Top all-time · #3467
Jesse Donat
Personal blog · donatstudios.com · on HN as donatjprogramming
Jesse Donat writes Donat Studios, a personal blog at donatstudios.com about programming. Since 2013, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 68 times, most often “CSV: An Encoding Nightmare”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jesse Donat's blog for posts on CSV and Excel encoding problems, CoffeeScript scoping, git garbage collection and Go modules, mostly as pointers to reference material.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- CSV: An Encoding Nightmare5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-06-20
- /CoffeeScript-Madness5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-01-04
- Problems with CSVs (2016)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-12-27
- The Joys of Unix Keyboards3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-12-30
- Go modules have a v2+ problem3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-09-10
- Git garbage collection? You're not going to need it2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-11-15
- Releasing my tools under the MIT License was probably a mistake (2023)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-08-13
- CoffeeScript's Scoping is Madness2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-07-25
- /mac-terminal-run-unsigned-binaries2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-08
- Go Binary Sizes Are Relatively Stable – Donat Studios2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-17
What Hacker News says?
No, CoffeeScript doesn't have the same semantics as vanilla JavaScript; not in any meaningful sense I can think of, certainly not in the way that TypeScript does. Most CoffeeScript will simply syntax error if you feed it into a JS interpreter (and vice versa), and there's no trivial syntactic transform to get around that (i.e. it's not just a new surface syntax over JavaScript). Various features in CoffeeScript have…
Comment linking /CoffeeScript-Madness
on “Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)”Submitted Go modules have a v2+ problem as a story · 217 points
HN discussionhttps://donatstudios.com Professional blog I've ran for over 10 years now. Started it because I wanted to separate coding and more professional stuff from the rants of my personal blog. For a while I used to get a pretty decent amount of side work from it just helping people with their Apache configs/mass redirects. Had a nice little cottage industry. It's mostly died off in the last couple years. Everyone moved to…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted GitHub shouldn't allow username reuse as a story · 216 points
HN discussionSo much this. I work in educational software, and have a little write up about the troubles we’ve had with schools “fixing up” CSVs from their student information systems before sending them to us. The simple act of opening the CSV and hitting save loses data (Microsoft actually fixed some of the problem very recently). That said, they will use Excel, it’s not in my control. I received dozens of comments “Just use O…
Comment linking /CSV-An-Encoding-Nightmare
on “Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates”Submitted Problems with CSVs (2016) as a story · 172 points
HN discussionHah, this comment took off! My colophon if anyone is interested https://donatstudios.com/colophon
Comment linking /colophon
on “My website is ugly because I made it”Submitted The Joys of Unix Keyboards as a story · 133 points
HN discussionfixing the gaps in Lua. Moonscript's [...] default local Roberto Ierusalimschy, the creator of Lua, believes that "Local by default is wrong." [1]. I don't necessarily agree that local-by-default is inherently wrong, but every implementation of local-by-default that I've seen has had flaws. It looks like MoonScript is no different - its scoping rules seem to suffer from the same "madness" as CoffeeScript [2]. [1] ht…
Comment linking /CoffeeScript-Madness
on “MoonScript, a programmer friendly language that compiles to Lua”Submitted Releasing my tools under the MIT License was probably a mistake (2023) as a story · 126 points
HN discussion> Your explanation makes sense. It would complicate the compiler in this regard. The compiler part's easy, it's the meatpiler which gets into an odd funk when implicit declarations don't do the expected thing (which will eventually happen). Not having implicit declarations is much simpler and more straightforward for everyone involved. I used to find implicit declarations NBD, but I've slowly soured on them (startin…
Comment linking /CoffeeScript-Madness
on “Go 1.13 Release Notes”Submitted Problems with CSVs as a story · 87 points
HN discussionI stopped releasing binaries for a number of my tools because I didn't want to pay the $100 a year for the right to do so, and I got tired of explaining how to run them without signing. The post I wrote to point people at anyway: https://donatstudios.com/mac-terminal-run-unsigned-binaries
Comment linking /mac-terminal-run-unsigned-binaries
on “Apple's "notarisation" – blocking software freedom of developers and users”Submitted Go Binary Sizes Are Growing out of Control as a story · 21 points
HN discussionI regret using the MIT License on a couple of my applications that others have picked up and monetized. I do not regret making their source available for people to learn from and extend. I'm not even mad they're making money. I just would have liked, in hindsight, to have used a license that guaranteed me some iota of credit in the finished product. Particularly in things where I built the entire finished product -…
Comment linking /License-Grumbles
on “Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?”Submitted CoffeeScript's Scoping is Madness as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> It is really hard to lose stuff Furthermore I recommend turning off automatic garbage collection. Turning it off makes it even harder to lose things, and unless you have an insanely massive amount of churn, you really don’t need it. https://donatstudios.com/yagni-git-gc
Comment linking /yagni-git-gc
on “Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part II)”Submitted Git garbage collection? You're not going to need it as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMy biggest gripe with CoffeeScript, beyond it's scoping being madness [1], is it made writing very inefficient JavaScript much easier. The language was full of footguns. Many times something would look perfectly reasonable in CoffeeScript but when you would actually read the JS it would be iterating the same dataset multiple times to grab individual items that could have and should have been a single loop. 1. https:…
Comment linking /CoffeeScript-Madness
on “Civet: A Superset of TypeScript”Submitted Releasing my tools under the MIT License was probably a mistake as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI built a little tool a while ago that converts CSV/TSV to Markdown. I use it mostly o convert MySQL EXPLAIN's to Markdown for pull requests. https://donatstudios.com/CsvToMarkdownTable
Comment linking /CsvToMarkdownTable
on “Show HN: Excel-like table editing for Markdown”Submitted Git gc – You're not going to need it as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Columns are separated by \u001F (ASCII unit separator) > Rows are separated by \u001E (ASCII record separator) That's a nightmare to try to edit yourself in a text editor? I'd rather just have basically TSV, but with every value always quoted, always UTF-8. Quotes escaped with backslashes, backslashes escaped with backslashes, and that's it. Any binary allowed between the quotes. I deal with CSVs all day every day…
Comment linking /CSV-An-Encoding-Nightmare
on “Why isn’t there a decent file format for tabular data?”Submitted Go Binary Sizes Are Relatively Stable – Donat Studios as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHow to make git an elephant: https://donatstudios.com/yagni-git-gc
Comment linking /yagni-git-gc
on “I scanned all of GitHub's "oops commits" for leaked secrets”Submitted CSV: An Encoding Nightmare as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere is a good start: https://donatstudios.com/Go-v2-Modules With the relevant HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429045
Comment linking /Go-v2-Modules
on “Three Months of Go from a Haskeller’s perspective (2016)”Submitted Go's New Iterators Smell (A Little) Funny, but It's Probably OK as a story · 2 points
HN discussionInteresting to understand what is possible in this Deno/Pyodide environment. For example sklearn works despite being quite an involved dependency [1]. Another side to this is data input/output, which seems possible with a low level interface [2]. Very exciting that (a simple) end-to-end ML experience is now possible in the modern browser. [1] https://www.erp5.com/NXD-Blog.Scipy.and.Scikit.Learn.Compile... [2] https:…
Comment linking /Read-User-Files-With-Go-WASM
on “MCP Run Python”Submitted PHP Has Grown Up, You Should Too as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
