From the other side, I’ve fairly often written blog posts that I don’t put much effort into and have no intention of reaching the front page of HN, only to see 12 hours later that somebody submitted it and it’s on the front page.
I realize this sounds like a humblebrag but it is not a positive thing for me to have every single thing I write submitted to HN whether it’s relevant to a broad audience or not.
I pay for a tool to convert HTML/CSS into PDFs https://www.princexml.com/ and it seems to work well. I don't have the best idea of how it compares to the various free options though.
I tried to grep the code for `api.` to get a sense for all the vendors this codebase is using, and which you'd need to have relationships with to run the code. Here's what I found:
Deleted this post because I don't think a random screenshot from my email is a good source for people to refer to. A better source might be the bitly terms of service: https://bitly.com/pages/terms-of-service (1.4 Destination Preview)
That book (Ed Mastery, https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ed) is an April fool's joke, but it's a real book and I thought it was actually really good. I've still basically never used ed but it was fun to learn about and it helped me understand vim's history a little bit.
Like I said in the blog post, I'd love suggestions for other things I've missed that happen when you run "hello world", _especially_ if there's a way to use a Linux spy tool to trace what exactly is happening.
Considering adding a few things that are happening in the kernel and trying to use `bpftrace` to trace them, but I need to figure out how to use bpftrace/kprobes and hunt down the relevant kernel functions.
Hello! I wrote this post and I have a couple of things to say about this "DNS is not actually hard" take. It took me many years to feel totally comfortable debugging DNS problems, and I wrote this post to explain why I think it was hard for me.
I also used to think that "no, actually, it's easy!" was an encouraging response to "this is hard to learn". And I kind of get it! I love DNS! I think it is surprisingly simple in many ways, and I've written about that a lot, for example in https://implement-dns.wizardzines.com which shows you how to implement a toy DNS resolver from scratch in some pretty simple Python code.
But over the years I've learned that "no, it's easy to learn!", instead of coming off as an encouraging comment ("you can do it!"), often gets received as "no, it's not hard, actually the problem is that you're dumb". Like, I've been confused about this for years, and you're telling me that, no, actually it's easy? Not that helpful!
So I've stopped telling people that, and instead I put a huge amount of work into trying to understand _why_ people find certain things hard and work to help remove some of those barriers.
A DNS resolver is both a client and a server -- for example Google's 8.8.8.8 (which this is a toy version of) is a server (you can query it with `dig @8.8.8.8 example.com`), but also a client of the various authoritative DNS servers that it fetches and caches records from.
I implemented this as a command line tool because that's much easier to do in a Jupyter notebook environment, but you can also pretty easily transform it into a UDP server running on localhost and query it with dig in the same way that you would with 8.8.8.8. That's one of the bonus exercises at the end (Exercise 7).
I might end up bringing "convert it into a server" into the main content though because it's pretty easy to do and I think it makes the whole thing seem more "real".
There's this by Andreas Zeller: https://www.debuggingbook.org/, it's an interactive free book with implementations of a bunch of different debugging tools in Python
Unfortunately I've done a bunch of research into this and I've never been able to find a print-on-demand service that prints the zines in a way that I was happy with. Print on demand is easier for regular books, but the booklet format is a bit weird.
The customs situation is a pain though, I wish I had a better solution.
As the author, I don't think this really makes sense on the front page of HN since you have to pay to read the zine.
I am doing a giveaway for folks who can't afford the zine though -- if $12 is a lot of money for you but you think the debugging advice in there would be helpful, you can use code BUYONEGIVEONE at checkout to get the PDF version for free. (it'll ask you for a billing address but if you dislike sharing your address unnecessarily like I do, you can just put a fake address)
I'd never heard of this, thank you! I was hoping for people to provide more examples of things that have gotten easier in this thread but I'm happy to see one or two at least :)
I realize this sounds like a humblebrag but it is not a positive thing for me to have every single thing I write submitted to HN whether it’s relevant to a broad audience or not.