throwaway_au_1

I'm not so sure that the meaning behind The Rat Race is that a human being participating in a rat race is a rat.

100%. The guy is leaving something behind that doesn't fulfil him in pursuit of something that does, and what do the best minds of HN have to offer? "Well actually"

Different strokes for different folks. At least the author of the OP had the humility not to call anyone else's perspective 'crap'.

I'd be surprised if you appreciated if the 'art' that is 90% of graffiti appeared on the exterior of your home or business.

You do not seem to have a grasp on Vim which qualifies you to assert that it is overcomplicated.

>Those editors also let you use shortcuts without having to switch through different modes making you more efficient.

The modes are what makes editing in Vim efficient.. you don't think Vim users are out here swapping through modes looking for the one that lets them paste a line do you?

It sometimes seems like a lot of the Vim, ew crowd think that the sole reason for using Vim is gaining some kind of god-like ability to physically pump out and manipulate characters. Sure, maybe that's possible. For me, it's about being efficient with my keystrokes. Standard shortcuts (Ctrl+_) are pretty unpleasant for my hands - saying this having already mapped CAPS_LOCK to LEFT_CONTROL (and LEFT_CONTROL to ENTER). I like running commands using sequences of letters - it just feels physically easier to me than sequences of multi-key-presses (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+T). That Vim has other smarts around that is just a perk.

Editing text using Vim, once you've built the muscle memory, really feels super natural and effortless. I really hate reaching for the mouse; it just irks me in a way that's hard to describe. Similarly, editing code without Vim feels tedious in a similar way. Imagine scrolling a long article by pressing the down arrow over and over, or clicking the down button at the bottom of the scroll bar.

Another complaint I see is that remembering the commands is too hard an ask. I moved from QWERTY to Workman at the same time that I was learning Vim and it was interesting because I learned that I -- and probably most people, but I'm speculating -- don't associate commands or actions with letters after they're initially learned. It's all muscle memory, just particular movements of select fingers. The Vim stuff you use day-in-day-out just sticks in your brain and you don't think about anymore than you think about which fingers to activate to type words.

Of course, some people probably just prefer to edit text like they do in almost all other text-editing contexts. They can already edit text; without some kind of perceived extra value, there's no motivation to change, or seemingly even try to understand an alternative. For me, it's the pleasure of feeling efficient and doing dev pain-free.

I would like for any article insisting I adopt any practice to put a little more effort into doing so. This seems to amount to "it's good", "I should have done it sooner", "it's not so bad, trust me", and "smart people like it, too". Could have been a tweet.

In what ways are DI and global variables similar?

FWIW a fellow who has published books on the topic calls Service Locator an anti-pattern[1]. I take no position here as usage of any pattern is contextual but it's worth a read.

[1] https://blog.ploeh.dk/2010/02/03/ServiceLocatorisanAnti-Patt...

I think it's sensible to be critical of the language used in our craft, especially when borrowed from the more physical world, because with it comes the baggage. For example, I have a pet peeve with the phrase "use the right tool for the job" used in the context of languages/stacks, because languages and stacks are more akin to building materials than tools (IMO). Selecting a building material and selecting a tool involve different considerations, and thought-terminating cliches like the above can give a false sense of clarity. So IMO, to look at software maintenance as the author has done, I think is fair and reasonable, even if just to render obvious that software maintenance is a special variety of maintenance that differs from most usages of 'maintenance'.

I also don't enjoy coming back to large sed expressions I wrote previously but I'm starting to write them in a way that makes that much easier. I'm on my phone so this will probably be syntactically wrong but hopefully the gist is evident. Basically, load the expression from a commented 'file':

    sed ./target --file=<(cat <<- 
    SED_EXPR | grep -v -E '^\s*#'
        # do a string replacement 
        s#target#replacement#g
        
        # then do something else
        ..
    SED_EXPR
    )

I've had 2 Barista Express units now. They have lasted me about 12-18 months each before something went wrong. In the recent case, I bought a new group head seal and I got about 60 brews before it blew out again. It has been a good intro machine, and it allowed me to go from using auto mode, to manually weighing 18g ground in for 36g output over ~30s (nb. with a $50 external scale) which made getting reliable results so easy. But now.. I really want a Flair 58, but I can't stomach the $800AUD. I'm stuck somewhere between coffee rookie and coffee snob and can't justify it yet.

