Top all-time · #5622
Dave Jarvis
Personal blog · dave.autonoma.ca/blogprogramming
Dave Jarvis's personal blog at dave.autonoma.ca covers programming. Since 2019, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 121 times, most often “Logging as a code smell”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dave Jarvis's blog for its multi-part "Typesetting Markdown" series on turning Markdown into styled PDFs with bash build scripts and themes, plus posts on vintage IBM advertising.
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.
Software development blog
Most-linked posts?
- Logging as a code smell3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-01-10
- Typesetting Markdown – Part 8: Annotations3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-04-30
- Web of Knowledge2 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2019-06-06
- /blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdown-part-8/jekyll-hyde.pdf2 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2022-02-21
- “Typesetting Markdown” blog post series by a technical writer2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-03-25
- Write Once, Build Anywhere2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-29
- Typesetting Markdown – Part 5: Interpolation2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-07-06
- Typesetting Markdown – Part 3: Automagicify2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-06-17
- /blog/2020/04/11/interior-book-design/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-14
What Hacker News says?
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p... > Of all these projects, the most amenable to automatic typesetting are those produced by Standard Ebooks and HTML Writers Guild. The benefit of using HTML Writers Guild is their semantic markup and simple document type definition (DTD) file. Standard Ebooks, as the name suggests, are brilliantly standardized and have an excellent Manual of Style that d…
Comment linking /blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-projects/
on “Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover”Submitted “Typesetting Markdown” blog post series by a technical writer as a story · 179 points
HN discussionhttps://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/ The blog has a series on how to typeset Markdown documents into beautiful PDFs. Along the way, there's deep discussion about why separating content from presentation is a great goal, how to implement CI/CD using a simple user-friendly bash script, a walk-through on leveraging externally sourced interpolated variables within Markdown documents, a way to typeset mathematics, and an intro…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Typesetting Markdown – Part 4: Theme Style as a story · 81 points
HN discussion"Whatever the reasons (market pressures, rushing processes, inadequate certifications, fear of being fired, or poor project management), Leveson’s insights are being ignored. For example, after the first fatal Boeing 737 Max flight, why was the entire fleet not grounded indefinitely? Or not grounded after an Indonesian safety committee report uncovered multiple failures? Or not grounded when an off-duty pilot helped…
Comment linking /blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
on “FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s”Submitted Web of Knowledge as a story · 50 points
HN discussionMy FOSS text editor, KeenWrite[1], takes a similar approach: Markdown -> XHTML -> TeX -> PDF. The software architecture shows how you can have processor chains: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/ima... I developed KeenWrite to help write a sci-fi novel where I can use variables for character names, places, etc. See the tutorials[2] for details. For anyone still using pandoc and shell scripts,…
Comment linking /blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdown-part-1/
on “Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system”Submitted Logging as a code smell as a story · 38 points
HN discussionOf possible interest, I once used an OSM editor to help draw Voronoi diagrams on spherical surfaces in a scalable vector graphic file format to help depict planet-wide fissures from colossal collisions. https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/05/12/impacts-project-vor...
Comment linking /blog/2020/05/12/impacts-project-voronoi-diagrams/
on “Make your first edit to OpenStreetMap”Submitted Write Once, Build Anywhere as a story · 7 points
HN discussionhttps://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png ;-) See also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
Comment linking /blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
on “Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera”Submitted Racism in Technology as a story · 4 points
HN discussion"Whatever the reasons (market pressures, rushing processes, inadequate certifications, fear of being fired, or poor project management), Leveson’s insights are being ignored. For example, after the first fatal Boeing 737 Max flight, why was the entire fleet not grounded indefinitely? Or not grounded after an Indonesian safety committee report uncovered multiple failures? Or not grounded when an off-duty pilot helped…
Comment linking /blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
on “Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge stemming from 737 MAX crashes”Submitted Logging Is a Code Smell (2022) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionUse events instead of repetitious logging calls. https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2022/01/08/logging-code-smell/
Comment linking /blog/2022/01/08/logging-code-smell/
on “Logging sucks”Submitted Converting Project Gutenberg Projects to Markdown as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere's an endless variation on how shell scripts can present help information. Here's another, consider this array: ARGUMENTS+=( "a,arch,Target operating system architecture (amd64)" "b,build,Suppress building application" "o,os,Target operating system (linux, windows, mac)" "u,update,Java update version number (${ARG_JRE_UPDATE})" "v,version,Full Java version (${ARG_JRE_VERSION})" ) The lines are machine-readable…
Comment linking /blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdown-part-1/
on “Help Message for Shell Scripts”Submitted Project Gutenberg Projects (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wrote a series of blog posts about typesetting Markdown using pandoc: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog Eventually, I found pandoc to be a little limiting: * Awkward to use interpolated variables within prose. * No real-time preview prior to rendering the final document. * Limited options for TeX support (e.g., SVG vs. inline; ConTeXt vs. LaTeX). * Inconsistent syntax for captions and cross-references. * Requires glue…
Comment linking /blog
on “Show HN: I made a tool to clean and convert any webpage to Markdown”Submitted Logging Is a Code Smell as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBash can also employ a kind of function pointer, which can greatly simplify command-line argument parsing. Consider the following simplified example: ARG_ARCH="amd64" ARGUMENTS+=( "ARG_ARCH,a,arch,Target operating system architecture ($ {ARG_ARCH})" "log=utile_log,V,verbose,Log messages while processing" ) utile_log() { echo "$1" } noop() { return 1 } log=noop By creating a comma-delimited list of command-line argum…
Comment linking /blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdown-part-1/
on “Bash functions are better than I thought”Submitted Typesetting Markdown – Part 8: Annotations as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe first four parts of my Typesetting Markdown blog describes improving the user-friendliness of bash scripts. In particular, you can use bash to define a reusable script that allows isolating software dependencies, command-line arguments, and parsing. https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow... In effect, create a list of dependencies and arguments: #!/usr/bin/env bash source $HOME/bin/build-te…
Comment linking /blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdown-part-1/
on “Techniques I use to create a great user experience for shell scripts”Submitted Typesetting Markdown – Part 1: Build Script as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png ;-) See also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
Comment linking /blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
on “Flock used >100 times to track veteran who recorded traffic stop”Submitted We Don't Know: A Case for Mars as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere are some Markdown books I've crafted: * https://whitemagicsoftware.com/softcover/technical.pdf * https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf * https://whitemagicsoftware.com/softcover/jekyll-hyde.pdf My blog describes shell scripts to use pandoc and knitr for converting Markdown to PDF: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow... I wrote a FOSS GUI/CLI cross-platform desktop application…
Comment linking /blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdown-part-1/
on “I prefer rST to Markdown”Submitted Web of Knowledge as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWas a famous IBM motto in the thirties. You dont receive der Fuhrer's "The Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star", granted to 'honor foreign nationals who made themselves deserving of the German Reich.' by talking bad about political leaders now do you. IBM commercial from 1934 'Übersicht hollerith lochkarten' https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/im... IBM CEO photo-op with the leader https:…
Comment linking /blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/images/hollerith.jpg
on “Facebook fires employee for publicly scolding a colleague”Submitted PHP File Download Hit Counter as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
