Top all-time · #610
Geoff Greer
Personal blog · geoff.greer.fm · on HN as ggreerprogrammingculture
Geoff Greer's personal blog at geoff.greer.fm covers programming and culture. Since 2010, 101 different Hacker News readers have linked it 161 times, most often “Thinkpad X210”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Geoff Greer's posts on Vim and Neovim, ThinkPad modding and the ag search tool; comments call some a nice overview and a great counterpoint.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- called a nice overview, compelling, interesting, really interesting, and a great counterpoint
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Thinkpad X21011 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2019-03-05
- Thinkpad X629 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2017-09-17
- Better than Ack8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2011-12-28
- Why neovim is better than vim (2015)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-02-09
- Why Neovim Is Better Than Vim7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-01-15
- Software Rot (2017)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-03-13
- In Defense of Richard Stallman6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-09-30
- The Silver Searcher: a fast code searching tool6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-09-08
- Burnout is in the Mind4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-01-07
- Vim Hall of WTF3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-01-16
What Hacker News says?
A mistake, I can understand. But each issue I linked to was not a mistake. Each one was the end result of a series of mistakes stemming from a combination of ignorance, negligence, and (occasionally) incompetence. Have I done dumb things without realizing? Of course.[1] But in almost 20 years of software development, I have never created issues resembling the ones I linked to. Bug reports are seen by hundreds of peo…
Comment linking /2015/08/15/how-to-write-good-bug-reports/
on “Dear GitHub”Submitted Thinkpad X210 as a story · 1005 points
HN discussionFLAVOR: Ubuntu Gnome Desktop HEADLINE: Have first class support for hibernate DESCRIPTION: There are a few problems i noticed with hibernate - During installation you don't get notified that you need a swap partition of the size of your ram if you want to hibernate (moving partitions around is a PITA) - There is no menu to set close lid to hibernate, the go to option seems to be edit /etc/systemd/logind.conf and if…
Comment linking /2016/08/26/gnome-terminal-cursor-blinking-saga/
on “Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?”Submitted In Defense of Richard Stallman as a story · 744 points
HN discussionNot the parent, but here's a blog post about it: https://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-...
Comment linking /2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-vim/
on “Python 3.13 Gets a JIT”Submitted Thinkpad X62 as a story · 474 points
HN discussionUbuntu 18.04: https://geoff.greer.fm/images/x210.jpg
Comment linking /images/x210.jpg
on “Thinkpad X210”Submitted Making my own wedding rings as a story · 300 points
HN discussionI name all of my computers after elements. I set up DHCP leases so that the last octet of each host's IP is their atomic number. eg: hydrogen is 192.168.1.1, lithium is 192.168.1.3, carbon is 192.168.1.6, iron is 192.168.1.26, etc. I also tend to categorize machines by elemental classification. Servers are alkalai metals, laptops are nonmetals, consoles are halogens, etc. I didn't have any neat nonmetals left, so I…
Comment linking /2009/06/17/hostnames/
on “Thinkpad X210”Submitted Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input as a story · 296 points
HN discussionThe solution I've come up with is a pledge to release the source code if the product dies.[1] We've done this at Floobits, and it makes our users' lives less stressful.[2] 1. http://geoff.greer.fm/2012/09/19/a-responsible-product-sunse... 2. https://floobits.com/pledge
Comment linking /2012/09/19/a-responsible-product-sunset-pledge/
on “Firebase is Joining Google”Submitted Oldest Viable Laptop (2017) as a story · 202 points
HN discussion> Then the developer threw a hissy fit a few days later and created a fork because his patch wasn't accepted right away. According to the Geoff Greer, they didn't fork Vim. The fork happened a couple of months after their patch wasn't accepted, and they joined: "A couple of months after my disillusionment with Vim, Thiago de Arruda submitted a similar patch. It was likewise rejected. But unlike me, Thiago didn’t giv…
Comment linking /2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-vim/
on “Vim 8.0 released”Submitted A couple neat things about using chemical elements as hostnames as a story · 165 points
HN discussionI'm linking this[0] post, not to talk about why/if neovim is better than vim, but rather because it gives a nice overview of why that patch was rejected, and why neovim was started. [0] http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-v...
Comment linking /2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-vim/
on “Vim 8.0 released”Submitted Software Rot (2017) as a story · 119 points
HN discussionI think he meant bad as in this: http://geoff.greer.fm/vim/ . 400 lines of code to wait for keyboard input.. sweet Jesus. Thankfully Neovim exists now. Granted, that's a VIM example, but I can't imagine Emacs being much better in terms of code.
Comment linking /vim/
on “Buttery Smooth Emacs”Submitted Freedom of Speech Isn't About Speech as a story · 54 points
HN discussion>I find my ancient Thinkpad X61s is the one I actually take around, even though my slightly newer X220 is faster, has more memory and has a brighter screen. You may be interested in the x62: https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/
Comment linking /2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/
on “A small notebook for a system administrator”Submitted An Office Made of Software as a story · 45 points
HN discussionThey took his words out of context: https://medium.com/@richardsmith_76348/richard-stallman-was-... https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/09/30/in-defense-of-richard-stal...
Comment linking /2019/09/30/in-defense-of-richard-stallman/?source=post_page-----c76302bdebe----------------------
on “Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him”Submitted The Cost of Features (2013) as a story · 38 points
HN discussionDid you not see my links to where a ThinkPad, certified by Ubuntu, has broken screen brightness? I own an X140e and it has been a nightmare. I've had it for a year and I still can't get bluetooth to work[1]. I've also tried a Carbon X1 and it leaves much to be desired. Like I said, it's a gamble. Sometimes the hardware and drivers and phase of the moon is right and everything works. Sometimes no amount of kernel fla…
Comment linking /2015/01/03/ten-years-of-progress-in-laptops/
on “Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak”Submitted Why Neovim Is Better Than Vim as a story · 37 points
HN discussionAnd there's a reply to that: https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/09/30/in-defense-of-richard-stal... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21113414
Comment linking /2019/09/30/in-defense-of-richard-stallman/
on “What happened to running what you wanted on your own machine?”Submitted Why neovim is better than vim (2015) as a story · 28 points
HN discussionIIRC, Ag excels at code search, where grep can outpace it when searching things like data files. "The Silver Searcher is a tool for searching code." ( http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/ )
Comment linking /ag/
on “Why GNU grep is fast (2010)”Submitted Burnout is in the Mind as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI've documented most of ag's tricks in various blog posts.[1] You're right that sequential reads are faster than random reads, but searching a bunch of source code is going to be a bunch of short reads no matter what. Each file is on the order of 50kB, or about 0.5ms if read at 100MB/sec. That's far less than the seek time of a hard drive. I've experimented a lot, and found it best to read ASAP, then let the OS & de…
Comment linking /2012/09/07/the-silver-searcher-adding-pthreads/
on “Why GNU grep is fast (2010)”Submitted Better than Ack as a story · 9 points
HN discussion