Would also recommend finding a nice decaf bean if you are one whom caffeine affects easily. Now I can (did) have 3 great coffees a day instead of 1.

Love reading threads like these. Have already discovered a couple of cool things in here to explore.

Here's what I'm either running now or in the process of standing up. It's very WIP, and nothing special, but maybe someone has some feedback/ideas. I'm aiming to have all the things I use contained in my rack, relying on cloud stuff as little as possible, mainly as a fun exercise/project.

https://i.imgur.com/PDO71bx.png

Devices:

    * 6 x Raspberry Pis (1 x v1, 2 x v2, 1 x v3, 2 x v4)    
    * 1 x HP Microserver (ProLiant Gen8 Intel Celeron G1610T, 2x3TB in RAID, 1TB regular)   
    * 1 x Old gaming PC (i7 3770K, 24GB mem)    
    * 1 x Current PC (i5 12600K, 64GB mem; this is in the rack so that I can have a small, cleared desk, but is not hosting anything)

Uses:

    * Dev stuff:
        * Forge - WIP: Forgejo
        * CI/CD - WIP/TBC: Woodpecker CI vs Concourse CI vs Laminar CI
        * Container registries - 1 x my images, 1 x Docker Hub mirror
        * Deployments - WIP: Would love a FOSS Octopus Deploy clone. Working on my own primitive Ansible clone for fun, which might be good enough.
    * Home stuff:
        * Reverse proxy - nginx
        * Backups - TBC: Not sure yet. Lots of good options around. Probably should be doing this first..
        * Adblock - Pihole
        * Content aggregation - Basic Bash YT downloader (using yt-dlp), Deluge
        * NAS - Samba
        * VPN - WIP: Wireguard
        * Network control - WIP: some basic custom stuff to wake/sleep the microserver + gaming PC when not in use for power/heat reasons, initiate backups etc
        * Telegram bots - TG is my chat client of choice and I have a small .NET 'gateway' API I use to send messages from various bots (each representing different parts of my 'home lab') to my personal account
        * Monitoring/dashboards - TBC: haven't explored software for this yet
        * Log aggregation - TBC: haven't explored software for this yet
        * Network boot - TBC: Yesterday I started thinking of trying to PXE boot the RPis cause they're in one of those stacking towers inside my half-height rack, so getting to them is a PITA.

Awesome project! C# is my preferred language, but I love the less-heavyweight tooling in other langs, so bflat fits nicely. What inspired you to start this / what was your use case? Where did existing tooling fall short for you? I had a brief look at the repo but didnt see a 'Why' or similar section.

>What is it about the Internet that we want to get away from?

For me, it has become overtly adversarial: rampant "advertising"/manipulation, pervasive use of dark patterns, content for the sake of content, and the bulk of discourse is overly pedantic/in bad faith. It's not so much about finding something out there that's "better", but more about removing activities from my life that are low or negative ROI, and the ROI of the content slot machine that is the internet I expect to fall even further with the advances in AI that ChatGPT is demonstrating.

If the OP weren't so far down the front page now, I would fully expect a reply along the lines of "Well that's not the internet's fault; it is just a tool and people are the problem [..]", or "Well unless you want to pay for content, advertising is required", or "Well why don't you create the community you want then? Be the change!". To continue with the investment analogy: this is why I avoid participating in online communities - the ROI for publishing a comment (or more) is low. At best, I can expect a few upvotes which feels quite hollow, and at worst, several comments patronising me or giving my comment the least charitable interpretation possible for Internet Smackdown Points. Yes I know, I left a comment on HN; you caught me in a weak moment :) I do like writing, putting some structure and physical form to my thoughts, but dealing with the conflict it can bring online is taxing - maybe too taxing.

Ironically they reject tabs and require space indentation. Something something the complexity of supporting both. Yet we have style insensitivity..

I didn't know this existed. There's a lot I like about Nim, but total rejection of tab indentation, and now this style insensitivity thing, mean that for me personally, Nim will just stay an interesting language I see on HN from time to time.

Great point. Would it be a stretch to suggest that this language is in reality just another medium for virtue signalling?

IMHO expecting synchronous behaviour from asynchronous tools is flawed way to operate; I'd be very comfortable taking a stand against manning these communication channels at all times.

