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The Scribbler of the Rueful Countenance
Personal blog · jordi.inversethought.com/blogprogrammingwriting
The Scribbler of the Rueful Countenance is a personal blog at jordi.inversethought.com about programming and writing. Since 2012, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 75 times, most often “Customising Mercurial Like a Pro”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Jordi's blog covers Mercurial, version control and open-source software, including the 'On gitology' essay on git's complexity, a post on Mercurial templates, and a piece on freedom in Firefox.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Customising Mercurial Like a Pro6 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2014-10-22
- 5 Things We Have Forgotten About Open Source4 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2014-06-09
- Exercising Software Freedom on Firefox4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-02-24
- On gitology4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-02-23
- Advent of D3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-03-06
- The Kluever Maneuver2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-31
- I hate git2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-01-31
- Git Enough (2011)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-28
What Hacker News says?
I am used to working in large repos (>100 commits/day), which generally means that something like 'git log --graph' contains a lot of extraneous information. The most common workflow I have is that I've got a couple of old working branches (like featurea and featureb), and I want to see if I need to update featureb to a newer head or not, or if featureb was based on featurea or featurea-v2. A demonstration of this k…
Comment linking /blog/customising-mercurial-like-a-pro/
on “Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client”Submitted Concurrency I can finally understand and write correctly as a story · 297 points
HN discussionNo, everyone seems to believe that, but it does not. The phrase did not exist before 1998, when OSI published the OSD and Tim O'Reilly viciously promoted it: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source&ca... http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot... http://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler
Comment linking /blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/
on “MAME is now Free and Open Source Software”Submitted On gitology as a story · 9 points
HN discussionHere is my blog post for when I did this in D: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/advent-of-d/
Comment linking /blog/advent-of-d/
on “Advent of Code 2018”Submitted 5 Things We Have Forgotten About Open Source as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI wrote a blog post about that: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...
Comment linking /blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/
on “D Language accepted for inclusion in GCC”Submitted Exercising Software Freedom on Firefox as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> Mercurial is not only simpler, but also has got really powerful features like revsets. Revsets together with templates can be used to build custom commands: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial-l... There are also filesets that work similarly for doing queries on files (hg help filesets).
Comment linking /blog/customising-mercurial-like-a-pro/
on “Ten Years of Git: An Interview with Linus Torvalds”Submitted Exercising Software Freedom on Firefox as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThose would be accomplished with hg templates, not revsets. Revsets are kind of like gitrevisions(7), but much more powerful. Docs: https://selenic.com/hg/help/revsets A complete example, which appears to have some popularity in Mozilla: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial-l... edit: Sorry, the --decorate part would be with template, the --all is kind of like a revset, and the --graph part is…
Comment linking /blog/customising-mercurial-like-a-pro/
on “I'm going to slowly move on from Mercurial”Submitted 5 Things We Have Forgotten About Open Source as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIf "open source" predates OSI, it must have been a very underground word. It doesn't appear before 1998: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=open+source&ca... My take on the matter: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...
Comment linking /blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/
on “The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty”Submitted Git Enough (2011) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Question: How does Mercurial deal with garbage collection? After all, the desire for garbage collection is by far not unique to Git -- any version control system that has the equivalent of `commit --amend` and rebase should provide it. Garbage collecion is an issue that is 100% unique to Git. No other VCS even thinks about throwing user data in the repository away without the user explicitly telling it to. Once yo…
Comment linking /blog/customising-mercurial-like-a-pro/
on “High-Level Problems with Git and How to Fix Them”Submitted Advent of D as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis reminds me a bit of my `hg wip` command: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial-l... It eventually got mainlined into Mercurial as the `hg show` command: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/WhatsNew#Mercurial_4.3_.2...
Comment linking /blog/customising-mercurial-like-a-pro/
on “Git log – The good parts”Submitted Advent of D as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYeah, that's a campaign slogan of the original OSI movement, sponsored by O'Reilly and spearheaded by esr and Bruce Perens. Other slogans are "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" or the promise that publishing your source means you'll get more contributors. http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...
Comment linking /blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/
on “My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open source project”Submitted Git… enough as a story · 3 points
HN discussionD has been a real pleasure for me. I did the 2017 AoC in it: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/advent-of-d/ The richness and flexibility of compile-time features almost make it feel like a lisp, with the slight downgrade of sometimes working on strings of source code instead of sexps. Regardless, like the article says, D's metaprogramming alone is worth the entry price of reading a few books or tutorials about th…
Comment linking /blog/advent-of-d/
on “D as a C Replacement”Submitted The Kluever Maneuver as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMercurial support, fuck yeah: https://hg.sr.ht/ This is the killer feature for me. Why Mercurial? Here’s a list of Mercurial features that I think are really cool: Revsets – a domain-specific language for querying your commits Templates – a domain-specific language for altering the output of almost every command. Putting together these two you can do things like this: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising…
Comment linking /blog/customising-mercurial-like-a-pro/
on “Sr.ht becomes Sourcehut”Submitted On gitology (2011) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Free Software, or was it just Open Source? These two are synonyms: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...
Comment linking /blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/
on “The new 501(c)(3) and the future of free software in the US”Submitted Modifying Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Yeah, I know I should switch to Git, but I really like Hg. Nothing wrong with hg. In fact, lots of good things about it: http://selenic.com/hg/help/revsets http://evolution.experimentalworks.net/doc/user-guide.html http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial-l...
Comment linking /blog/customising-mercurial-like-a-pro/
on “Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition now available”Submitted Advent of D as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSo the slides say... > Concurrency safety isn’t an accident. So far,only Rust has a good story on concurrency thanks to its type system. Is that really true? I've really enjoyed concurrency in D. http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/advent-of-d/#day18 How much better can it be? And yes, D's concurrency is also based around types.
Comment linking /blog/advent-of-d/
on “Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]”Submitted 5 Things We Have Forgotten About Open Source as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
