Hillel Wayne

It would be awesome to have a newsletter highlighting the top X articles (fully automated). You could start with a simple scoring system (page views) and maybe later add an upvote button so the most-voted articles get sent out each week. Sending emails isn't cost-free, but AFAIK, Buttondown [1] has a free plan for up to 100 subscribers. It's dead simple: they provide an issue archive [2] and handle subscription for you [3]. With their 100-subscriber free plan, you could limit this feature to a close circle. Maybe later monetize the newsletter feature to cover the ESP costs. [1] https://buttondown.com [2] https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive [3] https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter

Mailing list manager. Like MailChimp but it doesn't suck. I use it, and it does everything I want (handle subscribers; send emails written in Markdown) and a lot more. I've interacted with the owner / developer a couple of times and they are a great person. See https://buttondown.com/ for more.

I keep up with HN by reading it daily. My Firefox browser always have 2 pinned tabs at the top most: the front page /news and /ask. I also subscribed to HN Weekly Newsletter (https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/).

I agree that vinyl is technically worse than others modern formats, but it often gets mastered with greater care and therefore can sound better than CD or other digital formats. Read this thorough rundown of one of the more famously over compressed albums where the vinyl release has better sound than even the 24 bit release: https://buttondown.com/rhcpsessions/archive/me-and-my-friends-67-cali/

10K Pushup challenge 3 Key take a ways: Use a spreadsheet to track Start simple - if you can only do one pushup that is enough Do it multiple times a day I am past 1000, and feel great and my body shows it. <Long Story> Saw this article, https://wjgilmore.com/articles/10000-pushups?utm_source=hackernewslett… From a newletter, oddly called Hacker Newsletter https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/hacker-newsletter-765…

Hillel Wayne posted a followup https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/three-ways-formally-verifie… which may be interesting. Essentially the issue is "what does the Length of a string mean?"

i am! oblomovka runs off a machine on my desk, which tends to crash whenever I walk out of my house, like today. However, this is an excellent notification that I'm now writing enough to maybe make it a bit more resilient. (For real dannyobrien completists, I also write small more regular email newsletter at https://buttondown.com/dannyob of my work within the Filecoin Extended Cinematic Universe (which includes IPFS, libp2p, iroh, Bluesky, Spritely Institute, Guardian Project, Internet Archive, Prelinger Archive, DWeb Community, Foresight Institute, EFF, Muckrock, etc see https://ffdweb.org/projects , https://fil.org/ecosystem-explorer , https://directory.plnetwork.io/projects?focusAreas=Digital+Human+Right… ). It's pretty lowkey though.

> These things are great lookup tools, much better than web search Here's an article that argues otherwise, convincingly IMO: https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/information-literacy-and-chatbo…

Nadia does a great weekly dev log email that I enjoy as well. I highly recommend it -> https://buttondown.com/nodunayo

I follow these: * Matt Berman on X / YT * AI-summarized AI news digest: https://buttondown.com/ainews by swyx * https://codingwithintelligence.com/about by Rick Lamers Then I manually follow up to learn more about specific topic/news I'm interested in.

Am I not smart, or what about the "Subscribe" page won't allow me to get past the "Name" field? I tried a few combos and even an email addresses and it doesn't validate: https://buttondown.com/inkandswitch

https://buttondown.com/ Clickable link, since the blog didn’t have it.

Nah, if you don't need list management you're definitely better off going with something a little bit closer to the metal. We actually keep a price guide for comparing MTAs here (https://buttondown.com/comparison-guides/esps). I do happily recommend Postmark; they're a little bit more expensive than their peers but are worth it, IMHO.

A minor point to feed back: for me, https://www.buttondown.com/ fails to load, while https://buttondown.com/ works.

When I first read the title, my reaction was: how dare they say my website isn't for me? Of course it is. It's my space to share thoughts, jot down notes from things I come across, publish small tools, and so on. That made me click through and see how the article could possibly argue otherwise. Then I realised that the article talks about business websites, not personal websites. Quoting from the article: > The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It's for the person you've never met - the customer weighing up a purchase, the lead chasing a phone number, the visitor sizing up your credibility or the member signing up to access gated content. Yes, I agree. While not really a business, I've always liked https://nhs.uk/ for its simplicity. I especially like the A-Z section where we can find details about a large number of medical conditions. Among actual businesses (small ones particularly) I like https://buttondown.com/ and https://kagi.com/ quite a bit. That said (and this is off-topic for this article), the part of the web I enjoy most is where your website is indeed for you, the small web of personal websites. That part of the web was an important part of me growing up from my late teens into adulthood and it remains the part I enjoy most even now. I want this part of the web to remain healthy and vibrant for as long as possible.

