dancek

I strongly disagree about "lower-quality people". Yes, some people post low quality content, say horrible things and behave antisocially. Yes, in a community you want to restrict destructive behavior (by excluding people if need be).

But deep inside we all are, at times, selfish and evil, and at times, beautiful and wise. You can learn something from everyone. But you need to meet people at their terms. For some, it's over an esoteric internet protocol that you need to be a geek to use. And for some, it's over a glass of cheap lager in the backyard of an auto repair shop.

We can belong to many communities, and indeed we have many different facets or identities. That's what it's like to be human. Attending a chess club doesn't mean you cannot also hang out with tennis players.

So yes, the small internet movement seems to be about esoteric technologies and only people interested in them will join. But I don't see that as exclusionary on a personal level. It's just a weird hobby.

> And they are, and they might help you, but trying to ask scientific or metaphysical quæstions about it, is an exercise in futility.

What non-futile metaphysical questions are left, then? Is metaphysics completely futile? If so, is philosophy of science itself pseudoscience?

As far as I understand, most logical positivists would indeed reject philosophy of science. On the other hand, philosophy of science mostly put an end to logical positivism — and showed that we do need metaphysics after all. This paradigm shift also brought useful concepts such as falsifiability.

Of course, we are all free to choose whatever philosophy we want. I just personally find logical positivism and its rejection of metaphysics unconvincing.

More info: https://hackaday.com/2020/12/10/a-xilinx-zynq-linux-fpga-boa...

Exciting times!

While it's not about FPGAs, I got started by working through https://www.nand2tetris.org/ . After that I bought an UPduino v2 and started hacking. Of course working on a fantasy CPU and a real FPGA are completely different, but the mindset of how hardware works vs. how software works is very valuable.

Side note: Angular tends to create new commits (keeping the author, changing the committer) instead of directly merging the PRs. The real acceptance rate seems to be high.

Yes. Swedish is also easy compared to English and French, the other two languages I've learned after early childhood. The only thing that makes it hard is that you never really have use for it and you're forced to learn it nevertheless here in Finland.

I'm happy to see people here on HN respect the difficulty of learning languages. Most foreigners that speak Finnish do it very poorly at first and even after decades they still sound like foreigners. But it shows huge respect to our small country for someone to make the effort, and we really appreciate it. I'm hoping other people see learning their own mother tongue the same way. Sure, most of us need English, but learning it well is still a huge task.

Cotton underwear doesn't work that well if your activity varies. Wear enough cotton to be warm while sitting for hours, and you're certain to be sweaty after five minutes of physical activity. And moist cotton underwear makes you cold.

I tend to wear wool long johns from December to March. Decades of experience with cotton, too. Wool is much, much better.

Our tastes are so different. I'd much rather watch a great video from 2005 than a good one from 2020. I'm irritated by the recommendation algorithms pushing new content. Why would I care whether the video was published last night or last year?

Is this similar to git add -e? I have a hard time keeping diffs valid when editing.

I use git-revise a lot but it doesn't cover all my use cases. Maybe this will be useful.

I like your approach. As a maintainer of small projects with very few users I'm not offended by business-like bug reports. But it's very nice to hear someone is actually grateful for my software. (You only need one arrogant asshole demanding support to feel like your software is shit and maintenance is a burden.) Of course you only need to make a good first impression once.

This approach will also help if another part of your message comes off as arrogant. That can happen when English is not your native language.

Depression does not make a person completely incapable in every way, at least not usually.

This comment comes off as belittling someone else's depression, and I'm afraid it might be very hurtful to the author.

A great example of the HN use of the word "just".

I'm sorry if I've misunderstood the term. I mean absolutely no offense. I understand freemium as proprietary service with both free and paid tiers.

I expected "free" to mean free software. It means freemium here.

EDIT: NOTE: I mean nothing negative by freemium: I just mean there are both free and paid tiers. Not sure what the definition of freemium is.

You have a very good point.

However, Gemini does not exist in a vacuum. The web will be there. There will be social media platforms, multimedia, awesome webapps and all that. And Gemini is just text.

When you have the choice between easily consumable infinite multimedia and just text, you only pick the latter when you really care about the quality of text content. It's not sexy so all the spammers, content marketers and ego boosters have nothing to gain on Gemini. And so there can be this esoteric little corner of the internet, with down-to-earth text content written by ordinary people.

That's true, but I don't think it's a huge problem. Listening to an audiobook typically takes at least five hours. Usually you can tell whether you're happy with the narration within a couple of minutes.

