Hacker News: mattmein

New comment by mattmein in "Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits"

mattmein — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 01:10:16 +0000

Reminded me of this comedy skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fibDNwF8bjs

New comment by mattmein in "NixOS 26.05"

mattmein — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 21:29:02 +0000

This is the concept of Simple vs Easy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768107

New comment by mattmein in "France fines Apple €150M for “excessive” pop-ups that let users reject tracking"

mattmein — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 01:17:13 +0000

There's a WKUK comedy sketch that fits this story pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fibDNwF8bjs

New comment by mattmein in "Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think"

mattmein — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 23:45:24 +0000

A few years ago I set up a ublock filter to hide the next/more buttons on hacker news and reddit. It works great because I can still get my news fix, but I can't scroll endlessly.

Ublock Origin: ! 2020-10-11 https://news.ycombinator.com news.ycombinator.com##.morelink

New comment by mattmein in "Why Clojure?"

mattmein — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:18:01 +0000

I think that particular issue was addressed in the recent Clojure release [https://clojure.org/news/2024/09/05/clojure-1-12-0] ("Clojure developers can now invoke Java methods taking functional interfaces by passing functions with matching arity.")

New comment by mattmein in "Show HN: Chonkie – A Fast, Lightweight Text Chunking Library for RAG"

mattmein — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 20:02:29 +0000

Also check out https://github.com/D-Star-AI/dsRAG/ for a bit more involved chunking strategy.

New comment by mattmein in "Age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library"

mattmein — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 20:18:20 +0000

Check out agenix-rekey[https://github.com/oddlama/agenix-rekey], it has the ability to set up secret generators.

New comment by mattmein in "The flip-flop on whether alcohol is good for you (2023)"

mattmein — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 21:30:51 +0000

Reminds me of Planck's principle: > A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...

New comment by mattmein in "Ansible is a Lisp?"

mattmein — Sun, 05 May 2024 19:38:54 +0000

Related: https://yamlscript.org/

New comment by mattmein in "Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks"

mattmein — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 07:37:50 +0000

>> In practice, they are a niche endeavor used by a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds.

I don't know anything about federation, but what you said basically describes the Internet when it started, so I don't see how you can imagine it is not going anywhere based on that. Most tech starts as a "niche endeavor of a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds" (I'm also thinking of Apple starting at a computer club).

New comment by mattmein in "ValueObject (2016)"

mattmein — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 12:48:50 +0000

My point is that there is nothing about functional programming, specifically the "Data structure + Algorithm" style, that makes it unsuitable for building complex applications like air traffic control system or bank lending system, and it has in fact been used successfully in domains like that.

If you are really interesting in this topic, check out the following pages: https://clojure.org/community/success_stories

https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry

New comment by mattmein in "ValueObject (2016)"

mattmein — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 06:30:59 +0000

Data structure + algorithm is a valid way of building large programs. That is basically how Clojure is designed, and it works pretty well for big applications.

Functional programming in aviation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0x3EIqBrZxw

Functional programming in banking: https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36297/nubank-buys-firm-...

New comment by mattmein in "Clojure 1.11 is now available"

mattmein — Tue, 22 Mar 2022 20:12:04 +0000

>> other languages have radically different tools and practices that lead to far fewer footguns

Can you share any examples of these different tools and practices?

New comment by mattmein in "Tabula: Convert PDF Table to CSV"

mattmein — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 23:33:46 +0000

I've used Tabula for many years, and it works great. Use it for converting PDF invoices from specific supplier for import into our system. Changed a task that took about a day each month, to about 10 minutes each month.

New comment by mattmein in "Emacs Modernization: Simple Changes Emacs Should Adopt (2006)"

mattmein — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 21:58:24 +0000

Regarding your long lines issue - from your description it sounds instead like an unicode issue which I also ran into a while back.

What happens is that your main programming font does not have the unicode characters, so Emacs falls back to searching all your fonts for each character it can't find, which is slow if it has to search through many different fonts.

The solution is to ensure you have symbol fonts installed - see the list of fonts here: https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts

Remnants of the Precursors is an open source modernization of Master of Orion

mattmein — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 23:48:15 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/rayfowler/rotp-public

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28204349

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

A small C utility that encodes bytes into whitespace characters

mattmein — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 19:00:23 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/gregfoletta/whitespacer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27813743

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mattmein in "Wiretrustee: WireGuard-Based Mesh Network"

mattmein — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 21:37:58 +0000

I've used Zerotier for several years now, and it does feel that the stability on mobile has improved in the past couple of months.

New comment by mattmein in "Sign a PDF document client-side with no data leaving the computer"

mattmein — Tue, 01 Jun 2021 03:33:03 +0000

The free version of Foxit PDF Reader allows you to upload a signature image and add the signature to PDF documents. There is a Linux version. https://www.foxit.com/downloads/

Remnants of the Precursors – open-source remake of Master of Orion 1

mattmein — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 08:08:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rotp/comments/miullj/remnants_of_the_precursors_now_in_prerelease/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804321

Points: 2

# Comments: 0