Hacker News: knlb2022

New comment by knlb2022 in "Ditching Obsidian and building my own"

knlb2022 — Sun, 18 May 2025 19:13:52 +0000

Yeah, it's very far from usable by other people at the moment =/.

The readme at https://github.com/kunalb/termdex/tree/main/markdown_files is probably the best bit.

New comment by knlb2022 in "Ditching Obsidian and building my own"

knlb2022 — Sun, 18 May 2025 18:16:57 +0000

I've built a couple for myself so far; the most recent is in zig (sqlite extension that treats markdown files / frontmatter as virtual tables) and it's lasted me. I plan to rewrite it soon to adapt to how I've been using it :)

https://github.com/kunalb/termdex

New comment by knlb2022 in "Intermediate Activations – the forward hook (2020)"

knlb2022 — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:25:06 +0000

I gave a small talk on how to really push using hooks for logging intermediate values (including capturing gradients from torch & fx scripted modules) that may be useful: https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/pytorch2023/40/Interme...

New comment by knlb2022 in "Berkeley Mono Typeface"

knlb2022 — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 19:59:28 +0000

This was the first time I bought a font, and -- surprisingly -- I haven't regretted it at all. Every time I look at my terminal there's always a little bit of happiness at how elegant the font looks.

New comment by knlb2022 in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

knlb2022 — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:08:44 +0000

Happy to hear that!

Heh, definitely depends on the software itself but I generally find the contents /schema of tables used to save the data very illuminating: you can see the UX, whatever form it takes -- and then what is saved to the backend so it makes things slightly more understandable for me.

New comment by knlb2022 in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

knlb2022 — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 18:23:02 +0000

https://explog.in

I've been writing here sporadically for more than 10 years at this point, at ~1 post a year. The more recent posts took months to write, and tend to cover things I find myself repeating frequently while working with other engineers.

- https://explog.in/notes/elephants/index.html: Tips for ramping up on large projects

- https://explog.in/notes/devtools/index.html: Building developer tools

Planning to overhaul it later this year.

Mechanical Tactics for ramping up on large software projects

knlb2022 — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 20:31:55 +0000

Article URL: https://explog.in/notes/elephants/thework.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36189311

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by knlb2022 in "Tracing Python"

knlb2022 — Thu, 25 May 2023 06:21:43 +0000

I'll throw in my own too: https://github.com/kunalb/panopticon

New comment by knlb2022 in "Ask HN: What is your system for learning new things?"

knlb2022 — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 10:02:08 +0000

Build my own project with it, ideally for fun -- if it's a tool or a programming language. Try to apply it immediately if I'm learning something new.

New comment by knlb2022 in "Code Lifespan"

knlb2022 — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 21:52:26 +0000

> "you don't have to code all parts of your design".

That's an excellent articulation of what I think as "invisible seams" when I write code: they're soft points of extensions that don't need a separate interface/function/class _yet_. Sometimes I just mark them for myself with an extra newline within a function.

New comment by knlb2022 in "Grokking big unfamiliar codebases"

knlb2022 — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 03:27:26 +0000

Huh, I wrote about this a few months ago too (with a lot more whimsy): Eating Elephants -- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c07-Zj6bUbYPwx7Zttd1N74o...

The thrust of both our articles is similar, except I think I ended up using many more words.

New comment by knlb2022 in "Selfish Writing (2018)"

knlb2022 — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 04:26:09 +0000

Agreed, writing is necessary but not sufficient. But writing is still much better than nothing.

New comment by knlb2022 in "Selfish Writing (2018)"

knlb2022 — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 18:23:41 +0000

As much as I enjoy writing to think, simply writing doesn't lead to reality testing -- I've found even greater clarity by trying to add numbers or simulations and trying to program around what I'm writing. Writing with real data intertwined and numbers applied is much better.

New comment by knlb2022 in "A crash course in Python “comprehensions” and “generators”"

knlb2022 — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 06:09:14 +0000

I used this in AoC for the first time a couple of years ago, as a consequence of diving deeply into asyncio. https://explog.in/static/aoc2019/AoC23.html

New comment by knlb2022 in "Ask HN: Are there any books that changed your life during college or school?"

knlb2022 — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 15:13:35 +0000

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, and the whole series on Discworld greatly affected how I think about life, and to look beyond first assumptions.

New comment by knlb2022 in "H-m-m: Hackers mind map"

knlb2022 — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 04:51:37 +0000

I have 3 suggestions! because that's how I tend to work too

- Scapple (mac/windows only) https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview I love how minimal it is, but wish there was a linux/web version. I'll probably make my own some day.

- kinopio (web/mobile) kinopio.club Works well, but has a strong, quirky personality which sometimes gets annoying for me; I prefer the minimalism of scapple.

- draw.io / diagrams.net You can configure it to hide most of the toolbars and then just use it as mind mapping software, this is what I'm trying at the moment.

Eating Elephants: ramping up on large software projects

knlb2022 — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 20:06:11 +0000

Article URL: https://explog.in/notes/elephants.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32543901

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by knlb2022 in "Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?"

knlb2022 — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 15:19:02 +0000

I haven't yet cleaned up the slipbox code enough to publish it, but I do have my site generation code public: https://explog.in/config.html -- which does something similar but doesn't generate the cross links.

The slipbox code is just a bunch of python to pre-process the org files and "fix" links, which then passes them on to emacs subprocesses to generate html.

New comment by knlb2022 in "Ask HN: What is a sustainable methodology for taking notes of your learning?"

knlb2022 — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 15:17:19 +0000

I use logseq to take study notes in org mode, which are then published to my public slipbox by post-processing with emacs in a github action. The consistent part of this has been plain text notes -- the slipbox has stuck for the past year, and hopefully will continue.

https://explog.in/slipbox/

New comment by knlb2022 in "Memray: a memory profiler for Python"

knlb2022 — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 22:09:57 +0000

I built https://github.com/kunalb/panopticon to export perfetto/chrome compatible traces and also draw arrows between async functions. (I think the arrows are only supported in about://tracing though).