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Colby Russell
Personal blog · colbyrussell.comprogrammingwriting
Colby Russell writes For Good Measure, a personal blog at colbyrussell.com about programming and writing. Since 2015, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 37 times, most often “How to Displace JavaScript”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
37mentions?
4HN people?
2015–2024first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Colby Russell's posts on Git and GitHub, such as keeping a low profile on GitHub, Git trademark issues, identity and email on GitHub, and wikis versus pull requests. Other linked posts cover type-named objects and a C compiler series.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- How to Displace JavaScript2 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2020-02-18
- /2016/02/13/keeping-a-low-profile-on-github.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-01-05
What Hacker News says?
"Patches welcome" vs "patches wanted"[1]. 1. < https://www.colbyrussell.com/2013/08/06/patches-wanted.html >
Comment linking /2013/08/06/patches-wanted.html
on “Fixing a bug in Google Chrome as a first-time contributor”Submitted How to Displace JavaScript as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPhilip Guo wrote a great post several years ago under the title "Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery"[1] that seemed to get somewhat mixed but mostly positive reception. Much of the negative reception seemed to be chained to sophomoric arguments originating from folks stuck in the second panel of the glowing brain meme who wrongly thought of Guo being stuck in the first. The real truth behind the…
Comment linking /2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html
on “An app can be a home-cooked meal”> If folks want to help, it would be great to have a "youtube-dl for open access papers". Zotero has an existing set of "translators". And somewhat related to this request: I scratched out some notes last year about how to get more out of "zero-obligation communities" (like the pool of prospective contributors in open source) < https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan... . The long and short of i…
Comment linking /2019/02/15/what-happened-in-january.html
on “Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet”I jotted down some thoughts about this very thing last year. Here's the part that argues that it could work out to be fairly robust despite this apparent weakness: > Not as trivially compromised as it sounds like it would be; could be faked with (inevitably short-lived) edits, but temporality can't be faked. If a system were rolled out tomorrow, nothing that happens after rollout [...] would alter the fact that for…
Comment linking /2019/05/15/may-integration.html
on “Show HN: DNS over Wikipedia”How about just starting with "a compiler in the browser"? From [1]: > the web was first built in the 90s to share complicated academic work People complain a lot about the results of research not being replicable because people withhold their code when they publish, but the fact is that even then it's not guaranteed that anyone will be able to get it to work. Heck, there are plenty of run-of-the-mill software projec…
Comment linking /2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html
on “OpenAI's Codex sure knows a lot about HN [video]”Wirth came up with a simple RISC architecture for his compiler book. There's an emulator[1] for it, written by Peter De Wachter. Michael Schierl adapted Peter's emulator code into Java and JS. You can run it here: http://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/ I sent a bunch of patches to rework the in-browser emulator a couple weeks ago. If you don't know C, I recommend reading through the JS emulator's source. (View so…
Comment linking /staging/aubergine/emu.html?image=oberon&width=1024&height=768&debug=true
on “Writing a C Compiler, Part 1”> Programming is a profession requiring learning from experience - if a novice doesn't have the patience to overcome very small speedbumps like this on a daily basis while learning a new domain, this might not be a good path for them. There's a lot of assumption packed into this statement. Those speedbumps used to also not be there—they were put in recently[1]. Also, having read through your comment first and then r…
Comment linking /2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html
on “Today’s JavaScript, from an outsider’s perspective (2020)”Sure, but the big thing is the "serious" part. We're basically talking about the patch paradox[1]. At any point in time, someone could have stepped up and made it known they were willing to do the necessary work to move off XUL. But without a similar commitment from upstream to accept a future involving a mail client built on web standard tech, it would be a wasted effort. Heck, Nylas even built their own such email…
Comment linking /2017/08/06/contributors-dilemma.html
on “Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time”Today's static site generators are simply not fit for mass consumption. Even Jekyll—among the most polished and popular—immediately presents anyone stumbling onto its landing page with a facsimile of a terminal window with 3 inscrutable commands. And the kicker is that even if a prospective "customer" who was previously unacquainted with the command line managed to find their system's terminal emulator to open it up…
