Hacker News: littleroot

New comment by littleroot in "A Brief History of Fish Sauce"

littleroot — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:36:47 +0000

Vietnamese here, no we add this to almost everything, especially things that don't contain fish in the first place. We have techniques to remove the fish smell where we don't desire it, but to be honest highest grade nước mắm would smell more like pure umami than fish so removing the remaining fish smell isn't that hard, usually just some peppers would be enough.

New comment by littleroot in ""McKinsey in a Box": The End of Strategic Consulting?"

littleroot — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 06:34:53 +0000

but can your models make slides as fancy as mckinsey's

New comment by littleroot in "Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language"

littleroot — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 17:24:23 +0000

>a single executable is both the package manager, LSP and the compiler

oh my i just know you're going to love unison

New comment by littleroot in "Going declarative on macOS with Nix and Nix-Darwin"

littleroot — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 20:20:23 +0000

Despite how the learning curve keeps the Nix community relatively small (it's grown a lot since 2021 actually) nixpkgs has assimilated like 90% of OSS. Learning Nix is hard, but once you know enough Nix to be productive it's a huge enabler.

New comment by littleroot in "Cold-blooded software"

littleroot — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 07:04:57 +0000

This is literally the only reply that hit the core of the article's problem and of course no one on this site upvoted it lol. The only thing I dislike more than software development posts that use inappropriate analogy from nature to shallowly jump to conclusion, is software development posts that use inappropriate analogy from nature to shallowly jump to conclusion with absolutely flawed understanding of the supposedly analogous natural phenomenon.

And of course, painted turtles (among a few other species) can survive being frozen not because of their cold-bloodedness, but thanks to special antifreeze protein they have. Other lizards (and cold blooded animals for that matter) would just rupture their own tissues upon thawing.

New comment by littleroot in "Important Coding Habits"

littleroot — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 19:58:47 +0000

I found my neck and shoulder a lot less tense since I started using split keyboards, and my overall posture also improved. The downside is trying (and building!) new split keyboards starts to become an addicting hobby, and I keep finding my next keyboard with fewer keys than the previous. Settled with a 36-key Skeletyl for now.

New comment by littleroot in "Try: run a command and inspect its effects before changing your live system"

littleroot — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 11:36:26 +0000

> But the impression the community gives is very much that you can always rollback and everything is in its own sandbox

I've never got that impression from the community, since day one I have the impression that it's rollbackable in a revision-control way instead of sandbox-like. The dependencies are actually global instead of sandboxed, Nix just makes it explicit which exact instance of which depends on which exact instance of which. That's not sandboxing at all.

Well to be honest it's actual only occurred to me that you could have that sandboxing impression after reading your comments and yeah I can understand you point.

New comment by littleroot in "Why don't more languages offer flow typing?"

littleroot — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 19:04:09 +0000

Feels like type refinement via pattern matching on GADTs is more expressive than this

New comment by littleroot in "Go mod’s lesser known features"

littleroot — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 09:24:54 +0000

Modules = Lego bricks used to build bigger Lego artifacts

Package = Lego bricks (probably share a theme and are meant to build something concrete together), shipped with instructions and media and whatnot, in a, well, whole package.

New comment by littleroot in "Go mod’s lesser known features"

littleroot — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 06:15:34 +0000

I'm the opposite: I'm writing Go for a living and I hate everything about the language itself, but I found the de-facto toolchain ok-ish and probably the least obtrusive thing about the whole thing.

Imho, many languages would massively benefit with the kind of tooling Go has out of the box. I heard Rust's tooling has some great stuff too and it's in my immediate plan to learn some Rust.

New comment by littleroot in "Dagger: a new way to build CI/CD pipelines"

littleroot — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 18:40:59 +0000

Are you guys aware of Nix, both the language and the build system? Nix at its core is a build system, but the community pushed the boundary of what a "build" means so hard, now Nix could also be used as one definition language for everything in a CI/CD pipeline (also with a canonical collection of "building blocks" in nixpkgs), from (reproducibly) building artifacts to running automated testing/integrating tasks to automatically deliver the artifacts to whatever the "infrastructure" is. After all in a very general sense the whole CI/CD pipeline could be seen as just another build artifact, which I think resonates a lot with your idea. How do you think your project and Nix would overlap and/or (or both) complement each other?