Top all-time · #608
Martin Tournoij
Personal blog · arp242.net · on HN as Carpetsmokerprogrammingweb
Martin Tournoij's personal blog at arp242.net covers programming and web. Since 2017, 101 different Hacker News readers have linked it 192 times, most often “YAML: Probably not so great after all (2019)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Martin Tournoij's posts on config formats (YAML, JSON, TOML), email line wrapping, static Go binaries, open-source licences and curl-to-sh, mostly as support for their own points. Single commenters call individual posts excellent or the right idea.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- an excellent post, valuable insights, the right idea, a recommended essay, a blog one enjoys, a decent enough job
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?
- YAML: Probably not so great after all (2019)13 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2019-11-12
- The problem with hard wrapping email body text8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-04-21
- Statically Compiling Go Programs6 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-04-12
- Curl to shell isn’t so bad (2019)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-01-28
- Let’s not be pedantic about “Open Source”5 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2020-07-05
- YAML: probably not so great after all (2017)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-03-03
- Choosing a License for GoatCounter5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-12-30
- JSON as configuration files: please don’t (2016)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-06-21
- YAML: Probably not so great after all4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-08-18
- Stupid light software4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-11-28
What Hacker News says?
The features intended to make it easy to use, in the end lead to surprising behavior, often with values having non-string types where you expected strings. There are some examples in https://www.arp242.net/yaml-config.html .
Comment linking /yaml-config.html
on “Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad”Submitted YAML: probably not so great after all (2017) as a story · 673 points
HN discussionThis kind of stuff isn't new and has been going on for years. When I got a new laptop in 2017 I had a look at Windows 10 to see what it's like before I replaced it with Linux, and I got similar messages. I wrote a thing about it which has some screenshots: https://www.arp242.net/browsers-conflict-interest.html
Comment linking /browsers-conflict-interest.html
on “Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu”Submitted Tired of Stack Overflow as a story · 548 points
HN discussionI don't think writing is just about communicating things to other people. It's also communicating things to yourself. I think the greatest value in writing things down is to order and articulate your own thoughts. Certainly in my own case, I never finish a large chunk of articles I start to write simply because during the research I find out I was wrong, or that things are more complex than I thought and I'm no long…
Comment linking /weblog/why-write.html
on “Have a personal web site”Submitted Go is not an easy language as a story · 487 points
HN discussionYAML is kind of like C++: > You like C++ because you're only using 20% of it. And that's fine, everyone only uses 20% of C++, the problem is that everyone uses a different 20% :) https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2009/10/17/the-c-bashing-seaso... The YAML footguns are too numerous to reproduce here, so here are some sources: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3790454/how-do-i-break-a... https://www.arp242.net/yaml-conf…
Comment linking /yaml-config.html
on “JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data”Submitted Why I'm still using jQuery as a story · 457 points
HN discussionSQLite is awesome, but it's still an order of magnitude more complex than JSON. If it wants to be the one file format to rule them all, we're going to need high quality and heavily used implementations in most languages. Adding C sqlite to a golang project adds a significant hit to build times and cross-compilation/static linking complexity[0]. When I looked into the native Go implementations of sqlite I came away w…
Comment linking /static-go.html
on “JSON Canvas – An open file format for infinite canvas data”Submitted YAML: Probably not so great after all as a story · 445 points
HN discussionThis kind of stuff has been going on for years as well; it's not something new. I don't normally use Windows, but a few years ago when I got a new ThinkPad I figured I'd have a looksie around with the pre-installed Windows 10 just to see what it's like out of curiosity since I never used Windows 8 or 10, and it displayed all sorts of stuff trying to force Edge on people, including "ads" that just pop up; see [1]. I'…
Comment linking /browsers-conflict-interest.html