While you say "a dump of audiobooks", it is certainly not that for the readers who put in a considerable amount of work for each and every title. And it is certainly not that for the listeners who can listen to books not otherwise available.

I don't think reading or listening to books at random (or based on average community score) makes sense. If you pick books based on trustworthy recommendations, most problems go away. Then just see where that book is available; if it is on Librivox and it's good enough, great. If not, get a commercial edition or a hard copy.

I've only listened to a single audiobook from Librivox. It was a book that has no commercial counterpart. The quality was mediocre but I was really happy to be able to listen to that specific book. On the other hand, I had to stop listening to another commercially produced book (that I also wanted to listen to) because I couldn't stand the narrator, so I do see your point of view.

This is an amazing keyboard, and the best thing: it's really easy to modify to suit your needs. I got to try a friend's Dactyl so I had a general idea of what doesn't feel ergonomic to me about it. Then I took some measurements of my fingers, moved the columns around accordingly, somewhat flattened the whole structure and printed it. And got the most ergonomic keyboard I could imagine. (Gee, I really should solder the other side one so I could use it... :s)

Of course this is a lot of work and not for most people. But the point is that 3D modeling anything from scratch is near impossible for a first timer, yet the dactyl family is easy to modify for anyone who can code.

I find https://rscss.io/ to be a really nice design philosophy that takes the best parts from BEM.

And agreed: it's easiest to just work directly with flexbox (and grid if you can drop IE11), and a set of design principles is really valuable to avoid spaghetti.

We've had a great experience building a mid-size app with re-frame. Sure, writing subscription and event handlers and wiring it all together seems like a lot of boilerplate when you could just fetch().then(), but in the long run the architecture really pays off.

It's not perfect, I do lament the boilerplateyness myself, but I have not seen anything better in my decade of web dev.

Thanks for linking, I'll check it out! I'm occasionally running Beaker Browser to publish my https-first website also over dat, but I'd gladly switch to a better dat-capable browser.

That's weird. I find people with kids care more about personal and professional development, and are more diligent in their work.

This might have to do with the environment I'm in (7,5 hour days with almost no overtime; recruiting motivated people).

I also personally feel I've become more responsible in all areas of my life after having kids.

Edit: I'm mid thirties too. I find the least responsible people to be those in their 50s with no kids. But I've only met a few who remained developers; most either have kids or switched to management.

You can reverse engineer native binaries, too. Many companies are happily publishing web apps where the actual source is available, in minified form. Why does your source code need to be so secure?

For those unaware of the context, StackExchange fired a (volunteer) moderator in September causing a wave of moderator resignations. Now in January they fired two Community Managers (ie. employees) and a third CM resigned.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...

I didn't mean to imply how you think or feel. Sorry if my comment came off that way.

Maintainer burnout is a real problem and I personally would run a real risk if I ever released something worthwhile.

I agree that the idea is raw and difficult to implement, but we should think about these things as a community (ie. I don't have the energy to do anything about it, but I'm hoping someone would).

ITerm allows you to map the left and right option keys separately. Maybe that helps?

This is a great article. I respect every FOSS maintainer for what they're doing and am saddened by the bs I often see them deal with. The article is balanced in describing different reasons for coming off rude--as a non-native speaker of English I've been rude without meaning to, for example. But even if the intentions weren't bad per se, these interactions are an unnecessary burden to the maintainer.

So to reiterate: any bug report or pull request that isn't good will waste the maintainer's time and effort. I wonder if the community could address that. I mean, most anyone could screen issues for tone and the effort taken. We could have a group of volunteers that tag issues worthy of the maintainer's time and explain to reporters how they should improve. That would be a valuable contribution to FOSS.

Setting up the system to do this is not trivial, however. Ideally I'd love to just tag my repos for issue review. I'd wish for the reviewers to be trustworthy. And as a volunteer reviewer I'd want a queue of issues to review, and I'd require some compensation (e.g. a profile page showing how helpful I've been).

I guess the feasibility of this idea comes down to the availability of volunteers. What do you people think?

PS. Burntsushi, if you're reading this, huge thanks for your great software. You're one of the people whose contributions I appreciate the most in FOSS.

No need to. The Option key is configurable in terminal software.

MacOS Terminal and iTerm users need to configure their terminal to use the Option key properly. You need Option-Enter to output either Esc+Enter or Meta-Enter.

See https://superuser.com/a/496152 for screenshots.

Isn't USB-C designed to wear out the cable (or dongle) and not the port?

So if you used a Yubikey to log in and out ten times a day, you might need to replace it every three years. Of course you'll make the same amount of connections if you require it only for login, assuming you don't leave it connected.