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Theresa O'Connor
Personal blog · tess.oconnor.cxprogrammingwebphilosophy
Theresa O'Connor writes Theresa O’Connor, a personal blog at tess.oconnor.cx about programming, web and philosophy. Since 2017, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Building a Habitable Computing Environment”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Theresa O'Connor's older posts on Emacs, including json.el, composing HTML email in Emacs, and a 2005 Richard Stallman anecdote. Comments cite them as sources or examples, with no direct praise.
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.
I’m a queer lady and mom in San Francisco.
Most-linked posts?
- Building a Habitable Computing Environment2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-03-20
- Shadow DOM is for hiding your shame2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-11-27
What Hacker News says?
I'm reminded of this mid-2000s example of toxic behavior from Richard Stallman on Emacs, in response to a contributor who didn't have time to work on something because he just had a baby girl: https://tess.oconnor.cx/2005/04/rms > It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce—even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of. > It…
Comment linking /2005/04/rms
on “Rust Moderation Team Resigns”Submitted Building a Habitable Computing Environment as a story · 22 points
HN discussionWhy do people think that Emacs is impossible for non-programmers to use? "He wrote a version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a ma…
Comment linking /2006/03/quality-without-a-name
on “Emacs org-mode examples and cookbook”Submitted Shadow DOM is for hiding your shame as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf anyone has set something like this up with emacs, would love to hear about it. I'm currently using org-mime, but would prefer to use markdown Edit: 30 seconds of searching led me to here: http://tess.oconnor.cx/2008/01/html-email-composition-in-ema...
Comment linking /2008/01/html-email-composition-in-emacs
on “Markdown Here – Write email in Markdown”Submitted Proposal to replace “first/third party” terms in Web standards as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBuilding a Habitable Computing Environment[1] was a recent blush i had with a "literate" computing project, this time less about programming specifically & about system setup/config. I confess I'd rather forgotten what literate specifically meant beyond code comments describing the flow, but i did find it to be a remarkably comprehensive & understandable document, a prime example of how we might teach & understand c…
Comment linking /config/hobercfg.html
on “Literate programming is much more than just commenting code”Submitted Shadow DOM is for hiding your shame as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'll see your snark and raise you two, throwing Emacs in for good measure. ;) Have you heard of org-export-json? [1] Have you heard of json.el? [2] [1] https://github.com/mattduck/org-toggl-py/blob/master/org-exp... [2] http://tess.oconnor.cx/2006/03/json.el
Comment linking /2006/03/json.el
on “Comma-Separated Tree”Submitted On hypocrisy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWell, being an Operating System, there have been many things programmed "in Emacs": * email, slack and reddit clients * web wowser * tetris * Amazon's customer service handling https://tess.oconnor.cx/2006/03/quality-without-a-name (not sure what that says about Emacs Lisp. Or Amazon.) * PIM / OCD management software * video editing https://www.nongnu.org/gneve/ * mind control https://github.com/jonnay/mindwave-emac…
Comment linking /2006/03/quality-without-a-name
on “Eoops: An object-oriented programming system for Emacs-Lisp”Submitted The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Richard Stallman as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
