Hacker News: nickagliano

New comment by nickagliano in "Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access"

nickagliano — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:01:24 +0000

There’s some nuance to this surrounding the “creative commons” licensing of these ACM publications.

Open access does not mean Creative Commons license (CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC-ND).

Jan 1 2026, all ACM publications will be open access, but not all will be creative commons.

Per an email I received on April 11th, 2025 from Scott Delman:

“Thank you for your email. All ACM published papers in the ACM DL will be made freely available. All articles published after January 1, 2026 will be governed by a Creative Commons license (either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND), but ACM will not be retroactively assigning CC licenses to the entire archive of ~800K ACM published papers.”

This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because a lot of the foundational computer science papers fall into that category.

#FreeAlanTuring

New comment by nickagliano in "Fun with uv and PEP 723"

nickagliano — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 01:23:05 +0000

Fantastic comment

Premature Optimization: How Donald Knuth "Skill Issued" Dijkstra

nickagliano — Fri, 23 May 2025 16:45:08 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.slamdunk.software/premature-optimization-how-donald-knuth-skill-issued-dijkstra/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074378

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

The Internet, Remote Work, AI Ethics, and an American Pope

nickagliano — Thu, 08 May 2025 21:35:45 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.slamdunk.software/the-internet-remote-work-ai-ethics-and-an-american-pope/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43931596

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by nickagliano in "Ty: A fast Python type checker and language server"

nickagliano — Wed, 07 May 2025 18:27:46 +0000

Interesting to see astral come out with this right around facebook’s release of “Pyrefly, a faster Python type checker written in Rust”.

Not making any sort of ethical statement, just interesting that rust keeps eating the python and JS tooling worlds.

New comment by nickagliano in "Writing "/etc/hosts" breaks the Substack editor"

nickagliano — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 16:43:30 +0000

As a card carrying Substack hater, I’m not suprised.

> "How could Substack improve this situation for technical writers?"

They don’t care about (technical) writers. All they care about is building a TikTok clone to “drive discoverability” and make the attention-metrics go up. Chris Best is memeing about it on his own platform. Very gross.

SpacetimeDB-A Yak-Shaving Success Story?

nickagliano — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 16:33:02 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.slamdunk.software/spacetimedb-a-yak-shaving-success-story/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43707400

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A Sinister Brood of Web Crawlers Is Hatching

nickagliano — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 20:08:52 +0000

Article URL: https://slamdunksoftware.substack.com/p/a-sinister-brood-of-web-crawlers

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43392274

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by nickagliano in "Dear Substack, Please Add Syntax Highlighting"

nickagliano — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 10:58:57 +0000

After much deliberation, I've started writing on Substack. One of my main points of contention is that, well, since it's not my own blog, I can't just implement feature (i.e., syntax highlighting). Syntax highlighting is pretty important IMO when people are reading code, especially when it's interpolated with text. So I published this formal, open letter as a feature request.

Dear Substack, Please Add Syntax Highlighting

nickagliano — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 10:58:57 +0000

Article URL: https://slamdunksoftware.substack.com/p/dear-substack-please-add-syntax-highlighting

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43387124

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

The Hardest Thing About Software Engineering

nickagliano — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 19:05:06 +0000

Article URL: https://slamdunksoftware.substack.com/p/the-hardest-thing-about-software

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43366062

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Hidden Messages in Emojis and Hacking the US Treasury

nickagliano — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 03:13:26 +0000

Article URL: https://slamdunksoftware.substack.com/p/hidden-messages-in-emojis-and-hacking

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43359264

Points: 209

# Comments: 78

New comment by nickagliano in "Launch HN: Moonglow (YC S24) – Serverless Jupyter Notebooks"

nickagliano — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 23:51:49 +0000

I saw this comment on the marimo post too. Is there a source of Fernando saying this?

New comment by nickagliano in "Keep Out – WebGL Game"

nickagliano — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 23:32:45 +0000

Most fun game on HN since Infinite Craft.

Worked well on iOS Safari. Installed as PWA and everything. Managed to keep my attention for 5 levels. Nice work.

What I Learned About Software from Building a Chicken Coop

nickagliano — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 14:28:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.simplethread.com/what-i-learned-about-software-from-building-a-chicken-coop/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39641326

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

LLMs in a Vacuum Are Useless

nickagliano — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 17:07:07 +0000

Article URL: https://www.simplethread.com/llms-in-a-vacuum-are-useless/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38179481

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by nickagliano in "When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think"

nickagliano — Thu, 11 May 2023 17:10:41 +0000

Yes! Thank you Simon. Takes like this will make this conversation a lot more well-rounded.

Of course writing is important. Writing free-hand on paper is beautiful. But so are the ideas, and the organization of the writing, and the style, and the plot and the characters.

Of course playing instruments is important, but I'm reminded of the Rick Rubin interview where he talks about how he's not a musician, and he doesn't know how to do any real technical music production.

New comment by nickagliano in "When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think"

nickagliano — Thu, 11 May 2023 14:16:29 +0000

No, I agree with you! I'm not trying to simplify things by saying it's a tool. As you use the tool, it changes you as well. I think the chatbots are particular technology that will have a lot of that effect.

One of my favorite ramblings on this is Wendell Berry's essay on "Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer".

I'm just saying that there's an obviously bad way to let this tool have an impact on you, and there's a way to use it that won't ruin you.

It's important to be vigilant, and not to abuse GPT-4 and, i.e., replace all of your own writing with AI.

New comment by nickagliano in "When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think"

nickagliano — Thu, 11 May 2023 11:55:57 +0000

It's more complicated than, "using AI more and more will cause us to forget how to write."

It's just a tool.

I like comparing it to something like quizlet (online flash cards), which can be a great study tool, but which people will also misuse and abuse. Instead of studying and taking the online quizzes, people will often just find the right quizlet which has all of the answers to the online quiz. People who are honest will actually learn the material, and the cheaters suffer.

I think people who misuse ChatGPT will become lazier, worse writers. But using the tool in an honest way will improve even an already talented writers work.

Just my 2 cents.

New comment by nickagliano in "We're at a crossroads–navigating the intersection of AI and creative writing"

nickagliano — Thu, 11 May 2023 11:26:20 +0000

I posted something else a day ago more focused on the fivehundredwordsaday website, but I'm more interested in the topic of this post.