You're welcome! You, and I, and the entire software industry, it turns out. https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/i-ing-hate-science/ is the best summary I've found on that. > Are Late-Stage Bugs More Expensive? > (...) While there's no smoking gun, I think the body of research so far tentatively points in that direction, depending on how you interpret "late-stage", "bugs", and "more expensive". This is a newsletter, not a research paper, so I'll keep it all handwavey. Here's the rough approach I took to reach that conclusion: > Some bugs are more expensive than others. You can sort of imagine it being a Gaussian, or maybe a power law: most bugs are relatively cheap, a few are relatively expensive. We'd mine existing projects to create bug classifications, or we'd interview software developers to learn their experiences. Dewayne Perry did one of these analyses and found the bugs that took longest to fix (6 or more days) were things like feature interaction bugs and unacceptable global performance, in general stuff that's easier to catch in requirements and software modeling than in implementation. > I've checked a few other papers and think I'm tentatively confident in this line of reasoning: certain bugs take more time to fix (and cause more damage) than others, and said bugs tend to be issues in the design. As I see it, this is not so much about how long the bug has been in the system but about what kind of bug it is. Unacceptable global performance or…

Author here, from another issue I sent about my definition of bad ads for this newsletter: "tl;dr While I do exaggerate the “badness” of 80s tech ads to make things more fun, a nostalgic ad is not the same thing as an effective ad. What we see in advertising today is so depressing because it is often so bland AND more effective than its more playful predecessors." They are fun to look at now. And soooo much more creative than marketing crap from today. But they're still 12-page long marketing gimmicks. I'd still take them over today's ads any day of the week, and that's why I spend dozens of hours every month tracking them down and learning their stories https://buttondown.com/suchbadtechads/archive/bad-ads-defined/

You’re in luck! https://buttondown.com/hacker-newsletter/archive/

This reminds me of this Bjarne Stroustrup's Rule (creator of C++): - For new features, people insist on loud, explicit syntax. - For established features, people want terse notation Hillel Wayne [1] argues that the same applies for the differences between what beginners and experts desire from a language: Beginners need explicit syntax, experts want terse syntax. In my mind, DSLs are related to that – a short notation to avoid repetition. And LLMs are the experts. I wonder if Lisp with its powerful DSL-creating macros will enjoy more popularity in the near future. [1] https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/stroustrups-rule/

And yet, when the USPS did deliver email (via paper, no less, with their E-COM system), over half of the message volume was sent by one mass-mailer: https://buttondown.com/blog/the-e-com-story Afraid the spammers will always be with us.

This is a teaser for a real blog post : https://buttondown.com/blog/x400-vs-smtp-email the URL should probably be updated to it?

Wrote a bit about differences between rustfs and garage here https://buttondown.com/justincormack/archive/ignore-previous-direction… - since then rustfs fixed the issue I found. They are for very different use cases. Rustfs really is close to a minio rewrite.

You might be talking about this daily newsletter? https://buttondown.com/tech-daily This is run by the same person who runs https://hackernewsletter.com/, but just checked my email and got today’s issue and the last one was on 2nd of Jan (sent only on week days). Shameless plugin: I also run a hacker news curated links newsletter, focused on AI threads. If interested, here is the latest issue: https://eomail4.com/web-version?p=df548fb0-e8b0-11f0-97f9-35afc9c82550…

Well, yes. They control ISPs and exit nodes, therefore they can correlate entries into and exits out of the Tor network, narrowing down candidate lists until only one user remains. Essentially a nation scale version of the Harvard bomb threat correlation: https://buttondown.com/grugq/archive/bad-opsec-considered-harmful/ As noted in the article, it wasn't the failure of Tor that led to arrest, it was poor OPSEC. Failure to cover, failure to conceal and failure to compartment.

It's available, https://buttondown.com/chrisloy/rss but it's not in sync with the blog, just a single 2024 entry found. :shrug:

404, supposedly the correct link is: https://buttondown.com/blog/email-signatures-history

Good example of evil technology. Required reading: https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-not-build-the-torment-n…

Not technically a Tracker clone (we don't have points or all of its states) but we're in the neighborhood -- at StoryTime we've been writing about the development process monthly if any of ya'll are curious about what takes the most time in this domain. https://buttondown.com/storytime-team/archive/ Tracker's basics are pretty simple but getting the details right takes some finesse. Its multi-user update model is deceptively sophisticated -- being very responsive without ever losing data is a bit tricky, and you're probably making some tradeoffs you'd rather not make. The drag-and-drop behavior also took us a while to get exactly how we wanted it.

As for JavaScript runtimes, having seen Lynx (and some of the internal work NativeScript is doing), I'd like to see more engine-agnostic runtimes rather than coupling each runtime to one engine. As for writing, I'd like to stick to more manageable topics in future so that I can write as a hobby rather than as daunting work. My previous "Frontend predictions for 2024" (https://buttondown.com/whatever_jamie/archive/frontend-predictions-for… was similarly thorough and took an exhausting rush to write up. But simpler articles like "Staying productive with chronic pain" (https://buttondown.com/whatever_jamie/archive/staying-productive-with-… were all possible to finish in a weekend. There's probably a good story in Node-API, but I think I'd rather take on a research-light topic for a break first!

I really enjoy these lists of interesting features from various languages. They pop up occasionally on HN but now I can’t find them (Hillel Wayne had multiple). I want a meta list of all these interesting features across languages. EDIT: I found one! “Micro features I’d like to see in more languages” https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/microfeatures-id-like-to-se…