The Search Blog

I've known for months that Git worktrees are essential for running AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex in parallel. However, my early attempts to integrate them into my workflow failed multiple times. The problem wasn't Git itself-creating a worktree and a new branch via the CLI or Magit is trivial. The real obstacle lies in the .gitignore'd parts of your project. Things like .env files containing environment variables, or your Python .venv directory, don't carry over to new directories. Naively creating a Git worktree results in an incomplete environment, causing agentic tools to fail when trying to run standard development commands like linting, compiling, or testing. ...

The book is Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life's Work by Steven Pressfield. Have you ever felt stuck? Like you are at your lowest of lows, and there's simply no way out? It could be your career or life in general. You look around, and all you see is darkness. You try to make some changes, but something is always pulling you back. You feel no one can help you and you are beyond saving. You ask yourself how the fuck you got there. Your life is full of remorse and regret. You feel you are truly fucked. ...

The Current State Microsoft is seriously destroying Windows and users are leaving in droves. Every two or three days, there are articles popping up on Hacker News, screaming about how terrible Windows 11 is as an operating system. It's almost always the case that the authors have already made up their mind to migrate to Linux and swear to never come back. In the discussion, people would cheer them on, confirming their similar experience and applauding the decision to move away from this horrible, horrible product. Here are some of the recent examples: ...

First import the photo: File -> Open. Select "Fuzzy Select Tool": Shift + u. On the left, select "Antialiasing", "Feather edges" and "Draw mask". Click on the background of the photo. Hold the click and drag downward to increase the threshold and upward to decrease the threshold, so that you can select more or less. Once you are good with the selection, let go of the selection by clicking on DEL on your keyboard. Repeat this process a few times until it's satisfactory.

Amazon link. This book introduces the nondual way of meditation, which is quite different from the popular mindfulness meditation method. With mindfulness meditation, it takes years of daily practices to be awakening. The promise of effortless meditation is that through some powerful glimpses, the practitioner can experience awake awareness right away. These practices are usually quite short (most are just several minutes) but the effects are often immediate. There are over 40 glimpses in this whole book, some are quite similar to others. One problem that I experienced while going through these glimpses is that many of them are question-based. Rather than guiding the practitioner with concrete instructions, the author tends to ask a lot of questions in these glimpses. And often the answers are not obvious, especially as a new practitioner. As a result, by the end of a glimpse, I'm not sure if I "got it". Another problem is that the author likes to use a lot of adjectives to describe awareness, which sometimes can be annoying. I've never seen this style of teaching instructions in other kinds of meditations. Loch Kelly's teaching style was also complained about by other practitioners such as those on the Waking Up app. Indeed, if you are totally new to effortless meditation and listen to his meditation lessons directly, you may not understand what he's talking about. It gets better after reading his book. ...

Do not build anything without validation. And do not do any validation before reading this book. This is an extremely important book for aspiring founders. Rob Fitzpatrick shows every ins and outs of the process of validation in this little book. Some aspects of the validation process are quite counter-intuitive. For example, you may hear the potential customer you are interviewing saying something like "I'll sure buy your product once it's ready" and gleefully consider this as a very positive signal, while in reality, this does not mean anything. There are a lot of examples where a founder got this kind of "positive signals" and then spent six months confidently building, only to find that even the original "promised" potential customer wouldn't pay. ...

In dynamic web applications (like those using HTMX, Hotwire, Turbo or React), there is this classic "stale reference" issue. As a quick example, consider the following javascript code that finds an element after receiving an event, and then deletes that element after 5 seconds. document.addEventListener("elementSwapped", () => { const timestampElements = document.querySelectorAll('[id^="el-last-saved-"]'); timestampElements.forEach(timestampElement => { if (!timestampElement.dataset.clearPending) { timestampElement.dataset.clearPending = 'true'; setTimeout(() => { timestampElement.remove(); }, 5000); }; }); }); While the logic is sound, the element reference timestampElement captured in setTimeout is likely becoming outdated before the 5 seconds are up. ...

Deliberate mindfulness has two main styles of practice: shamatha, translated as "calm abiding" and vipassana, translated as "insight meditation". It is now accepted in the field of mindfulness research to refer to calm abiding as focused attention (FA) and the insight meditation practice as open monitoring (OM). Recently, a third type of mindfulness, nondual awareness (NDA), has been included in mindfulness research studies. Here are three descriptions that might be helpful to understand the difference in these three stages of mindfulness. Focused attention (FA) is like looking down from a tower to the river of your breath. Open monitoring (OM) is like looking from an open sky to thoughts, feelings, and sensations as separate objects, like clouds and birds, coming and going. Nondual awareness (NDA) is like being the entire ocean of awareness that is also arising as the unique wave of your body while feeling an interconnected flow with everything. ...

You should know your layer well, but you should also know one layer below it a little bit, and you definitely need to know the shape of the layer that’s beneath that. – Godbolt’s rule by Corecursive Edit: Later on I realized it's the same Goldbolt who created a compiler explorer. Full stack web developers are sitting upon layers of abstractions and can often get lost due to the lack of understanding of the layers below. Understanding these "layers below" is what separates a developer who uses a framework from a developer who understands how web applications work. ...

Two articles about software design pop up on HN: Do the simplest thing that could possibly work Cognitive load is what matters Design is about dealing with complexity. You start with a problem and then you want to solve the problem. There can be numerous ways but often the best way is the simplest way. Now in a craft like software design, it's usually not that easy to be simple and often it requires years of experience for one to reach that point. But sticking to the fundamentals and avoiding shiny techniques can go a long way: ...