on “Mozilla has defeated Microsoft’s default browser protections in Windows”Submitted JSON as configuration files: please don’t (2016) as a story · 401 points
HN discussionThis is one of the most useful programs that I use. I use it for turning .md files into .html or .pdf. I use it for creating slides with it. I even use it for fixing the hard-wrapped text I write in vim before sending emails. When I write in vim, I prefer the text to be hard-wrapped, but for emails, I like it better when the text is not wrapped. I recommend arp242's essay explaining the problem with hard-wrapping [1…
Comment linking /email-wrapping.html
on “Pandoc”Submitted Against Best Practices as a story · 280 points
HN discussionThe best one, of course, is Bret Devereaux's acoup ( https://acoup.blog ). It's the only one I follow with any regularity. It's a weekly blog focussing on history and sometimes on its interaction with popular media, like GoT or EU4. Scott Galloway is also a great read. He writes about the digital economy and tech. ( https://www.profgalloway.com/ ) I also enjoy reading Martin Tournoij's blog whenever he updates it (…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Why is no one signing their emails? as a story · 270 points
HN discussion> lobby for a legally binding do-not-track header. DNT is pretty dead, and IMHO was never a good idea in the first place. Opt-outing of invasive and unethical tracking is just weird. What about people who don't know about it? Or don't fully understand what it means? It's almost like the Hitchhiker's Guide : "Well, you should have visited the planning department in the disused lavatory with a sign 'beware of the leop…
Comment linking /dnt.html
on “Firefox 72.0”Submitted Curl to shell isn't so bad as a story · 266 points
HN discussionIMO it's pretty much useless (and possibly even harmful) and a failed experiment. GoatCounter intentionally ignores it. Context: https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html
Comment linking /dnt.html
on “Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics”Submitted s/bash/zsh/g as a story · 191 points
HN discussionYou're taking my quote out of context, I said it takes more effort to constructively engage in constructive and meaningful discussions, not that it takes more effort to rephrase a sentence; I explicitly said it doesn't. If you don't want to engage in discussion, fine. Then just don't say anything, or just state that you don't have time. That's fine. No need to not be nice. I actually used Arch Linux for many years a…
Comment linking /stackoverflow.html
on “It’s Not Enough to Be Right – You Also Have to Be Kind”Submitted Scripting tmux as a story · 187 points
HN discussionYou can get around that using a special " https://web.whatsapp.com/send?phone= [..]" and/or " https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone= [..]" URL. I think the web. URL only works with WhatsApp web and the api. works on phones, but I'm not 100% sure (I typically use WhatsApp Web myself). I have a simple form on my website to make that a bit easier: https://www.arp242.net/wa.html .
Comment linking /wa.html
on “Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?”Submitted The web as a GUI toolkit as a story · 155 points
HN discussionBecause it's fun and useful. I actually wrote a thing about this: https://www.arp242.net/why-write.html Later I discovered others have expressed similar sentiments long before I was even born, e.g. "writing is thinking". Ah well, always nice to feel validated when you independently arrived at essentially the same conclusion as other people who are probably smarter than you :-)
Comment linking /why-write.html
on “Building a personal website in 2021”Submitted Go’s Features of Last Resort as a story · 120 points
HN discussionThis is not my experience with k8s at all. Sure, everything will work fine when it works (although I don't think it's as easy as you make it out to be), but when something unexpected happens it's a massive pain to debug. "8 hours" initial investment is already large for a small/simple scenario; and it's not the full costs either, because fixing problems will be much harder/time-consuming. I wrote a post about this j…
Comment linking /weblog/easy.html
on “Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes”Submitted The Art of Unix Programming (2003) as a story · 111 points
HN discussionJSON doesn't have comments so it's a bad choice for human-editable config. YAML doesn't have an end marker so you can never be sure if you've got the entire file. XML is a huge pain to edit by hand if the schema is complicated, and overly verbose if it isn't. None of them are even close to being safe (for example https://arp242.net/weblog/yaml_probably_not_so_great_after_a... ). All of those choices fail your "elega…
Comment linking /weblog/yaml_probably_not_so_great_after_all.html
on “The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy”Submitted YAML: Probably not so great after all (2019) as a story · 107 points
HN discussion
