Hacker News: temporallobe

New comment by temporallobe in "Spending 3 months coding by hand"

temporallobe — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:28:11 +0000

The very first few years of my career I spent writing code (mostly Perl) in vi (not even vim) on a SPARC running Solaris. I bought myself the O’Riley Perl Cookbook and that was pretty much my sole guide apart from the few internet forums that were available at the time. Search engines were still primitive, so getting help when you got stuck was far more difficult. But it forced me to deeply learn a lot of things - Perl syntax (we had no syntax highlighting, intellisense, etc.) terminal tools, and especially vi keystrokes. Looking back, there was far less distraction and “noise”, though I admit that could have been the fact that it was the beginning of my career and expectations were lower. I miss those times because now everything feels insanely more layered and complex.

New comment by temporallobe in "Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989"

temporallobe — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:54:10 +0000

Had the same experience with Doom II. Got it to run surprisingly well on a brand new Tandy 486DX2 + 4MB RAM, though I seem to recall having issues with SoundBlaster compatibility.

New comment by temporallobe in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

temporallobe — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 04:11:17 +0000

MD is not perfect, but it’s perfectly adequate.

Markdown apologist here - I think MD is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I use it a LOT. In fact, one project I work on has an entire git repo of just MD docs. It’s easy to maintain, and even non-tech people can author them with ease. In fat, I love that raw MD is entirely human-readable, and even if someone fat-fingers some of the syntax, it’s still very forgiving.

Don’t forget, many MD renderers support regular HTML embedding, including