Comment linking /2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html
on “'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs”This is cool. I've been looking for an "open relay" to help with collaborating on GitHub-hosted projects that's easier than doing account resets.[1] I'll check it out later. Side note: the Git project is enforcing the Git trademark now.[2] If you want to use "Git" for your branding, you'll need to get approval. 1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2016/02/13/keeping-a-low-profil... 2. https://public-inbox.org/git/2017020…
Comment linking /2016/02/13/keeping-a-low-profile-on-github.html
on “GitMask – Develop Anonymously”> It goes like this: you can do the wrong things but be in a long enough feedback loop that the effects only really start to show themselves some time later. So rather than successfully correlating results to their real causes, what happens instead is: > a) people fool themselves in the meantime that bad things aren't bad, and > b) in the aftermath, when the consequences do start to appear, the temporal offset from…
Comment linking /2018/10/11/mozilla-and-feedback-loops.html
on “Jack Welch has died”Many of these platforms aren't really interested in shifting the _full_ development to the browser (although they could), since that would destroy the business position they're trying to establish for themselves. JS was created to be able to run in the browser, and yet most JS developers insist on still writing or relying on metatooling that can't actually run in the browser, even if that tooling is already written…
Comment linking /2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html
on “Gitpod shipped GitHub a launch cake for Codespaces”> Github provides a very useful project-independent unified UI for drive-by patches and off-the-cuff issues. Unless you value your privacy. If you take the necessary steps to approximate the level of "privacy in public"[1] that you get by default when dropping into someone's disconnected bugtracker or attaching a patch via email, then GitHub is pretty cumbersome to use. The article argues the case that GitHub is mak…
Comment linking /2016/02/13/keeping-a-low-profile-on-github.html
on “Making is show business now (2020)”> language like "solutionism at its worst" feels counter-productive[...] why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Because resources are not infinite. Gemini sucks the air out of the room. > Sometimes an adage is trotted out that goes roughly like this: Welp, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing!¶ And sometimes that's true. It's at least widely understood to be true, I think.¶ What I don't see mentioned, ever,…
Comment linking /2019/02/15/what-happened-in-january.html
on “Gemini is Solutionism”Alternatively, JS programmers should exhibit less contempt for the standardized, sandboxed runtime that JS was originally created to target: the Web browser. What's nuts is that any of these projects (whether they be single components, larger utilities, or full-blown apps) require a build step that involves anything more complicated[1] than a single machine-readable document in the web browser's native file format a…
Comment linking /2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html
on “Embedded malware in RC (NPM package)”> GitHub identifies people via their SSH key, not via a "name" or email address. Contrary to this, GitHub leans heavily on email addresses to identify contributors—in fact it may be correct to say it relies entirely on email addresses. This comes from both the documentation[1] and is borne out by experiments I've done to verify this[2]. The only thing I'm aware of that's of note is if you superficially try to change…
Comment linking /2016/02/13/keeping-a-low-profile-on-github.html
on “From AST to Lossless Syntax Tree”There is wisdom in this comment. It's important to note, though, that the point about investment applies also to the tools and methodology that the blank slate programmers are being steered towards. It's both interesting and exasperating that the modern JS ecosystem and its influencers have managed to recreate the experience of downloading SDKs and fiddling with configuration options and dealing with builds that som…
Comment linking /2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html
on “Why I chose Electron.js for my side business”My suspicions are compatible with yours. Last year I jotted down some thoughts about a possible solution: > Zero-obligation communities could probably extract more value from their contributors (including converting passive bystanders into contributors) by fostering a culture of voluntoldism and getting maintainers to put in some asks of their own. Right now, people are half-insisting that there's something intrinsi…
Comment linking /2019/02/15/what-happened-in-january.html
on “Rust Ghost, Signing Off”I started a project[1] a while back when it became clear that the underlying architecture for the new devtools in Firefox was going to be as problematic as Firebug's had been. Longtime Mozilla contributor Wladimir Palant just published a post a few days ago touching on some of the problems with devtools that he ran into when trying to work with it.[2] The idea with sepsis-inspector is that it should be able to repla…
