site VS Home Manager using Nix

My blog https://xeiaso.net (source code: https://github.com/Xe/site) and the stuff I've written for it ended up doing several things to help me get employed over the years:

1. Letting me have a place to write to get better at writing, which makes it easier to do my in DevRel.

2. Lets me talk about all of the interesting projects I work on (eg: an AI novel writing experiment https://xeiaso.net/videos/2023/ai-hackathon/) that people regularly find interesting. This gets people interested in wanting to employ me, which ends up working up well for me in the long run.

Do side projects, but write about what you did and what you learned.

As someone who is regularly falling victim to the rightward lurch (for having committed the dastardly crime of the wrong hormone activating in-utero), the only reason I don't actively block Hacker News readers is that I make ad money off of them. That is the only reason it's worth the abuse vector to me.

dang, if you are reading this, please take a moment to seriously consider the actions you have taken today. I understand your desire for the community that Hacker News could be, but that is so far away from what it is today that it's almost laughable. Yes, this is a no-win situation but that's bascially how it is globally when trying to be centerist about any issue. I use Hacker News referers to change the page slightly (mostly to add a deserved "hey, can you please not be an asshole, thanks" via this code: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/686cc58fb6fc8f2e3bf0197e9b38...) and I would be very frustrated if that went away. Maybe even to the point of having a worker process figure out if my articles are posted to hacker news and making them go dark if they are on the front page. I know you value the articles I post (as our email threads have contained), but really it's an abuse vector that I need to keep metrics of.

Website administrators should be allowed to block Hacker News referers. Yes this is a thing that is not desirable for you as an administrator, but at some level something's got to give. The enshittening of Hacker News is something that is very undesirable for me too. I've gone over this in our emails. This was going to be another one of those emails, but I really would prefer this one to be out in the open.

My read time estimate code is here: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/aa3608afa6c62695ca0ab139f823...

I've been trying to play with the constants over the years to make the read time estimate more "accurate", but it's a tough nut to crack in general. So I can go over my numbers more accurately, how long did it take you to read it?

I originally started putting ads on my blog after people started being an asshole about my articles on Hacker News, originally scoped to only readers from Hacker News. That combined with Patreon pays for all my hosting costs (even the CDN on fly.io and my random AWS infrastructure) and all the video games I play (about $280 US per month of income). It's gotten to the point where it's a tax burden, but I think it's worth it. I've never had a side project make an actual profit before and I'm excited to keep writing as a way to hone my skills and get experience with even more fun technology.

My recent post on embedding Rust into Go programs with WebAssembly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713717) made me about $20 of ad impressions on the day of its release, pretty impressive given how many of you people must run ad blockers!

It'd be cool to make my blog generate more income and eventually take over as my full time job, but I'm pretty happy with the fact that it's a side project that I can peck at when I want to. A lot of energy that would be spent doing various random Discord/IRC bots that go nowhere ends up being thrust into the blog instead. I also love being able to integrate various cursed things (like a Dhall script that takes my salary history data to spit out LaTeX for my resume: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/dhall/latex/resume.dhal...) and then write up how I did it and why. It makes coming up with ideas for the blog a lot easier!

I have plans to make a "Why I think WASI is cool" style post with interactive terminals that run WebAssembly programs in the browser, but I'm still trying to figure out how to graft xterm.js into my custom build setup with Deno. I have an untested but should theoretically work implementation here though in case anyone has any tips: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/src/frontend/wasiterm.t...

Filing my taxes is a huge pain now lol.

Hi! I was going to ask about your site template but I see you already answered my questions :D

Patches are welcome: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/templates/salary_transp...

I've found it worth doing. My blog (xeiaso.net, formerly christine.website) is the main way that I get employed at this point. It also helps that people link it here a lot. After 100 articles or so writing got a lot easier and now people rely on my blog for a lot of things. I think it's worth it, but I've also been exclusively self-hosting it. I currently have the code (and writing) open source on GitHub (https://github.com/Xe/site) but I'm considering moving the writing to either a private repo or a SQLite database because people keep copying it, slathering it in ads and rehosting it.

Oh dear. I pushed an addendum to the article: https://github.com/Xe/site/commit/05135edcbe5e474131c15c2476...

Thanks for pointing that out!

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ home-manager --version 23.05 $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-23.11.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update $ nix-shell '' -A install [...] All done! The home-manager tool should now be installed and you can edit /home/MY-USERNAME/.config/home-manager/home.nix to configure Home Manager. Run 'man home-configuration.nix' to see all available options. $ home-manager --version 23.05

Unfortunately until we find more volunteers in this area, it is hard to see status quo changing. See also https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/607 and this ongoing project https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs

It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally.

Per the Nix manual[0]:

> Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version.

e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]:

  nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager nix-channel --update nix-shell '' -A install

I'm using flakes and home manager and not really sure how to go about managing my neovim configuration. I've read through some other posts, github issues, and various articles trying to suss out a good way to do this. Reading through other people's configs and posts was somewhat helpful but there is a lot going on I don't understand and everyone's examples I've seen vary wildly.

Said store path contains the home-manager repo. After the home-manager run, the store path is recreated.

I can't answer all your questions, but home-manager does have a dconf module that would probably be better to use than that external tool. Everything inside the options block are the things you can pass to the dconf module.