3,319 karma · joined March 27, 2012
That being said, I do agree that windows is user hostile and i won't run it myself.
For indie game devs you're competing against engine ecosystems like Unity, Unreal, Godot. If someone is inclined for more of a DIY route, you're competing against Lua (love2D), C# (monogame), Javascript (...), or for the people who care about performance, C++, Rust, Odin, Zig, and soon even Jai. It's a very crowded competition space and again, I think overwhelmingly the people in this space aren't dreaming of programming in a functional style.
I just tested CLion, VS Code, and Sublime Text. I thought all three behaved as described, but only CLion did. I wish it was more common though, I find it a lot more intuitive and clear on what's happening.
* When you press undo, and the content to be undone isn't on the screen, it will jump your screen to the relevant section (good) but also with that same keypress actually undo the content (bad). Other editors, if the content is not on the screen, will not perform the undo action unless the content is actually visible. When I press undo in Helix, I'm always taking a moment to figure out what has actually changed because of this.
* This is a conscious decision by the Helix creator, so it's unlikely to change, but undo is not granular enough. It's chunked per insert mode operation. So you could type the entirety of a tale of two cities while in insert mode, you could be in insert mode for 30 minutes, and then go back to normal mode -- at this point, if you press undo once, the entirety of what you did in insert mode is undone. There is a feature where you can explicitly give the editor a save point for undo, and you're expected to press the key manually at your desired undo points. I really don't like this at all. I have bound some keys such as spacebar to this save point, so I get more granular undo, but this has some consequences such as clearing any selections that are currently present. I couldn't figure out a way to fix this without any side effects unfortunately.
I like Helix a lot, and I have no intention of changing editors, but there are some default behaviors which I think are absolutely baffling, and the undo granularity + expectation that you manually save checkpoints for undo is one of them.
Total 10 year cut: $~490 billion
Source: https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-republicans-cutting...
The source is clearly biased (sorry), but I believe it's accurate on the numbers.
With Jetbrains, while there are plugins for other languages, it's hit and miss in my experience. Managing multiple IDE's was simply annoying, even things such as ensuring your settings are synced across everything was an issue. A different editor per language feels like a decision made for business needs and not user needs.
Which isn't to say that their IDE's are bad or anything, they are good. But they would be a lot better if they didn't take their product and split it up for each mainstream language.
I think there's only so much oxygen on the 'net for a help site centered around programming. I think to some extent it's a zero sum game and we've been stuck with the local maxima of Stack Overflow, where the nature of social media network momentum has prevented a competitor from forming and overtaking them. I don't necessarily want them to fail or anyone to lose their jobs, but I am happy that LLM's have arrived and replaced my usage of their site. I'm sure a lot of folks love StackOverflow, and it does provide real value, but I'd bet a disproportionately high number of people feel similar to me because of the way they operate that site.
Two things can be true at once:
A) Diversity hiring is unrelated to the crash
B) There is a real scandal with hiring and the FAA
What I have read so far about this situation is outrageous. My understanding is that in 2014, Obama appointed a head of the FAA who wanted to diversify the workforce.
They introduced a biographical questionnaire which had rather arbitrary criteria for passing. It appears to have been explicitly designed to fail people that do not know the magical answers. The failure rate was 90%.
This is not the only example, but perhaps the most egregious questions: you are asked what your best subject was in highschool. If you answered science, you get 15 points (a substantial amount). No points for any other subject. Next, you're asked your best subject in college. If you answer history, you get 15 points. No points for any other subject.
Here is an alleged recreation of the test: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
There are supposedly voicemails in which they helped select candidates pass this biographical questionnaire by providing their preferred race/gendered candidates with the answers. I haven't been able to find a voice mail online, but Fox Business reported that these voicemails exist.
Per a 2016 Yahoo Finance article, an internal FAA report falsely cleared the employee of wrongdoing.
It's my understanding that there is currently a lawsuit making its way through the courts regarding this. It's also my understanding that some allege that the problems are not all resolved yet with hiring, despite the questionnaire being withdrawn in 2018. I'm not sure of the specifics of how there may still be problems with hiring and the FAA.
This could however be done without introducing angled brackets. myFunction(myFirstClassType); which is what more and more languages nowadays do like Zig.
I frankly don't understand why I keep seeing on social media people like yourselves push the idea that it's okay because other companies are also harvesting the data. It is obviously not about the data. It is about China being in a position to manipulate information flow.
I think the quality of discussion on these sites has definitely gotten worse, but it's always been pretty bad. Digg people would post absolutely idiotic shit, even by today's standards. The thing that sticks out to me is something that I don't even think is appropriate to mention here, but I want to mention it because I think it illustrates how insanely poor the level of discussion was on these older forums -- there was an ASCII art meme that was reposted in seemingly every thread -- pedobear, a bear that wanted to molest children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedobear. Hilarious (sarcasm)....
I switched to Reddit because it did not have people posting this crap in every thread. It was refreshing to have a forum where people weren't spamming idiotic ascii memes but actually discussing things.
But even so, it's all relative. At one point probably near 2009 or 2010, I was struck by the amount of unhinged comments where people called for outright revolution and violence against the US government / capitalistic systems. I stopped sometime after reaching 100 count in a week or two. I hope it goes without saying, but any violent overthrow of the current status quo is not going to be replaced with something better. It's going to have end up in an authoritarian dystopian nightmare.
