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Neil Van Dyke
Personal blog · neilvandyke.orgprogramminggames
Neil Van Dyke's personal blog at neilvandyke.org covers programming and games. Since 2007, 41 different Hacker News readers have linked it 210 times, most often “SICP Support for Racket”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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210mentions?
41HN people?
2007–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- SICP Support for Racket12 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2011-05-19
- SICP in Texinfo Format - Read It In Emacs11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2008-04-29
- /quack/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-12-09
- /sicp-plt/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-05-14
- iRobot Roomba/Create Interface for Racket2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-03-30
- SICP in Texinfo Format (2007)2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-07-13
- /htmlprag/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-01-24
- /racket/html-writing/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-26
- /racket-openwrt/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-06
What Hacker News says?
> The FSF has been supporting earlier free software mobile phone projects such as Replicant, Hopefully this project will go better than Replicant. Here are my notes on running Replicant on the (then already very old) flagship Samsung GT-I9300: https://www.neilvandyke.org/replicant/ The hardware was a little difficult to obtain in the US, and WiFi worked only with a blob of questionable provenance. It looks like Repl…
Comment linking /replicant/
on “FSF announces Librephone project”Submitted SICP Support for Racket as a story · 48 points
HN discussionOne not in this list that I find helpful: highlighting in code blocks. For example, when you're showing a before and after, and want to highlight what changed. For example, I use it in the docs for: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/progedit/ The is one of the many features supported by Racket's Scribble, which is used to generate the online and print books for the Racket ecosystem. https://docs.racket-lang.org/scr…
Comment linking /racket/progedit/
on “Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites”Submitted SICP in Texinfo Format - Read It In Emacs as a story · 17 points
HN discussionYes, I love this idea as well. Did a little research and found the TextInfo format from Neil Van Dyke here: http://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/
Comment linking /sicp-texi/
on “Beautiful Online SICP”Submitted SICP in Texinfo Format (2007) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://www.neilvandyke.org/ It's the same look for a couple decades. Used to be HTML tables, currently responsive CSS (see the 3 simple width modes). Generated by an ancient Emacs Lisp program. The late '90s version kludged a color-coded two-level tab site-wide navigation scheme out of `table` elements, no images. The only remaining example (with tab text removed) is: https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/
Comment linking /lab-linux-1999/
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted iRobot Roomba/Create Interface for Racket as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou might try to find forums where people are doing the kind of LLM work you want to do, and see what they're recommending for how to do that work. Personally, for my changing needs, my GPU server is already on its 4th GPU, after I kept finding I needed more VRAM for various purposes. The RTX 3090 seems to be a sweet spot right now, and my next upgrade right now would probably be a 2nd 3090 with NVLink, or some affo…
Comment linking /machine-learning/
on “Home Lab Beginners guide”Submitted AsteroidOS Notes as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> It was not always thus. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, installing Linux on one's home computer was a rather terrifying affair, requiring a ton of abstruse tweaking using the command line. For those not in Linux back then, here's some examples from that era: https://www.neilvandyke.org/linux-thinkpad-560e/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/
Comment linking /lab-linux-1999/
on “Linux on the laptop works so damn well that it’s boring”The CompUSA that opened in Cambridge, MA, had a guard who insisted on checking your purchases after the registers, like you were a criminal, or implying it was a crime-heavy area. Not the kind of insult or atmosphere anyone should have to put up with, and, further, the generally affluent people of Harvard and MIT, which the store was located right between, weren't accustomed to it. I called this out in 2000, when I…
Comment linking /cheap-pc-2000/
on “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)”> Doing something for the hell of it is worth it. Just make it separate from the point above so they don't conflict. This is a great use for new, standalone open source modules: feel free to experiment with styles or techniques or goals that you wouldn't want to justify. (Or for experiments that you start and then abandon without ever showing anyone.) For example, when I was making lots of packages to help build out…
Comment linking /racket/html-template/
on “A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago”In a case of great minds think alike (you, Eli Barzilay, and Matthew Flatt), this (especially the square brackets and curly braces purposes) is remarkably similar to what Racket ended up using, for the @-reader syntax that's used by Scribble document processing: https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/reader.html#%28part._.... I made an Emacs mode for it: https://www.neilvandyke.org/scribble-emacs/
Comment linking /scribble-emacs/
on “Org-Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text (2018)”I'm leaning towards agreement with you, especially for embedded API docs in code. I've been using Scribble for embedded API docs for years,[1] and the formatted result looks great, and is very powerful and extensible (Scribble is actually a better LaTeX), but it's not nearly as readable in code as it could be. I think I actually preferred my earlier three-comment-character-Texinfo format I had before, and I even wro…
