Viewpoints are my own and not the viewpoints of my employer.
noah@packetlost.dev
- packetlost parentDRM sucks, but the time to thrash against it is has passed. It's here, it's not going away, and users expect to be able to use their browsers to watch protected content.
- It's a major sticking point for most people though and a very large blocker for wider Linux desktop adoption.
- Yeah, the lack of sum types of any kind in Go is the only thing that I really miss when coming back from Rust. It's, I think, a big part of the reason that Gleam has seen a lot of growth. It has many of the syntactic benefits of Go with the compiler guarantees of Rust (though it's weird in some other ways, like dramatically favoring continuation-passing-style in programmer facing syntax).
- I'm always happy when I see Touhou mentioned on HN. It's reasonably popular with a certain subset of hacker types that grew up in in the 2000s
- I imagine the margin necessary scales with the size of the project.
- In areas with low CoL the cost of building houses and the cost of selling a house has a massive impact on the number and type of homes that get built. If it's not profitable for a builder to build a home they simply won't, whether it's because of bureaucratic red tap or economic conditions. There's very strong incentives for builders to take the path of least resistance and highest margin.
- It's in golang.org/x/net, but yeah. I don't know if it's complete though.
- > Only problem I find with self-hosted blogs and certain personalities like mine is that I spend more time tinkering with the blog engine than actually blogging.
I don't see the problem with that ;)
- I really wish we would shift back towards quality and reliability being major selling points in software. There's only a handful of projects I'm aware of that emphasize it and they're both pleasures to use: Obidian (note app) and Linear (ticket tracking)
- Our ops guy has thrown together several buggy dashboards using AI tools. They're passable but impossible to maintain.
- > But you still believe that quantum computers have a likelihood of being possible to build AND that they can accomplish a task faster than classical?
Not GP but yes. I'm reasonably confident that we will have quantum computers that are large and stable enough to have a real quantum advantage, but that's mostly because I believe Moore's law is truly dead and we will see a plateau in 'classical' CPU advancement and memory densities.
> I feel like it’s going to get exponentially harder and expensive to get very small incremental gains and that actually beating a classical computer isn’t necessarily feasible (because of all the error correction involved and difficulty in manufacturing a computer with large number of qbits)
I don't think people appreciate or realize that a good chunk of the innovations necessary to "get there" with quantum are traditional (albeit specialized) engineering problems, not new research (but breakthroughs can speed it up). I'm a much bigger fan of the "poking lasers at atoms" style of quantum computer than the superconducting ones for this reason, the engineering is more like building cleaner lasers and better AOMs [0] than trying to figure out how to super cool vats of silicon and copper. It's outside my area of expertise, but I would expect innovations to support better lithography to also benefit these types of systems, though less directly than superconducting.
Source: I worked on hard-realtime control systems for quantum computers in the past. Left because the academic culture can be quite toxic.
- Combining something like FOKS (https://foks.pub) to a messaging system would be pretty neat
- I'm pro secure boot fwiw and have had it working on my of my Linux systems for awhile.
- Kernel level anti-cheat with trusted execution / signed kernels is probably a reasonable new frontier for online games, but it requires a certain level of adoption from game makers.
- I haven't done much with CL so I can only speculate, but I think stricter FP principles in general work to minimize the downsides of dynamic typing. CL, to my understanding, isn't the most "pure" when it comes to FP, but does a good job at giving the programmer a lot of power to constrain and explore systems.
- As someone who up until recently would have agreed with you, both of these are fundamentally familiarity issues. Nix's error messages really aren't that bad, but chances are there's exactly one line out of 200 that tells you what's wrong. Learning to read stack traces for a new language is part of learning that language.
I've not had issues with Nix APIs, at least not Nixpkgs or the language builtins. When something does break for me, it's usually some random JavaScript package that had some external dependency change. Nixpkgs is pretty well organized and I find navigating it not that hard once you read the packaging guidelines. find / fzf / ripgep / etc. are all great at this, as file and folder names are critical to the organization of nixpkgs.
The big turning point for me was trying to build and package a non-trivial application and build a NixOS module for it.
- I think it's possible to write correct systems with dynamic languages, just not the ones we commonly use like Python and JavaScript. I find Clojure, for example to be one example of a dynamic language that is pretty easy to manage and I attribute that to the immutable nature and data-centric ethos. I'm sure there are other dynamic languages that would work as well.
Now, I wouldn't necessarily use Clojure on a huge multi-organization codebase (maybe it's fine, this is outside of my experience with it), but it can be the right tool for some jobs.
- fsync on most OSes lie to some degree
- You probably overestimate the market for something like that. Most people don't know or care. Those that do are more likely to hang out on HN or adjacent places and know how to deal with it themselves anyways.
- I have absolutely nothing good to say about Pulumi. Stay far, far away.
- I have both a Kindle Colorsoft (1st gen) and whatever the latest gen Paperwhite is and there's a noticeable contrast difference, but not nearly as bad as shown in that image. I find lack of sharpness to be more of a problem for very small fonts than the contrast.
I actively use both. I toyed with getting a Scribe because I read a lot of full size PDFs which aren't a great experience with such low refresh rates and small screens, but opted for an iPad instead. I owned a ReMarkable 2 a few years ago and don't really have anything good to say about it.
- But... you don't have to use the new tools? The tools that ship with POSIX haven't meaningfully changed since like 2001 and work just fine today.
- Yeah, I see it as a necessary evil. It costs real money to operate the infrastructure that it runs on. I'm hoping now that the hype has died down a lot the swindlers will move on and real use cases will start showing up.
- Smart contracts are actually pretty cool, but the entire ecosystem is made dramatically worse by the tokens having speculative value. It’s necessary for the economics to work out, but it dampens the coolness of the technical aspects because it attracts sleazeballs and enables fraud/crime.
- Most of those projects are pretty locked down/closed, I just mean I can actually see the project to a reasonable degree.
- Yes, but the programming languages is much more well known.
Regardless, cool! This is the first project I'm aware of to have been written in Ada
- Not that Scala.
- I pretty much always store date/times as Unix epoch integers. Also use STRICT tables and set the PRAGMA to enforce foreign key constraints.
- I've certainly had some unusual contents in the past where we had approximately 10,000 configurable properties on the system, but we didn't use SQLite for that. Regardless, you ignored 3 of the 4 (I'll ignore the last one, it applies to JSON too) other points I made. My use cases aren't that weird and I'm not saying reach for SQLite every time, it's one option out of many. Migrations and runtime configuration change alone justify it for me in many cases.
- There's a laundry list of benefits that all add up, not like one specific killer feature. Some applications really do have very complex configuration needs, but it's sorta situation dependent on whether embedding a scripting language or a database is the right solution (for really simple cases I'm more likely to reach for TOML).
An incomplete list of benefits of using SQLite:
- Runtime config changes for free
- type safety
- strong migration support
- incorrect configurations can be unrepresentable (or at least enforced with check constraints)
- interactable from text-based interfaces and strong off-the-shelf GUI support