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Ah, the infamous public static void main(String[] args). Hopefully the next generation won’t need to learn all those concepts up front with the introduction of instance main methods in Java 25.

https://openjdk.org/jeps/512


I actually think the inscrutable Main method in java has some value. As a kid, I loved to know how things worked and always did things like read instruction manuals and read ahead in school textbooks. I wanted to know everything about anything, and I wanted to know how it worked from the bottom up.

The java main method taught me "This is abstraction, an important concept in programming. You won't always know how all the magic works all the time"

It taught that you have to deal with black boxes.

Also, I never saw it cause problems in CS101 classes, because the kids curious enough to want to know something their professor didn't explicitly talk about were usually the ones who would do fine at learning all the parts of it.

The kids who struggle with programming never seemed to have problems following "Just write your code here, you will learn more about it later"


I wish I had known about ixnay earlier! I also got annoyed of the user experience, to the point where I also wrote my own tool, hdn: https://github.com/seasonedfish/hdn

I added a mention of ixnay to its readme :)


Thanks for the mention!

I just noticed there's a bug with uninstalling. Probably a parsing issue, they must have changed the output of nix for that (this isn't the first time that happened...)


  Location: St. Louis, MO
  Remote: Yes, hybrid and in-person OK too
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Go, Linux
  Résumé/CV: [1]
  Email: f.sun@wustl.edu
  
Hello, I'm Fisher. I'm a rising senior in CS looking for a co-op/internship for the fall. My experience is in web dev (both backend and frontend), data processing with Python, command-line tools, and unit testing. I'm passionate about creating reliable, easy-to-use software.

If my experience aligns with your needs, please shoot me an email!

[1]: https://www.fishersun.com/portfolio/


    Location: St. Louis, US
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: Python, TypeScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, Go, Linux
    Résumé/CV: https://seasonedfish.github.io/resume/yu-fisher-sun-resume.pdf
    Email: f.sun@wustl.edu
Hello, I'm Fisher. I'm a third-year CS student looking for part-time freelance/contracting work. My experience is in web dev (both backend and frontend), data processing with Python, command-line tools, and unit testing. I'm passionate about creating reliable, easy-to-use software.

If my experience aligns with your needs, please shoot me an email!


So, I originally posted this last year. When I posted it, I was using tectonic as my LaTeX compiler, and since it didn't support HTML output yet, I didn't actually try the article's suggestion.

Today, when I saw that I got an invitation to repost this article from the mods, I thought I'd take the time to try it out.

The two commands that the article suggests can be combined into one:

    latexmlpost --dest=mydoc.html --format=html5 <(latexml mydoc.tex)

I did a comparison[1] of pdflatex and latexml using some old assignments, and it looks like compiling to HTML isn't fully there yet: the spacing was off in some places, and manual line breaks didn't work. But, I remain hopeful. If this gets polished, viewing LaTeX documents on phones would be much nicer.

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/yyyXWL8


There's some good news... arXiv just adopted LaTeXML for in-house HTML conversions of its papers. They allow users to submit bug reports and have collected over 700 so far.

LaTeXML is maintained by a team at NIST, and they are actively responding to the bug reports on github issues.

The LaTeX team headed by Frank Mittelbach is also working to add more structural information to the output of LaTeX, which will make compiling to HTML much easier.


What's the advantage of that subshell redirection over a simple pipe?


I don't know if there's an advantage, haha. It was just the first thing that came to mind.

Looks like a pipe is also supported; you just need to pass `-` as the name of the file to `latexmlpost`.

    latexml mydoc.tex | latexmlpost --dest=mydoc.html --format=html5 -


You can actually also use the latexmlc omni-executable [1] (that is part of the latexml distribution), which can convert to html in one command:

    latexmlc --dest=mydoc.html --format=html5 mydoc.tex

[1] https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/manual/commands/latex...


> Today, when I saw that I got an invitation to repost this article from the mods

The mods personally invited you to repost a year later?


Yes! I was surprised too. It's a cool hidden mechanic of HN, the second chance pool[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308


Interesting! Thanks for the link :)


There's a new project, Inshellisense[1], that provides fig's completion directly in the shell. Also check out zsh-autocomplete[2], and if you use iTerm2, the built-in autocomplete functionality[3].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38167363

[2]: https://github.com/marlonrichert/zsh-autocomplete

[3]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53848666/


I recognized the 'g' and 'r' from Fira Mono, but from the slashed zero and ligatures (the raised x in 0x), I think the font is Fira Code[1].

I don't think the color scheme is Solarized Dark. Looks closer to Nord[2].

[1]: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Code?preview.text=(gd...

[2]: https://github.com/nordtheme/terminal-app


    Location: Boston, US
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: Yes
    Technologies: Python, Go, Java, C++, HTML/CSS, SQL, MongoDB, Unix/Linux
    Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16f64zFLJudSvsiOKGIUtoLBHoKTvSo7x/view?usp=sharing
    Email: f.sun@wustl.edu
Hello, I'm Fisher. I'm a second year computer science student. I'm passionate about learning, and I care about writing clean, idiomatic code.

I'm proficient in data processing in research, especially with Python, Pandas, and Polars. I have also worked on several software projects, so I'm adept at writing backends, testing, and deploying to Linux servers.

Looking for an internship---if my experience aligns with your needs, please shoot me an email!


After trying out Mac OS9[1], I discovered Balloon Help, and thought it was quite a neat feature. After I looked for more information about it, I came across this well-written blog post. I especially liked reading the author's reflections about computers being more helpful when they explained why things were.

It reminds me of this other story about writing better error messages[2]; maybe helpful computers are making a comeback.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33868197

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33261125


Location: Boston, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, Java, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, C++, Linux

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vl_bAjZ6zZnUzdpf-vunasvUbMj...

Email: f.sun@wustl.edu

I'm a sophomore studying CS eager to learn and do meaningful work. Looking for a summer internship for software engineering or data science!


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