Hacker News: saysjonathan

Pen & Pixel: Design Process Behind 20k Iconic Album Covers [video]

saysjonathan — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:13:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVz2IAAxttE

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312346

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by saysjonathan in "My Rules for Using Spreadsheets"

saysjonathan — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:36:24 +0000

Can you expand more on this? Is it just for drafts or do they track all their correspondence in Excel?

New comment by saysjonathan in "Rubish: A Unix shell written in pure Ruby"

saysjonathan — Sat, 23 May 2026 10:33:55 +0000

Tangential:

I would love to see more interpreted languages offer shells with native constructs for operating as daily drivers shells (not just REPLs). When I first started learning Ruby I used `rush`[0] as my main shell. Being immersed in the language, even if there were a few helpers for shell operations, really helped me reason better about Ruby and think in the language. `scsh`[1] was enlightening as well. Ultimately the ergonomics of both pushed me back to more conventional variant but they were really helpful learning mechanisms.

0: https://github.com/adamwiggins/rush 1: https://github.com/scheme/scsh

New comment by saysjonathan in "Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI"

saysjonathan — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:17:39 +0000

3060ti only has 8GB, 3080ti has 12GB. That’ll make a difference for prices/comparison.

New comment by saysjonathan in "Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?"

saysjonathan — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:23:41 +0000

I'll bite: 15.5 years tech experience across SRE, SWE, PM, PGM, & strategic initiatives-adjacent things. Last roles was Director/Principal level. Last projects were driving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of portfolio acquisition integrations (successfully) at a $5B public company. NYC metro area but I've been remote for 13 years. No degree, self-taught, first real tech role acquired when I was recruited after hacking a company back in 2010. Laid off in Feb, though garden leave ran through April.

I've had mixed results overall. Primarily looking at senior+ TPM, TPGM, SI roles. My network is hard to leverage due to being remote for so long. Lots of cold applications. 25% of applications got recruiter responses within a day, 25% within a week, 50% blocked at ATS, ghosted, or hiring being re-evaluated. Not as many direct recruiter outreaches as I've received in the past.

From the JD side, salaries seem to be more stratified and requirements, even for lower roles, seems to be higher than before. I've seen quite a few requests for 10+ years experience for mid-level PGM roles. In loose convos with friends, everyone wants a big name on a resume but no longer will pay a premium to get it.

No degree seems to be a bigger gate now than it was the last time I was searching. Being a generalist also seems to be more of a risk but I'm sure that's at least partly a fault in my own framing. I do not play the LinkedIn game well. My major contributions have been either inside a company (internally-focused, hard to share publicly or company-specific), mildly popular open source dev work (>100 stars), or things actually used everywhere but no one cares because it's not "real" dev work (created puppetlabs-firewall module, 10M+ downloads, adopted as part of Puppet Enterprise, used globally, no one cares). Without a strong public profile in a specific direction, I've been told I read as too hard to quantify.

Overall, it seems "bad" in that everyone is battling uncertainty about where things are going and being more vigilant to avoid the wrong hire. Credentials and resume pedigree seem to matter more than ever and roles are much more vertically aligned than I've seen them in the past. If you're good, with some amount of credentials, and a lot of vertical ownership then you'll probably be fine though it might take longer. If you're a generalist who's hard to pin down, you might be in for some pain.

New comment by saysjonathan in "For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions"

saysjonathan — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:03:55 +0000

This is probably more common than you think. VMs are expensive, both in resources and cost (if you’re using something commercial). OS-level isolation (shared kernel, cgroups, namespaces) is used pervasively

New comment by saysjonathan in "My .config Ship of Theseus"

saysjonathan — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:20:02 +0000

Oh, I've used some awk too. My favorite (and most ridiculous) application was using the qawk from The AWK Programming Language[0] book to make a flat-file relational database of CSV files. Ultimately I just moved to sqlite but I learned a lot about awk in the process!

0: https://ia800708.us.archive.org/25/items/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoI...

New comment by saysjonathan in "My .config Ship of Theseus"

saysjonathan — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:08:00 +0000

I landed on near the same thing. I also went too far the other way at various points: ed as editor, weirder shells (posix sh, rc, es, rush (ruby shell), pdksh), suckless everything (even on MacOS, where possible). I found my healthy balance between using more modern tools and learning the defaults to avoid too much configuration. I still have 281 lines in dotfiles (according to `git ls-files | xargs cat | wc -l`), along with my dwm.tmux[0] as window manager, but I feel like I can generally operate in most environments as long as base tools are present. If others haven't tried it, I recommend giving it a go. Try being bravely default.

