Top all-time · #21458
Alex Yankov
Personal blog · aleyan.com/blogprogrammingdata
Alex Yankov's personal blog at aleyan.com covers programming and data. Since 2025, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “LLM Coding Assistant Census”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Alex Yankov's Blog
Most-linked posts?
- LLM Coding Assistant Census2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-08-11
- Task Runner Census 20252 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-13
- Why Aren't We Uv Yet?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-04-10
What Hacker News says?
I have been excited about bun for about a year, and I thought that 2025 is going to be its breakout year. It is really surprising to me that it is not more popular. I scanned top 100k repos on GitHub, and for new repos in 2025, npm is 35 times more popular and pnpm is 11 time more popular than bun [0][1]. The other up and coming javascript runtime, deno is not so popular either. I wonder why that is? Is it because i…
Comment linking /blog/2025-task-runners-census/
on “Behind the scenes of Bun Install”Submitted Task Runner Census 2025 as a story · 30 points
HN discussionIf you want to get into fixed-width character art, I highly recommend doing it in the browser like OP did rather than trying to old school it in the terminal. I have done a little ascii[0] and unicode[1] graphics, and the browser is such a better tool. You can set fonts and proportions and know exactly how things will render for the user. Mouse input, performance profiling and a bunch of other things are just better…
Comment linking /projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon/
on “A walkable ASCII cyberpunk city in one HTML file [video]”Submitted Show HN: The ASCII Side of the Moon as a story · 8 points
HN discussionWhat an amazing set of data! The "Generative AI services popularity" [1] chart is surprising. ChatGPT is being #1 makes sense, but Character.AI being #2 is surprising, being ahead of Anthropic, Perplexity, and xAI. I suspect this data is strongly affected by the services DNS caching strategies. The other interesting chart is "Workers AI model popularity" [2]. `llama-3-8b-instruct` has been leading at 30% to 40% sinc…
Comment linking /blog/2025-llm-assistant-census/
on “Cloudflare Radar: AI Insights”Submitted Python Iceberg as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIf you want to get a single entry point into your repo's task, also consider my tool: dela[0]. It scans a variety of task file definitions like pyproject.toml, package.json, makefile, etc and makes them available on the cli via the bare name of the task. It has been very convenient for me so far on diverse repos, and the best part is that I didn't have to convince anyone else working on the repos to adjust the repos…
Comment linking /blog/2025-task-runners-census/
on “Mise: Monorepo Tasks”Submitted LLM Coding Assistant Census as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe OP postulates two paths for the future: "1: LLM Labs go direct" and "2: LLMs become commodities, wrappers win". I just happened to have published a blogpost on llm code assistants used by GitHub repos[0][1]. Claude Code has just overtaken Cursor as the most popular. Gemini CLI and OpenAI Codex also has a steeper growth curve than Cursor. So on just this question, it looks like the drugs are beating the dealers.…
Comment linking /blog/2025-llm-assistant-census/
on “Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer”Submitted LLM Coding Assistant Census 2025 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI have been using SVGs for charts on my blog for a couple of months[0] now. Using SVGs satisfied me, but in all honesty, I don't think anyone else cares. For completeness the benefits are below: * The charts are never blurry * The text in the chart is selectable and searchable * The file size could be small compared to PNGs * The charts can use a font set by a stylesheet * The charts can have a builtin dark mode (no…
Comment linking /blog/2025-llm-assistant-census
on “Nicu's test website made with SVG (2007)”Submitted Why Aren't We Uv Yet? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionGreat work! While I was building ascii-side-of-the-moon [0][1] I briefly considered writing my own ascii renderer to capture differences in shade and shape of the Lunar Maria[2] better. Ended up just using chafa [3] with the hope of coming back to ascii rendering after everything is working end to end. Are you planning to release this as a library or a tool, or should we just take the relevant MIT licensed code from…
Comment linking /projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon
on “ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering”Submitted Why Aren't We Uv Yet? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYes, the angle above the horizon is usually what is most useful because it is used to find something small but visible. In the case of my ascii moon, the angle below the horizon, is there to explain why something is not visible. The Moon is large enough that people can easily find it on their own if it is not obstructed by the Earth itself. Consider the Moon as viewed from NYC at time of comment [0], it is hiding be…
Comment linking /projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon/?lat=40.71&lon=-74.00&date=2026-03-11T04%3A19Z
on “U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth”Submitted Show HN: The ASCII Side of the Moon as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is a fantastic discovery! Displaying azimuth in my ascii-side-of-the-moon [0] sounds useful, but then I would need to explain the symbol. I am displaying altitude/elevation below horizon, but there doesn't appear to be standard symbol for it. I checked the tables linked from article and there doesn't seem to be a symbol for it. Maybe this the opportunity to invent and suggest a symbol for Altitude? [0] https://…
Comment linking /projects/ascii-side-of-the-moon
on “U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth”Submitted Task Runner Census 2025 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAgree with you on outdated and upper bounds. However, if users are complaining about the interface being difficult, there is probably something there. Yes, it makes sense that `uv lock` commands only work the lock file, but users have real needs to upgrade direct and transitive dependencies. For transitive dependencies `uv lock --upgrade-package` works, even if a bit wordy. For direct dependencies, `uv lock --upgrad…
Comment linking /blog/2026-why-arent-we-uv-yet
on “Uv is fantastic, but its package management UX is a mess”