parentheses. I do like asciidoc's method: https://example.com for bare link, or https://example.com[pretty text] if alternate text is desired

Edit: It took me a re-read to fully understand your comment, I can see how square brackets might be an incremental addition. This may also help remember the syntax, thanks!

New comment by evnp in "Nested code fences in Markdown"

evnp — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:48:51 +0000

I like this, thank you.

New comment by evnp in "Nested code fences in Markdown"

evnp — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:48:00 +0000

This is great! Not an emacs user (as yet) but this and org-mode's /italic/ _underline_ *bold* +strike+ feel that much closer to the oft-touted "source looks kinda like formatting” ideal of markdown. Not sure why we ended up with the mediocre version as a defacto standard.

New comment by evnp in "Nested code fences in Markdown"

evnp — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:45:26 +0000

Anything that doesn't force you to remember arbitrary ordering - square brackets first? Or parentheses? It's the textual equivalent of plugging in usb upside down.

An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link.

New comment by evnp in "US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year"

evnp — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:07:43 +0000

Same here, basically word for word.

New comment by evnp in "Go ahead, self-host Postgres"

evnp — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 19:23:32 +0000

Enjoyed the article, and the "less can be more than you think" mindset in general.

To the author - on Android Chrome I seem to inevitably load the page scrolled to the bottom, footnotes area. Scrolling up, back button, click link again has the same results - I start out seeing footnotes. Might be worth a look.

New comment by evnp in "I don't care how well your "AI" works"

evnp — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:40:37 +0000

I'm interested in this. Code review, most egregiously where the "author" neglected to review the LLM output themselves, seems like a clear instance. What are some other examples?

Something that should go in a "survival guide" for devs that still prefer to code themselves.

New comment by evnp in "I don't care how well your "AI" works"

evnp — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:28:42 +0000

Exactly. The problem is instead of getting a raise because "you can do more now" your colleagues will be laid off. Why pay for 3 devs when the work can be done by 1 now? And we all better hope that actually pans out in whatever legacy codebase we're dealing with.

Now the job market is flooded due to layoffs, further justifying lack of comp adjustment - add inflation, and you have "de-valuing" in direct form.

New comment by evnp in "Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste"

evnp — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:01:06 +0000

I love it too. Appears to be accomplished with this CSS, which you can tinker with by finding the :after element at the bottom of the tag in browser devtools:

  body::after {
    content: "";
    position: fixed;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 1px, transparent 1px);
    background-size: 2px 2px;
    background-repeat: repeat;
    pointer-events: none;
    z-index: 9999;
  }

New comment by evnp in "Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle"

evnp — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 17:02:08 +0000

Appreciate the exposition, great ideas here. It's fascinating how the relationship between human and machine has become almost adversarial here!

New comment by evnp in "Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle"

evnp — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 02:59:10 +0000

Just curious, how do you go about making the test suite immutable? Was just reading this earlier today...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45525085

New comment by evnp in "Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap"

evnp — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:59:00 +0000

Aren't the impacts perpetual if we're creating new contrails every single day?

Taken from another comment, this seems pretty clear:

> Contrail cirrus may be air traffic's largest radiative forcing component, larger than all CO2 accumulated from aviation, and could triple from a 2006 baseline to 160–180 mW/m2 by 2050 without intervention.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail#Impacts_on_climate

The original article describes associated costs in time and fuel usage in the realm of 1% increase.

New comment by evnp in "Pre-record your demos"

evnp — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 02:47:42 +0000

It seems like you're misunderstanding what parent meant by "prerecorded" - not a screen recording, just pre-writing of commands to be executed during the demo. Would you consider it "deception" to hit up arrow a few times in a terminal during your demo to execute a command from shell history? This is effectively the same. Take a look at the linked repo, it's very clever.

New comment by evnp in "Writing toy software is a joy"

evnp — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 22:27:50 +0000

This is great! Asciinema is well-made and a lot of fun, but it sadly doesn't show the recordings in motion right there in the markdown/README. Looks like vhs neatly solves that problem, appreciate the share.

New comment by evnp in "Ash Framework – Model your domain, derive the rest"

evnp — Wed, 14 May 2025 15:35:20 +0000

Appreciate these thoughts. Would you mind sharing what Elixir and Phoenix books you're working through?

New comment by evnp in "Show HN: Node.js video tutorials where you can edit and run the code"

evnp — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 16:04:52 +0000

It's beautiful, but note to OP it doesn't work great on Android Chrome for me - can only draw very very short lines.

New comment by evnp in "Sixty Years On, We Still Dream of the Arrow"

evnp — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:16:32 +0000

Great read, fascinating piece of Canadian history.

For anyone on mobile (android/chrome at least) select "Desktop Site" under browser settings to see five historical images. They don't show up for me at all in the default mobile view.