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. 1
    'AI' Sucks the Joy Out of Programming
    3 people · 27 points · first shared 2025 · 4 comments on HN
  2. 2
    Asynchronous Programming and Scala
    3 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
  3. 3
    What is functional programming
    3 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
  4. 4
    Scala isn't fun anymore
    2 people · 234 points · first shared 2022 · 386 comments on HN
  5. 5
    Books For Learning to Design, The Hard Way
    2 people · 161 points · first shared 2011 · 33 comments on HN
  6. 6
    Organize and Index Your Screenshots (OCR) on macOS
    2 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  7. 7
    Programming Languages in the Age of "AI" Agents
    2 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    JavaScript's Promise Leaks Memory
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
    Java’s Cultural Problem
    1 people · 226 points · first shared 2022 · 307 comments on HN
  10. 10
    Blogging for Hackers
    1 people · 82 points · first shared 2012 · 37 comments on HN
  11. 11
    Earning Money as an Amazon Affiliate, A Small Experiment
    1 people · 75 points · first shared 2011 · 43 comments on HN
  12. 12
  13. 13
    JavaScript's Promise Is Memory Unsafe
    1 people · 24 points · first shared 2017 · 22 comments on HN
  14. 14
    My Favorite Firefox Extensions
    1 people · 12 points · first shared 2025 · 3 comments on HN
  15. 15
    Use Firefox in 2025
    1 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…

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