Top all-time · #7779
Marcelo Lazaroni
Personal blog · lazamar.github.ioprogrammingweb
Marcelo Lazaroni's personal blog at lazamar.github.io covers programming and web. Since 2016, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “Searching and installing old versions of Nix packages (2020)”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for a tool and write-up on installing older versions of nixpkgs packages, which comments cite when discussing Nix package pinning and version management.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Developing for the Interwebs
Most-linked posts?
- Searching and installing old versions of Nix packages (2020)5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-09-21
- A virtual DOM in 200 lines of JavaScript3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-22
What Hacker News says?
Have you come across Nix Package Versions¹ yet? If you’re looking to work around a recent bug or other unwanted change by installing a slightly older version of some package from nixpkgs, Marcelo Lazaroni built a nice page to help with that and wrote up an explanation² of how it works. This only works for versions of your package that do exist in nixpkgs but aren’t currently the default for your chosen channel, so i…
Comment linking /download-specific-package-version-with-nix/
on “Nix – Death by a Thousand Cuts”Submitted Building a data compression utility in Haskell using Huffman codes as a story · 232 points
HN discussionBtw, what is that on the girl's shirt in the image? Direct link: https://lazamar.github.io/images/data-compressor.svg
Comment linking /images/data-compressor.svg
on “Building a data compression utility in Haskell using Huffman codes”Submitted A virtual DOM in 200 lines of JavaScript as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI feel Nix is eating their lunch. Even though Nix as a language could be tough, it's a simpler solution than Dagger. It provides a shell, almost complete reproducibility and isolation can be added through containers. Working with dependencies to build source code using nix is usually straightforward but having the right binary version that doesn't have the same love as major languages (i.e. terraform, flux, etc) is…
Comment linking /download-specific-package-version-with-nix/
on “Dagger: A shell for the container age”Submitted A virtual DOM in 200 lines of JavaScript as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFunny how you're talking about how horrible it is to install glibc, when the entire reason lazamar's tool exists is that he couldn't figure out how to install a specific version of a tool using nix https://lazamar.github.io/download-specific-package-version-... "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" Also, not all of us depend on glibc or cha…
Comment linking /download-specific-package-version-with-nix/
on “Ditch your version manager”Submitted Show HN: Browse Hackage from the Terminal as a story · 3 points
HN discussion>> Oh. Wait. There's literally no such way. > I think there is? There is no official way to do that. There's no history. There are no tools in nix to do that. As you noted, you have to rely on the kindness of strangers to provide this service. Here's lazamar's own explanation why he built the tool: https://lazamar.github.io/download-specific-package-version-... Look at the beginning of the "automating" section to se…
Comment linking /download-specific-package-version-with-nix/
on “Ditch your version manager”Submitted Zero downtime – Making Blue-Green deployments dead simple as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> What does Spack offer that Nix does not? Installing specific, older versions of software seem to be a bit of an ordeal with Nix: * https://lazamar.github.io/download-specific-package-version-... involving pulling out git and cherry-picking specific commits. Whereas with Spack it is: * spack install neovim@x.y.z Plus you can do that multiple times times for various values of "x.y.z" and then do a "module load neovi…
Comment linking /download-specific-package-version-with-nix/
on “Mapping Out the HPC Dependency Chaos”Submitted Dispatching from inside a reducer in Redux as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted My accidental Denial of Service attack as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A virtual DOM in 200 lines of JavaScript as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Searching and installing old versions of Nix packages (2020) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Searching and installing old versions of Nix packages (2020) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Searching and installing old versions of Nix packages (2020) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Calling Elm functions synchronously from JavaScript as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
