travislane

> In the 90s, before the web really took off, stuff like this was hen's teeth. Anything you found, via BBS, Usenet, or the nascent web, you'd pore over in detail and make sure to fastidiously back up in case you never found it again.

To be honest, backing up stuff makes sense even today. Websites do disappear. You never know when your favorite blog may disappear. There is the internet archive machine that fights link rot quite well. But it wouldn't hurt to take back ups of your favorite online articles.

Two questions:

With the advent of capable editors like Visual Studio Code, is Vim still a relevant skill to have?

Is SLIME still the state of the art for Lisp development environment? Is there no way to get started with Lisp programming without having to learn Emacs or Vim?

You make a very good point. I think the biggest factors that can determine happiness at work are the immediate boss and the immediate teammates, two things that are very hard to assess until you have already joined the new place. But the money is easy to assess and guaranteed because it is written on paper and it is legally binding. A boss with a good attitude, however, isn't guaranteed, no matter how rosy things look during the interviews. So it makes sense to never take a pay cut unless there are other compensating factors that are also guaranteed. Working 4 days instead of 5, or 6 instead of 8, seem like those things that can be guaranteed by the contract and would be worth taking a pay cut for.

This reminds me of a personal story when I interviewed for a very popular startup in the valley. They boasted of working 12 hours every day. I had a competing offer from a non-startup which required me to work about 7 hours every day. The CTO of the startup agreed to pay me 20% more than the non-startup. I politely explained the CTO that I could work for 12 hours every day, however, I would need a 70% more pay than the non-startup's offer, so that I feel I am being compensated commensurate to the time and effort I spend on the company. The CTO, now visibly upset, said, "If you like working 7 hours every day, please do join that other company!" while completing missing the point that I am okay to work for 7 hours or 12 hours as long as the pay is commensurate. Needless to say, I joined the other company for lesser pay and lesser working hours, and I am quite happy about the decision because it leaves with me a lot of time in the evenings to pursue my hobbies and also pick up new fun technologies to learn.

Awesome. Thank you for the suggestion. I will take a look at it.

Thanks for the reply. I have tried Hugo earlier but found it confusing due to so many locations for template files (_default/? baseof.html? single.html? list.html? hard to remember all this stuff). What would be a good alternative tool where I can just place a few template files in a single location and it would be sufficient?

I have also looked at Jekyll but it is Ruby-based. I know Python. If the tool is Python-based then it would help me because it would allow me to customize its functionality or make it do some niche things that the tool does not support by writing some Python code. I have looked at Pelican too but customizing it seemed daunting to a beginner like me.

So I guess I am looking for a something simple, written in Python and easily customizable. Any suggestions?

I was also made to log in via a recaptcha today. The recaptcha widget appears just below the HN login form so pretty sure this is added by HN, not Cloudflare.

If people are complaining about it on this thread, I would also like to register my complaint with it. I think Recaptcha has two major problems:

- It's Google. I would want it to be technically impossible for someone in Google to link my HN profile with my Google profile.

- The Recaptcha widget is plain abusive to Firefox users. If I log in with Chrome, I can get past the Recaptcha hurdle in just one attempt. But if I am Firefox user, I am forced to submit like 5 Recaptchas, then be greeted with a "Please try again" message, then submit like 5 more, and only then be allowed to log in. No I don't want to do this amount of work for Google for free. I urge everyone to please stop supporting Recaptcha.

Nice first post for a new blog. I like the blog theme as well.

How can I create my own blog with such a clean and minimal theme?

What is the motivation behind writing tools like these in JavaScript? Not everyone is going to have Node or NPM. I don't want to first install NPM to install a utility.

But Perl/Python/Ruby are very likely to be present on more number of systems (Windows being an exception). Why aren't more of these utility tools written in Perl/Python/Ruby?