Comment linking /racket/roomba/
on “Org-Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text (2018)”The article has a broken link for the free copy: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b... https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf I hadn't seen a blessed PDF version until today. Circa 2001, only the HTML version was freely available, and someone converted it to TeXinfo: https://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/ If anyone wants to work through SICP today, you can run the code in MIT Scheme, or i…
Comment linking /racket/sicp/
on “SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)”For curating videos for one's own children, if the catalog isn't changing too often, you might be able to `youtube-dl` the videos, and put the files on kids' devices or your home media device/appliance. I've been using `youtube-dl` successfully for lecture videos on my TV appliance (supposedly to watch while using the stationary bike). An example command line is in a script that grabs the videos from a conference: h…
Comment linking /racket/download-racketcon-2019-videos.sh
on “YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation”I've been using todo.txt too, for personal tasks and appointments. I have a few tweaks: https://www.neilvandyke.org/todotxt/
Comment linking /todotxt/
on “Show HN: A plain-text file format for todos and check lists”The me_cleaner they mentioned is an attempt to remove/disable the Intel ME, including any AMT. An alternative to me_cleaner on some systems (like ThinkPad X200) is to replace the BIOS entirely with Coreboot [1]. More recently, it was found that me_cleaner appears to let you remove/disable all or part of Intel ME on those and some other architectures but still boot. [1] My own notes from when I played with this, whic…
Comment linking /coreboot/
on “Intel VISA Exploit Gives Access to Computer’s Entire Data, Researchers Show”> You can blame Zeigarnik again. The mere act of making a to-do list relieves so much itchy stress that it can, paradoxically, reduce the pressure to actually get stuff done. “People feel that when they put all their tasks somewhere, they’ve already done most of the work,” Perchik says. But it’s an illusion. The pile of work is still there. I suspect that this effect can work for you, without working against you. Fo…
Comment linking /todotxt/
on “We Still Don’t Get Things Done”As much as I'm a fan of Emacs, I don't think a .emacs file had much to do with that startup's success. He just wanted to see the UX and features that were possible for a particular purpose, for ideas and competitive analysis. But I did opensource a minority of the bits. :) https://www.neilvandyke.org/emacs/
Comment linking /emacs/
on “EmacsConf 2020 Talks”I had this kind of risk in mind when I wrote a server-side "HTML template" feature for Racket. The template language intentionally only handles static chunks of HTML, escaping of values, and a little safety guards. Everything else (including the usual template language behavior like iterating over a collection/stream, such as from a database query result) is done with arbitrary normal Racket language, which the temp…
Comment linking /racket/html-template/
on “Dear sir, you have built a compiler (2022)”For people already locked into Kindle, I don't know what to tell you. (Unless you DRM-crack, and get into the gray areas of the piracy culture that's creating much of the DRM problems.) But it would be healthy for everyone if people supported a DRM-free and non-surveillance ebook ecosystem. One solution I found is to buy ebooks as DRM-free EPUBs and PDFs, and read them in open source desktop tools and on my relative…
Comment linking /ebooks/
on “Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th”Very little commercial use of Racket is maybe an understatement. A few notes to people thinking about commercial use of Racket... The big customer of my consulting business (public sector) did amazing "force multiplier" things with Racket and my help, even when many general-purpose libraries had to be built in-house. But there were virtually no other prospective clients in that niche after over a decade. There are a…
Comment linking /racket-money/
on “Racket is 25”IKEA CORRAS Bedside Table FTW! Photo of my newest CORRAS rack setup: https://www.neilvandyke.org/kubernetes/ Sadly, IKEA no longer makes the CORRAS. I used to have 6 of them, foolishly sold some when going minimal.
Comment linking /kubernetes/
on “LackRack: IKEA's cheapest table is perfectly sized to rackmount computers (2020)”For a few years, I evolved a slightly-modified Todo.txt format for this purpose, to represent both tasks and appointments. http://todotxt.org/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/todotxt/ In some ways it worked well, but there were a few drawbacks, and eventually I switched to native calendar programs on desktop and mobile. Drawbacks I personally felt: * In the text file, recurring tasks didn't show up when I looked into th…
Comment linking /todotxt/
on “Calendar.txt”All the CL people I've worked with have been amiable. Though, I suppose you could say: what high-powered hacker wouldn't be in a good mood, if they were getting paid to hack Lisp. I don't recall any curmudgeon behavior in-person, but a bit "critical" is often a useful role for an engineer to play, if they can back it up and discuss. A useful mode of engineering discussion involves people making assertions, thinking…
Comment linking /racket-money/
on “Why Racket? Why Lisp?”I even included SGT's puzzle collection in a Linux distro that was optimized for small size (but the puzzles were important)! :) https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/
Comment linking /lildeb/
on “Git without a forge”And info: http://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/
Comment linking /sicp-texi/
on “Why SICP Matters”I've been looking at this (most recently, got a 3.5" touchscreen for a RasPi3B+), but an option for a Linux handheld that fits in your pocket today might be off-the-shelf smartphone device with PostmarketOS: https://postmarketos.org/ PostmarketOS is still in a developers-only state, and there's a lot of directions you could take everything that's atop the kernel. My own whim was to incrementally build the userland i…
Comment linking /postmarketos/
on “Linux-based 4G phones with Google Assistant sold for $7 in Indonesia”