Comment linking /2013/08/06/patches-wanted.html
on “Taking Chrome DevTools outside the browser”I think you're halfway there. The problem is not the feed view—that's a matter the client can handle. The problem is the feed itself. It's the wrong data structure. I wrote about this approx 2 years ago: https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan... Around the time that the phrase "social media" started getting bandied about, the Internet went from topic-focused indexing to person-focused indexing.…
Comment linking /2019/02/15/what-happened-in-january.html
on “Twtxt Is a Self-Hosted, Twitter-Like Decentralised MicroBlogging Platform”I'd say go further than that and focus on writing course material as "applicative literature"—something akin to an executable textbook. Once you're in this mindset, it's natural to recognize that writing your tools so they run in the browser is not just something that can be done, it's the way it should be done for that context. In terms of accessibility and portability, there's nothing that comes close. I once want…
Comment linking /2019/03/06/how-to-displace-javascript.html
on “Essentials of Compilation”> Could articles[5] be used to do things like pass variables or instantiate objects? I wrote about something similar to this (called "type-named objects") in a post last year[1]. The idea is that for small utility methods, you shouldn't have to interrupt your main flow of thought to come up with names for your formal parameters; in fact, you shouldn't even have to name your locals. If you're working in a language wi…
Comment linking /2017/02/16/novel-ideas-for-programming.html
on “Ask HN: What human language features could be useful for the writing of code?”> Doesn’t seem to me to be a big deal and a relatively normal way to differentiate free and paid accounts for such a service/SaaS. I'm not steeped in the Observable ecosystem either, but it's worth thinking clearly about what "public" means to not conflate things that are not by their nature inherently joined. If a notebook has to be public because your account is on the free tier, then that alone is maybe not so ba…
Comment linking /2019/02/15/what-happened-in-january.html
on “Observable transitions to paid plan for private notebooks”> Would you mind making a pull request? I do mind, so no thanks. I've written at length about why[1][2]. I'm not using the project, but you can consider the feedback in my last comment as a bug report if you like. 1. http://www.colbyrussell.com/2015/05/31/git-and-its-hubs.html 2. https://github.com/colbyrussell/keeping-a-low-profile-on-git...
Comment linking /2015/05/31/git-and-its-hubs.html
on “Icaro – Smart Javascript object observer, ideal for batching DOM updates”Not sure why your reply was deleted, but FWIW... > https://www.colbyrussell.com/2020/05/13/psa-wikis.html Forking a github repository to edit one file and submit it back as a PR is super-duper easy these days. You can do it entirely from the UI by just clicking the pencil icon when viewing the file you want to edit. I'd argue the only real difference from a classic Wiki is that you need to submit the change for revi…
Comment linking /2020/05/13/psa-wikis.html
on “New and improved Workers Docs”I agree with your overall position, but where you say: > Otherwise it'll be left in a sort of museum curator position I think we actually need this; somebody should already be doing it. I wrote about this several years ago: > Maybe in an alternate universe there exists an organization—or some sort of loosely connected movement—that focuses on software comprehensibility as a gift to the world and for future generatio…
Comment linking /2019/05/15/may-integration.html
on “Forty years of GNU and the free software movement”Here's a subset of active processes on my system, where I know that these have never fulfilled their purpose, given the way that I use my computer: - /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-source-registry - /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-alarm-notify - /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-calendar-factory - /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-calendar-factory-subprocess - /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-addressbook-factory - /usr/lib/evolution/e…
Comment linking /2019/05/15/may-integration.html
on “I3wm and Ubuntu 20.04 server without any useless packages”This is the first time I'm noticing you have a treatment on versioning in handaxeweb. I don't have time to read now, but I've bookmarked it for later meditation. You might also consider using the file format from the WHATWG/W3C hypertext system as your source code + presentation format. (I.e. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.) It's ubiquitous and JS is a capable language and every bit as good of a didactic language as othe…
Comment linking /LP/debut/plain.txt.htm
on “Writing a Compiler is Surprisingly Easy (part 1)”I never implemented this, but here's a transcription of my journal entries: https://www.colbyrussell.com/2020/05/10/index-and-location-t...
Comment linking /2020/05/10/index-and-location-tags-for-documentation-generators.html
on “CodeTour for Visual Studio Code”