I'm sure there's a much nicer, scientific way to articulate this, but one interesting observation I took away from learning Vim (in terms of bindings) and Workman simultaneously is that, at least in my mind, typing sequences are not stored how I expected; for example, 'apple' is not learned as LPinky, RRing, RRing, RIndex, RMiddle, but more like LPinkyRRingRRing, RIndexRMiddle (i.e. in bunches). I know the Workman layout now, and I can hit the same WPM as I had after 20 years of QWERTY, but if I come across a word with sequences I've not yet typed (it happens from time to time, about 6 years in), I will have to revert to the char-by-char typing until I learn those sequences. I found the same with Vim; there's multi-key commands that after some use, my brain has just filed under "indent this block" with the finger movements. The benefit of the modal editing is that sequences of commands can be chained very quickly without finger strain, and code editing starts to become as easy and nice as regular typing.

If you subscribe to the Unix Philosophy and like to use your tools in in such ways, yes. If you want to point and click* (no hate - I just mean you just want to get things done) and composing small tools in novel, productive and repeatable ways doesn't interest you very much, I would say there's a chance you may struggle to see the benefit and motivation may drop off and your ROI may be low.

(yes Neovim supports mouse, don't @ me lol)

I started with Vim because of the modal editing (prompted by the classic in-person witnessing of a Vim user). I had just switched to the Workman KB layout so I was already slow and useless - why not be slow and useless for a while, but then have also learned Vim? I started out with the modal emulation in various editors, provided by extensions, but over the years I became more and more sick of Windows' BS and swapped to Linux for dev. This is when I encountered Neovim, and I now realise Vim is so much more than the modal editing.

As I wrote in another comment, working in code now without Vim feels like punching in a dream. I won't say I'll never leave Vim, but until there's something that allows editing as ergonomic as Vim's, startup as fast as Vim's, terminal/GUI options like Vim has, integration with basically anything like Vim can, and a lack of Big-Tech-BS like Vim has, then I'll probably just keep using it.

>it becomes excruciatingly annoying to edit non trivial amounts of text and not have vim.

I can relate to this. Writing code without Vim feels like punching in a dream. Make sure you're working in an environment where you're allowed to use such tools.. I'm currently not and it stinks.

>Vim is basically the only editor you can safely assume to be available on any machine you’ll ever interact with.

Windows?

Bet those truck drivers who learned to code feel kind of ripped off..

The last time I looked at Ubuntu as a daily driver, a few years back, I remember reading the threads about snap and its forced updates. The sheer arrogance of the snap team in their hardline refusal to acknowledge that this would be useful to users was staggering, and for me, ample reason to write Ubuntu off.

Glad that they finally came around. I'm sure many people are happy with this.

I think I need to adopt a practice where if I open an article, like the one you linked, and the title is some alternative take presented as a universal truth without qualification ("Git commits are useless"), I immediately stop reading. Not because I think they are always wrong, though that is usually how they read to me, but because they seemingly fail to demonstrate any humility - a characteristic I think is probably necessary for a balanced take landing closer to truth. (I did read the intro paragraph under the assumption the title was just clickbait but things don't improve).

You're only ever one promotion or departure (not yours) away from a management shuffle which can make your job shit. That stable software delivering value, day in day out? Legacy trash that needs to be rebuilt as a matter of urgency. Actually, no - outsource it. Software isn't our core business, after all. Personally I have no confidence that I will be able to avoid this scenario (again), or suffer it in silence, so I cannot see myself being a lifer for this reason alone. But the idea alone of working for one company forever doesn't concern me in the sense that I'd have only 1 item on my resume for several decades of work, nor would I look negatively at someone with that resume. I just have a low tolerance for corporate bullshit and at this stage in my career I think it's easier to jump ship than to try and fight the winds of change emanating from some Cx0's arse.

>People who criticize IQ scores as a proxy for intelligence should publish their own IQ score, no? If the author did so, I missed it, which is certainly possible. The not-intentionally-snarky point is that perhaps the author is not "smart enough" to assess this reliably.

From the article:

>I did try an IQ test in the past a few times. [..] I will not disclose the results, because I do not want this text to be skewed by a number I am criticizing. If the number was low, skeptics would say I am not smart enough to appreciate the value of IQ or that my claim is just sour grapes.

I wish I could downvote you. Your comment is unsubstantiated nonsense.