Hacker News: mistahchris

New comment by mistahchris in "Vibe engineering"

mistahchris — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:44:47 +0000

That's actually a pretty reasonable description I think. I mean, in the semi-serious way. But I was just talking to some colleagues of mine about how one can get attached to or invested in code that they hand wrote, even though that code wasn't really solving a problem that was "worth" that level of attachment. And AI assisted code generation changes the dynamic for code that fits in that category for me, and it just so happens to be a lot of the code people write for work fit into that. You only really need to be "artisinal" about the code that "really matters".

New comment by mistahchris in "Claude Code 2.0"

mistahchris — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 16:28:05 +0000

i've done that as well. but turns out, for me, i'd rather do it manually most of the time.

New comment by mistahchris in "Claude Code 2.0"

mistahchris — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 15:28:45 +0000

I'm a recent jj convert, and working with llms was actually a driver for my own jj adoption. I haven't tried the watch daemon, but I do run `jj new` anytime i ask the llm agent to do anything. It has worked amazingly well.

New comment by mistahchris in "WASM 3.0 Completed"

mistahchris — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:35:18 +0000

I'm still hype about WASM. This looks like a cool release. I'm running some pretty high traffic WASM plugins on envoy, running some plugins for terminal apps (zellij), and for one of my toy side projects, I'm running a wasm web app (rust leptos).

For 2 of those 3 use cases, i think it's not technically the optimal choice, but i think that future may actually come. Congratulations and nice work to everyone involved!

New comment by mistahchris in "Gleam v1.12"

mistahchris — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 20:22:52 +0000

I really like gleam. I have a few unfinished side projects in gleam with about 10k lines of code, so I've had enough of a taste to know I like it. I can't wait to see how it matures. I plan to write more gleam in the future. I am particularly excited about the possibilities of sharing more code between webapp frontends and backends. Gleam has so much potential and is already quite productive.

I am not that online of a person. But I joined the discord to say hi and ask a few questions and I have to say the community really does have great vibes. If I were spending more time online, I would likely bias to spending it in the gleam community. They're a bunch of very friendly, and smart people working on a wide variety of interesting projects.

New comment by mistahchris in "Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?"

mistahchris — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 22:51:41 +0000

I use search engines every day (primarily kagi). But I will use a fast llm with a search tool for some things, like providing context about a news story etc, (primarily gemini 2.0 flash with "grounding" on).

New comment by mistahchris in "Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its schools (2023)"

mistahchris — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 20:47:28 +0000

Yes! A physical book and ebook bundle would be awesome.

New comment by mistahchris in "Sweden is investing €104M to bring back printed textbooks"

mistahchris — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 20:46:29 +0000

I did the exact same thing. I'm back to buying real books, but I will say I still use my ereader in situations without good lighting or where the book is just too cumbersome. Sometimes that means I get the book twice which is suboptimal, but I strongly prefer the reading experience of a physical book. My appreciation of the work is even higher when the reading experience is better.

New comment by mistahchris in "Am I crazy to quit a FANG job for ethical reasons?"

mistahchris — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 22:29:52 +0000

Personally, I think you are very sane for considering leaving FANG for ethical reasons. Of course, in our economic system, there isn't any fully ethical way to participate at all. But in my opinion, there are other good jobs that pay well that are overall less harmful.

New comment by mistahchris in "TypedDicts are better than you think"

mistahchris — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:34:39 +0000

the link is 404ing, but i found the post in the author's github repo: https://github.com/Jamie-Chang/Jamie-Blog/blob/18c0aaf2266de...

New comment by mistahchris in "Python Has Too Many Package Managers"

mistahchris — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 19:36:13 +0000

If you haven't yet, check out https://devenv.sh (super powered nix shell and more). It's pretty nice for python packages and installs your requirements to a project local venv for you via whatever tool you want (pip, poetry, uv etc).

