Alexandru Nedelcu
alexn.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
Alexandru Nedelcu writes about programming, mainly Scala, functional programming, and asynchronous code, plus AI's effect on programming and macOS tips.
What HN saysHN links it for book recommendations on learning design, Scala and functional programming topics, and a macOS screenshot OCR indexing setup.
34HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
41stories submitted
964story points
3 months agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1'AI' Sucks the Joy Out of Programming3 people · 27 points · first shared 2025 · 4 comments on HN
- 2Asynchronous Programming and Scala3 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 3What is functional programming3 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 4Scala isn't fun anymore2 people · 234 points · first shared 2022 · 386 comments on HN
- 5Books For Learning to Design, The Hard Way2 people · 161 points · first shared 2011 · 33 comments on HN
- 6Organize and Index Your Screenshots (OCR) on macOS2 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 7Programming Languages in the Age of "AI" Agents2 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 8JavaScript's Promise Leaks Memory2 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 9Java’s Cultural Problem1 people · 226 points · first shared 2022 · 307 comments on HN
- 10Blogging for Hackers1 people · 82 points · first shared 2012 · 37 comments on HN
- 11Earning Money as an Amazon Affiliate, A Small Experiment1 people · 75 points · first shared 2011 · 43 comments on HN
- 12Akka is moving away from Open Source – Alexandru Nedelcu1 people · 50 points · first shared 2022 · 3 comments on HN
- 13JavaScript's Promise Is Memory Unsafe1 people · 24 points · first shared 2017 · 22 comments on HN
- 14My Favorite Firefox Extensions1 people · 12 points · first shared 2025 · 3 comments on HN
- 15Use Firefox in 20251 people · 8 points · first shared 2025 · 3 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
bad_user · 2017-11-22
I deploy my websites on my own VPS at DigitalOcean, but with a simpler setup then the TFA.
I simply have a Travis-ci.org setup that does an "rsync" after "jekyll build". And in case I'm not in the mood for waiting on Travis, I simply "rsync" from my localhost after build.
Having an automated build system has advantages though - if you get a PR on your website repository with typos and so on, you just have to merge it and the content will get published, so you can do it over your phone. And yes, I had PRs, since I publish 2 project documentation websites this way.
Also folks, you don't need a CDN or Cloudflare, or any of that — you just need a healthy Nginx setup hosted at a decent VPS provider. I've had my websites withstand Reddit and HN level traffic just fine, paying $5 per month for hosting about 4 static websites, plus other stuff.
I also hate Medium, Blogger, Wordpress and any of that crap, I hate their bloat and trackers and I do think having your own website published in a Git repository is worth it. Yes, there is a cost in maintaining my websites, but I do so willingly, because they are mine.
PS: shameless plug — https://alexn.org
subpixel · 2012-01-03
Here's a great shortlist: http://alexn.org/blog/2011/11/25/4-books-for-learning-to-design-the-ha…
And CSS tricks will prove very useful (mine the backlog!): http://css-tricks.com/
If you can code, then you're way ahead when it comes to translating visuals into functional elements on a screen, in my opinion. Rock!
hocuspocus · 2025-12-07
Scala 2's syntax is mostly Java/C-style with a few peculiarities.
Scala 3's optionally allows indentation based, brace-less syntax. Much closer to the ML family or Python, depending on how you look at it. It does indeed look better, but brings its share of issues.[1] Worse, a lot of people in the community, whether they like it or not, think this was an unnecessary distraction on top of the challenges for the entire ecosystem (libraries, tooling, ...) after Scala 3.0 was released.
- [1] https://alexn.org/blog/2025/10/26/scala-3-no-indent/
simonw · 2021-07-19
I finally figured out how to use the Tesseract CLI utility on macOS today (installed from Homebrew). It's really neat - you can use it to turn a PNG into a PDF with embedded text, which you can then copy-and-paste: https://til.simonwillison.net/tesseract/tesseract-cli
I learned about it from this post: https://alexn.org/blog/2020/11/11/organize-index-screenshots-ocr-macos…