Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Joey Hess' minimal approach

joey.hess.usesthis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 122 posts

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#51

Post by elliott99 »

waferbaby wrote: post #44
fafner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea of usesthis. But I'm a bit disappointed that most setups are boring and not really individualized. This makes a lot of the interviews uninteresting if you don't know (care for) the developer. "Spoiler:" 2/3 seem to be using a Mac Book and a fairly common configuration. Please don't misunderstand me. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that configuration. But it's not very interesting to read about.…

Yeah, I'm always trying to get interesting people, but I never know ahead of time what they use. Feel free to suggest more, though!

Actually, while I still very much like the idea of the site, I think I spoke too soon...it's very much focused on the hardware and software used, whereas I thought it was interviews with people in general from all walks of creative/hacker/writing/painting life about their workflow and how they get stuff done. More of these types of interviews would interest me.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#52

Post by pyre »

agumonkey wrote: post #38
kami8845 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Says the guy doing all his work on a 1024 x 600 display. I mean the guy no harm, but so much of what he says strikes me as incredibly back-worldly. Like using dial-up and limiting yourself to fan-less laptops. I mean I get the "thin terminal" philosophy where you have a shit laptop that connects to something much more potent. But where's the point if the connection sucks as well. I guess in the end we have vast…

Haskellers don't need a lot of screen space ;) He might suffer the first installation of ghc/platform though.

He's a hardcore Debian guy. I'm sure that if he needs a custom build he probably farms out the compilation to one of his remote servers, and just downloads the resultant .deb file.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#53

Post by mercurial »

hollerith wrote: post #42
mercurial wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably makes it less tempting to procrastinate on Hacker News. Upgrading Debian Unstable must be fun though. Ugh.

Actually, it wasn't so bad in 2006 when I was running Debian. I ran apt-get update && apt-get upgrade at 3 am via cron.

Yeah, the trick must be to run it regularly. Skip the upgrade and you're in for 900MB of upgrades (though deb-delta can help a lot).

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#54

Post by hollerith »

mercurial wrote: post #53
hollerith wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it wasn't so bad in 2006 when I was running Debian. I ran apt-get update && apt-get upgrade at 3 am via cron.

Yeah, the trick must be to run it regularly. Skip the upgrade and you're in for 900MB of upgrades (though deb-delta can help a lot).

Actually, I was subscribed to the security repository, meaning I only got security updates, and over the year and a half I did this, there were probably no more than 10 megs of updates total IIRC.

You're probably (and the OP, Joey Hess is definitely) talking about Debian unstable, though, which does not have a security repo. (I was on testing IIRC.)

It was not hard to upgrade to a new version of Debian, either, because the tool I was using to download the necessary files, apt-get, would reliably restart the download where it left off, so I downloaded the files over about 7 consecutive nights.

It was pretty sweet, actually. In contrast, I wouldn't have a clue how to keep OS X updated with security patches using a dial-up connection.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#55

Post by pwang »

npsimons wrote: post #35
kami8845 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Says the guy doing all his work on a 1024 x 600 display. I mean the guy no harm, but so much of what he says strikes me as incredibly back-worldly. Like using dial-up and limiting yourself to fan-less laptops. I mean I get the "thin terminal" philosophy where you have a shit laptop that connects to something much more potent. But where's the point if the connection sucks as well. I guess in the end we have vast…

I hate to pull this card on you, but what have you done? We're talking about a Debian developer who has also developed (and continues to develop) basically an open-source replacement for Dropbox ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistan... ), by himself on an incredible budget. He actually Gets Shit Done, and does it relatively efficiently. I would not be surprised at all if a factor towards bein…

> And when you are a creator rather than a consumer (especially of the written word, be it code, essays or books), screen size rarely matters.

I don't necessarily agree with the parent post's sentiments, but I also disagree with this very broad blanket statement of yours. I am reasonably happy most of the time on my Macbook Air screen, but I definitely prefer to be coding on a larger screen when I can. I knew Joey back in college and he is a sharp guy with a LOT of working memory. My memory has gotten worse over time, and I tend to work with heterogenous codebases, so I can't fit everything in my head and need the screen real estate.

I know many excellent, productive devs who love having large screens to code on.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#56

Post by agumonkey »

pyre wrote: post #52
agumonkey wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskellers don't need a lot of screen space ;) He might suffer the first installation of ghc/platform though.

He's a hardcore Debian guy. I'm sure that if he needs a custom build he probably farms out the compilation to one of his remote servers, and just downloads the resultant .deb file.

Not sure I understand, ghc/platform is hundreds of MB iirc, remotely built or not. Or maybe you meant a tailored ghc distro without all the statically compiled libs and such ?

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#57

Post by chrisbolt »

hollerith wrote: post #54
mercurial wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the trick must be to run it regularly. Skip the upgrade and you're in for 900MB of upgrades (though deb-delta can help a lot).

Actually, I was subscribed to the security repository, meaning I only got security updates, and over the year and a half I did this, there were probably no more than 10 megs of updates total IIRC. You're probably (and the OP, Joey Hess is definitely) talking about Debian unstable, though, which does not have a security repo. (I was on testing IIRC.) It was not hard to upgrade to a new version of Debian, either, becau…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Software_Update#Command_l...

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#58

Post by cweiss »

agumonkey wrote: post #39

Let's make a petition for someone to produce this e-ink open arm laptop. I'd buy one immediately.

My understanding is that the big issue is that e-Ink displays have a miserably slow pixel update time. The new Kindle Paperwhite is on the order of 450ms whereas the average LCD display is in the single digit ms range. Great for static text, but horrid for anything real-time.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#60

Post by pattern »

lanna wrote: post #22
anonymouz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For writing or coding, a decent keyboard seems much more important than a high resolution screen. For consuming stuff the converse is true. (Even though I also prefer a high res display, and he mentions that it took him some time to set up Xmonad in a way that allowed him to effectively work with such a low-res display).

Except the Dell Mini 9 doesn't have anything nowhere close to a decent keyboard.

You begin your sentence with "Except" -- however you and the parent are saying the same thing :)
Post reply on HN