At least back then though I felt like it was actual people being unhinged. Now I don't think you can use Reddit as a barometer for the public opinion on anything. I simply think the amount of fake shills and accounts are too high. Reddit got its start by faking comments, but there was definitely a peak in the ratio of genuine to fake comments, and we're in my estimation doing very very bad on that benchmark nowadays. This became evident on large subreddits like r/politics back in 2016, where on a dime it was like a button was pressed in a machine and the shape and color of comments all change in unison. The site is gamed to hell and back.
I like Discord nowadays because I can be sure I'm interacting with a real human, though how long this will stay true I don't know. The internet desperately needs a system in place which can distinguish between genuine human beings and bots. I think much of the social issues we have nowadays stems from how bad actors are manipulating what people see online, and confusing people on where the consensus actually is. Various actors are waging psychological warfare on the public, and the public does not even seem to acknowledge it, even when it is blatantly obvious (as in the example of something like Tik Tok).
I did a cargo install. I then used the dx command line app to create a new project. After initialization I ran dx serve in the directory as instructed, but it gave me a compiler error with seemingly no feedback on what specifically went wrong. And again, this is for a hello world app that they generated for me. I'm unsure how to obtain more information on why it failed.
I feel like I'd have more insight and ability to debug this if I were trying to compile using a standard rust workflow rather than their CLI tool.
You can press v to enable verbose logging, but this doesn't add information which provides clarity to me. Here's the compiler output with verbose logging, though heavily edited to be readable in this HN comment box
14:17:49 [dev] Building server...
14:17:49 [dev] Building app...
14:17:49 [dev] Executing cargo...
14:17:49 [dev] cargo args: ["--profile", "server-dev", "-- verbose", "--features", "dioxus/server", "--bin", "hack"]
14:17:49 [dev] cargo args: ["--verbose", "--features", "desktop", "--bin", "hack"]
14:17:49 [dev] cargo args: ["--profile", "server-dev", "--verbose", "--features", "dioxus/server", "--bin", "hack"]
14:17:50 [dev] Setting builder to failed state
14:17:50 [dev] Build failed: Other(Cargo build failed, signaled by the compiler)
Status: Failed
The compiler error on variables which are mutable when could be const is almost as annoying. Zig does not acknowledge that not all code is production code, that sometimes you want to prototype without having to backtrack and fix compiler errors to irrelevant things when the goal is prototyping and figuring out what you are building.
It also adds friction to learning the language because statements you write will immediately get flagged as wrong -- is it actually wrong due to your unfamiliarity with the language, or is it just the lsp immediately flagging and underlining all unused as red. Better take a moment to check.
Super annoying to me. I can't get past it, nor do I trust the author of Zig to not go even further in this direction. He has made it clear he will not compromise on this issue.
There are more planned similar errors on the way here. At least it looks like they are no loner planning to do compiler errors on unused pub functions if they are not accessible from outside the package.
Zig: Trust the programmer to manually manage memory, but not to clean up unused variables.
The language is weirdly pedantic, in ways orthogonal to Rust.
There are parsers which allow for comments if one wants, so if someone wants to engineer an insane system no one is stopping them, provided they can ensure the parser on the other end of it.
This is a data format meant to be readable by humans. As such, it's natural to want to support things like configuration via end-user editing values in the text as a use case. Data is occasionally going to need comments to explain valid options or add context for people to edit. This is a reasonable thing to have.
I also think that someone making money off LLM's is a separate question from whether or not the original creator has been harmed. I think many creators are going to benefit from better tools, and we'll likely see new forms of creation become viable.
We already recognize that certain uses of intellectual property should be permitted for societies benefit. We have fair use doctrine, patent compulsory licensing for public health, research exmpetions, and public libraries. Transformative use is also permitted, and LLMs are inherently transformative. Look at the volume of data that they ingest compared to the final size of a trained model, and how fundamentally different the output format is from the input data.
Human progress has always built upon existing knowledge. Consider how both Darwin and Wallace independently developed evolution theory at roughly the same time -- not from isolation, but from building on the intellectual foundation of their era. Everything in human culture builds on what came before.
That all being said, I'm also sure that this tech is going to negative impact people too. Like I said in the other reply, whether or not this tech is good or bad will depend on who you ask. I just think that we should weigh these costs against the potential benefits to society as a whole rather than simply preserving existing systems, or blindly following the law as if the law is inherently just or good. Copyright law was made before this tech was even imagined, and it seems fair to now evaluate whether the current copyright regime makes sense if it turns out that it'd keep us in some local maximum.
As time goes on, I imagine that it'll increasingly be the case that these LLM's will displace people out of their jobs / careers. I don't know whether the harm done will be greater than the benefit to society. I'm sure the answer will depend on who it is that you ask.
> That's a good thing! If a company cannot raise to fame unless they violate laws, it should not have been there.
Obviously given what I wrote above, I'd consider it a bad thing if LLM tech severely regressed due to copyright law. Laws are not inherently good or bad. I think you can make a good argument that this tech will be a net negative for society, but I don't think it's valid to do so just on the basis that it is breaking the law as it is today.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...
Along those lines too, I don't have evidence but I'd bet that the type of developer who uses Linux is more likely to integrate new tech like LLM's into their workflow than someone whose on Windows.