The quotation marks having been stripped from the title changes the meaning quite a bit…

I admit the article is not what I at first expected. But I liked it. The references to Ruby feel dated, though.

> OT overhead 200MB (ensuring app loads fast)

Yet there is a positive correlation between size and startup time…

> Call what store? How do I know a store even exists to call it? How do I find out the store’s name and phone number? How do I find out where the store is located?

Maps exist. Search engines exist. Have you been stuck in a cave the last 50 years?

> How do you solve discoverability, especially of a new type of product or category? I invented this new gadget call "luminexel". People don't know what it is yet, because it's new. How do people find it in a catalog?

You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!” Some people will think it’s really cool and tell their friends about it. Eventually it will end up on some “curated list of awesome things” website.

My man that’s an ad

Many posts on HN are ads. We’ve just collectively decided that some of them are OK

> You make a post on Hacker News titled “Show HN: I made this cool thing called Luminexel, check it out!”

So, place an ad in other words.

It’s not an ad if you’re not paying someone to forcibly show it to other people.

So if I put up posters in my neighborhood for my PC fixing service, it's not considered ads, but if I pay someone else to put the same posters up, they're suddenly ads?

what if I payed a content marketing expert to craft my blog post and title in such a way that drew attention? Would that be paying for

This might be a measure against LLM scrapers, which is something I can get behind despite disliking websites that pointlessly require JavaScript.

I have a writing tablet from who knows where that my brother gave me and it works flawlessly on Linux.

Do you also like watching tennis matches from up close? It’s a similar head motion…

Isn’t it just a bunch of static pages? You can get that hosted for free.

There wasn't free hosting in 2003 when I first made it. I have thought about converting it to static, but it would be a complete rewrite, and there is always some other new shiny thing to play with instead.

The newer things I'm doing (like UnicodeSearch.org) are static, though I don't like forcing everyone to have JavaScript enabled.

Is there any free static hosting that has lasted longer than a few years?

Notepad = making fire with sticks and stones

Vim/Neovim = making fire with matches and lighters

VS Code = making fire with a magic box that weighs 60 kg, you don’t understand how it works and it could randomly stop working at any time

It's a code editor. It's not that much more complex than vim. It doesn't do magic to your codebase that makes development different. I've written plugins for vim, neovim and VSCode... VSCode at least has well documented interfaces for everything (edit: well ok not everything, there are some difficult gaps in the docs), and it's pretty clear how things work under the hood. Neovim is fine too, lua is nice. Vim plugins I didn't enjoy much.

Vim/Neovim = cutting down wood and chemistry for the matches, molding plastic and metal for the lighters.

With fish, `for f in *.pdf` Just Works™.

This is also a crutch. Take the time to learn the kludgier tool. It will make you a better developer.

/s (I'm a big fan of fish)

Terminal emulators are a crutch you kids are spoiled by. In my day we had to create programs on punch cards. Copy a file from one directory to another? fifteen cards full of custom assembler code. Print out a file listing on the teletype? Ten cards... uphill... in the snow... both ways.

/s (no, not really)

Same with zsh