I've been using it for a couple of years and it's super nice to be able to manage both python and "native" dependencies, and other non-python development tools all together.

I used just nix and whatever python packages are already in nixpkgs for several projects. And that works really really well until you run into an issue with compatibility like I did. It seems to mostly happen when some extremely common tool like `awscli2` depends on a specific version of some package and so it's pinned.

New comment by mistahchris in "Calibre – New in Calibre 7.0"

mistahchris — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 19:20:35 +0000

I was a kindle user and recently switched to Pocketbook. I’ve been buying new ebooks from ebooks.com which are often already drm free. For me, there haven’t been any downsides.

New comment by mistahchris in "Calibre – New in Calibre 7.0"

mistahchris — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 19:17:14 +0000

I use calibre-web and love it.

New comment by mistahchris in "Zellij New WASM Plugin System"

mistahchris — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 23:43:28 +0000

locked mode is my fav as well. I used it to re-make a DoomEmacs-like workspace with helix.

New comment by mistahchris in "Emacs: Mastering Eshell"

mistahchris — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:05:45 +0000

I love vterm. It's so good.

New comment by mistahchris in "Emacs: Mastering Eshell"

mistahchris — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:04:31 +0000

Same for me. I've been using emacs now for several years after being a long time vim user. I have never missed vim after switching. Emacs is amazingly powerful. And I never got to a point where Doom felt limiting. I only ever need to make minor customization on top of Doom's packages and it's super easy and I actually like elisp _way_ better than vimscript.

Anyways I don't really care for text editor wars or whatever. I just wanted to second this person's experience with vim -> emacs via Doom Emacs.

New comment by mistahchris in "Nix: Taming Unix with Functional Programming"

mistahchris — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 20:50:33 +0000

I have used plain nixpkgs, poetry2nix and mach-nix for packaging "real" projects. My biggest take away is that python packaging is a hot mess. This isn't exactly news that no one has heard before though.

The initial work for packaging a complicated python app is dominated by sorting through a lot of confusing errors, no matter what tool you use. poetry2nix and plain nix has been my best experience so far in python packaging though.

For my simple python packages, I'm using plain nix and flit, which has been the simplest. It's not feasible for python applications that need complicated dependency version resolving due to python dependency pinning though.

Here's the plain nix + flit example that I really like: https://git.sr.ht/~averagechris/deduper/tree/main/item/flake...

The poetry2nix projects I have worked with are closed source sadly so I can't link them.

New comment by mistahchris in "Nix: Taming Unix with Functional Programming"

mistahchris — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 20:30:10 +0000

Wow that is cool. I have been wanting to build both a router and a NAS and run nixos on them since I run nixos for everything else I do. Thanks for writing and sharing about your experience!

New comment by mistahchris in "Using Nix on macOS"

mistahchris — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 05:33:25 +0000

Yep. Note that there's nothing you need to do to configure display resolution in UTM / qemu. You do need the spice guest tools installed in your nixos vm though. The only thing you should need to do is set the resolution in whatever display manager you use in nixos. For me, I run the sway window manager. My display manager is kanshi.

Here's my config: https://git.sr.ht/~averagechris/dotfiles

Here's a branch that I has some aarch64 specific things in it that I'm using for my guest vm config (I will merge it into the main branch when I get an hour or two so this link might die at some point) https://git.sr.ht/~averagechris/dotfiles/tree/aarch64-work-v...

Here's the link to my display manager config https://git.sr.ht/~averagechris/dotfiles/tree/aarch64-work-v...

New comment by mistahchris in "Using Nix on macOS"

mistahchris — Sun, 31 Jul 2022 01:59:28 +0000

This has been my experience as well. I was nervous to start depending on NixOs for my work, but when I started at a new company ~2 years ago, I decided that was a good time to dive in. I have absolutely not regretted it. My setup is far less troublesome than any of my coworkers managing a bunch of different python versions for various python applications on macos.