[0] https://github.com/saysjonathan/dwm.tmux

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

saysjonathan — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:17:05 +0000

I've made a few batches of salmon garum that turned out nicely. Just make sure you use raw and not cooked, as the cooked fats will taste rancid. It tastes different than asian fish sauce or colatura but still of use in similar contexts.

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

saysjonathan — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 10:34:16 +0000

For fish sauce definitely, assuming you also use the guts so you can get the enzymes. If you want to make with a protein source that doesn't have the enzymes present, like mushrooms, you can add them separately. Whole fish just fills the protein and protease slots with a single ingredient.

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

saysjonathan — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:45:38 +0000

Homemade garum is a fun kitchen experiment, if you have the equipment and patience. Heat + protease + protein substrate is really all you need.

New comment by saysjonathan in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

saysjonathan — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:51:49 +0000

The National put out a official 'bootleg' recording of two nights of concerts using the Mike "the Mike" Millard method, called Juicy Sonic Magic[0]. Only physically released on triple cassette though I think you can stream it. Sort of tangential to this conversation but it really captures the energy of a live show in a completely different way. Highly recommend checking out if you're a fan of the band, old bootleg recording techniques, or live recordings in general.

0: https://www.discogs.com/master/1664187-The-National-Juicy-So...

New comment by saysjonathan in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

saysjonathan — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:31:50 +0000

Technically TRS only has one ring (Tip Ring Sleeve) and TRRS only has two rings (Tip Ring Ring Sleeve). It does have four separate contacts though, separated by bands.

New comment by saysjonathan in "Show HN: Dwm.tmux – a dwm-inspired window manager for tmux"

saysjonathan — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:32:51 +0000

It's not just configs though, as there is some logic implemented via shell that could not be handled entirely in configs. "Window Manager" was chosen as it the logic imposes a specific layout without necessarily preventing you from using other configuration options. It's almost solely layout management and keyboard shortcuts to assist.

New comment by saysjonathan in "Show HN: Dwm.tmux – a dwm-inspired window manager for tmux"

saysjonathan — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:28:43 +0000

This does have a single floating pane shortcut (in the current directory), using the tmux `display-popup` command.

New comment by saysjonathan in "Show HN: Dwm.tmux – a dwm-inspired window manager for tmux"

saysjonathan — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:14:53 +0000

I think the key distinction is the consistent layout (main pane + stack) along with keyboard shortcuts to manage. To me it's similar to running vanilla X{11,org} vs using a window manager (hence the name). A vanilla configuration will work just fine but sometimes a constrained or opinionated environment gets more out of your way and better fits your preferred workflow.

If you already have a robust tmux workflow with a desired layout (or lack of layout) and custom keyboard shortcuts then this may not work for you. It's just one way to manage panes/windows in tmux that I hadn't seen before and different from the usual ad hoc methods.

Like most window managers, I think it's all preference. What're your current preferences for pane layout, window management, etc? Do you always create/layout panes in the same way or is it situationally dependent?

New comment by saysjonathan in "Show HN: Dwm.tmux – a dwm-inspired window manager for tmux"

saysjonathan — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:51:45 +0000

I went a little too far into 'unix as my IDE'.

Do I regret using `ed` as my primary editor? No.

Do I still use `ed` as my primary editor? Absolutely not.

New comment by saysjonathan in "Show HN: Dwm.tmux – a dwm-inspired window manager for tmux"

saysjonathan — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:49:48 +0000

Through this project I realized that there's just some limitations to a plain tmux config. I eventually had to switch over to calling out to shell in order to get around those issues.

Commit with the switch to shell here: https://github.com/saysjonathan/dwm.tmux/commit/c8752b978390...

I think there's a lot of potential to scripting terminal multiplexers in various ways and I would love to see more work exploring what's possible!

New comment by saysjonathan in "Show HN: Dwm.tmux – a dwm-inspired window manager for tmux"

saysjonathan — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:46:21 +0000

For me, personally, the value was in have something similar to a window manager for the terminal. As I was constantly spawning, killing, and reorganizing panes, a tiling-based approach gave me more control over my terminal and allowed me to perform complex operations without having to memorize or execute multiple commands. My use of a terminal is not static and therefore having a more dynamic option made my life easier.

This is really just a personal project that I wanted to share in case others might like to try it.

I will add that, especially at the time of creation, I was heavily in the 'unix is my IDE' camp. A terminal window manager was a logical next step to that notion. As someone called out below, I even used `ed` as my main editor for a while (which was as bad as it sounds).

New comment by saysjonathan in "Dole Kemp 96 Web Site"

saysjonathan — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:32:11 +0000

As weight and baker's percentage instead of volume:

227g (94.58%) margarine

30g (12.5%) sugar, powdered

240g (100%) flour

5g (2.1%) vanilla (assuming liquid extract)

15g (6.25%) water

200g (83.33%) pecans, pieces