Hacker News: rbonvall

New comment by rbonvall in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

rbonvall — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:52:55 +0000

Just like that place that's so crowded nobody goes there anymore.

New comment by rbonvall in "Privilege is bad grammar"

rbonvall — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:20:50 +0000

That doesn't explain the "punctuating with multiple cryface emojis".

New comment by rbonvall in "The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"

rbonvall — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 23:21:57 +0000

Lies, Damned lies, and Unreasonable Effectiveness For Fun and Profit

New comment by rbonvall in "Awk Technical Notes (2023)"

rbonvall — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:44:51 +0000

Example of replacing grep+cut with a single awk invokation:

    $ echo token:abc:def | grep -E ^token | cut -d: -f2
    abc
    
    $ echo token:abc:def | awk -F: '/^token/ { print $2 }'
    abc

Conditions don't have to be regular expressions. For example:

    $ echo $CSV
    foo:24
    bar:15
    baz:49
    
    $ echo $CSV | awk -F: '$2 > 20 { print $1 }'
    foo
    baz

New comment by rbonvall in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

rbonvall — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 22:14:21 +0000

I use dtrx, which also ensures that all files are extracted into a folder.

New comment by rbonvall in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

rbonvall — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 20:27:58 +0000

Python also pretty-prints out of the box:

    $ echo '{ "hello": "world" }' | python3 -m json.tool
    {
        "hello": "world"
    }

New comment by rbonvall in "Users only care about 20% of your application"

rbonvall — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 21:38:04 +0000

> I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today.

This is exactly what Joel Spolsky did:

> What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.

... so he went on and created Trello.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...

New comment by rbonvall in "Rost – Rust Programming in German"

rbonvall — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 13:02:34 +0000

Reminds me when Scala was translated to German some time ago, at about the same time of the year:

https://scala-lang.org/blog/2017/04/01/announcing-skala.html

New comment by rbonvall in "GIMP 3.0 is on the way"

rbonvall — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 15:15:47 +0000

Since no other pedants have chimed in yet, I'm required to point out that 20 years is five olympiads, which is the timespan in between six Olympic games.

New comment by rbonvall in "Alonzo Church: Architect of computer intelligence"

rbonvall — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 21:01:12 +0000

Just like Niklaus Wirth's quote about how people used to call him, or the joke about there being 10 kinds of people.

Those are the ones that make me wish people knew just enough Computer Science to get them :)

New comment by rbonvall in "Techniques I use to create a great user experience for shell scripts"

rbonvall — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:54:21 +0000

In my opinion, shell scripting is the right tool when you need to do a lot of calling programs, piping, and redirecting. Such programs end up being cumbersome in "proper" languages.

New comment by rbonvall in "Why Haskell?"

rbonvall — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 01:52:59 +0000

The most important benefit is not that you CAN unwrap a value, but rather that you CANNOT NOT do it.

New comment by rbonvall in "Why Haskell?"

rbonvall — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:29:36 +0000

Sbt is too complex and powerful for its own good. I had a love-hate relationship with it, and now I try to avoid it if I can.

I like scala-cli a lot. It's very promising, but I think it's too new to be proclaimed best-in-class yet. Time will tell, and I'm rooting for it.

New comment by rbonvall in "Show HN: Defrag the Game"

rbonvall — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 12:06:30 +0000

If I was you I wouldn't bother. The cool thing is not the game itself, it's the fact that we "old folks" just know what to do right away :) If you need to read instructions, probably you'll find the game dull anyway.

New comment by rbonvall in "How old is your globe? [pdf]"

rbonvall — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 12:03:21 +0000

This document was made by a specific globe manufacturer, so it probably isn't meant to be used to date arbitrary globes, but only theirs.

New comment by rbonvall in "Aho – a Git implementation in Awk"

rbonvall — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 18:02:47 +0000

Awk doesn't have a way to define function-local variables. All variables are global, except for function parameters.

This spacing convention is meant to clearly separate mandatory parameters and optional parameters that are sometimes only introduced to "declare" a local variable.

New comment by rbonvall in "Origins of J"

rbonvall — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 14:07:26 +0000

Once I put the effort to understand code like this and it turned out it's straightforward once you learn the conventions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19421524

New comment by rbonvall in "37, the median value for the second prime factor of an integer"

rbonvall — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 23:10:01 +0000

It's because the characters in the result can be one of 10 digits or one of 26 letters.

New comment by rbonvall in "On Keeping a Logbook (2010)"

rbonvall — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 13:58:34 +0000

Commenting on the internet is note-taking for jerks.

New comment by rbonvall in "That's a Lot of YAML"

rbonvall — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 12:47:17 +0000

I think that's precisely the problem with YAML. By being so unpredictable, it turns from "format I use without thinking much about" into "format that makes me spend a lot of time finding out what's wrong this time".

Maybe you and I haven't been bitten personally by YAML idiosincracies yet, but just learning about examples like the "Norway problem" and the "negative GPS coordinates bug"—and thinking how frustrating must have been to figure those out in the first place—makes me shudder.