HN user
+ the whole "I am a elite Path of Exile"-saga
That was the most "the emperor wears no clothes"-moment I've ever witnessed in my life. I play more PoE than I care to admit, and it was obvious within mere seconds that he has absolutely no clue what's going on.
It was absolutely surreal to watch.
Possibly just a case of having seen "AI-language" too often and just starting to use it themselves?
Honestly we should define 80% as the new "100%" on such batteries and label "charging to full" as "overcharging".
Psychologically, people understand charging a battery to "125%" (or whatever) a lot better: Do it when you really need to but if you do it all the time it wears down the battery a lot faster.
No nagware but, at least on the machines of my colleagues, an even worse enemy: Microsoft Defender with all the checkboxes ticked. Grinds the machine to an absolute halt for any development work - sometimes the responsible security department has mercy and gives exceptions for certain folders/processes, sometimes not.
Ubisoft launcher being so bad that people prefer the cracked, launcher-free version should go down in the history as example of some of the worst product-management there is.
I'm totally in the same boat; I've not bought several Ubisoft-games I was interested in playing because their launcher is such a cancer (if anyone from Ubisoft is on HN: What on earth are you guys smoking?).
I'm too lazy to bother with pirating games these days (I have more games than time to play them anyway), but younger me would've certainly went to the high seas to circumvent their ridiculous insult of a game launcher.
As an avid gamer myself, I fully agree with your point. I guess in this thread there are a lot of people who, due to them being in tech, have a bit of a relationship with games but it's not really a big hobby. And as it happens, Steam has a few policies that trigger some intellectually motivated objections - nice in theory but practically irrelevant for gamers who play games on a regular basis.
As a matter of fact, in case the nostalgia itch really does hit, Steam actually enables a relatively easy 're-release' of old games that many publishers started doing - often with no further addition except the promise that it'll run on modern hardware/OS hassle-free.
I've re-bought games I've played in the 90s/2000s on Steam even though I already owned them and probably still have the CD lying around somewhere, but I just can't be arsed to go through the troubles of installing from them. Pay a few bucks, click a button and I'm up and running.
I typically think of myself (and try to act like) a rather rational person. The amount of hours of my life that I've done silly, mindless and occasionally annoying things because some Steam achievement required it is something I can't quite square with that. There's something oddly satisfying about getting them.
It's certainly not a primary purchase decision factor but I've not bought games because they did not come with steam achievements.
It is complacency or is China just accelerating?
Specifically in the case of Roomba complacency certainly played a role. I have one of their robots for several years already, and while it mostly works fine for my usecases their app is a complete mess. Sometimes the roomba has an issue and aborts a run but there's zero to no detail visible in the app as to why that happened. I seem to be unable to look at old runs, see statistics over time, basically anything that might be useful other than the bog-standard basics, and even those are lacklustre at best.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually reverse-engineered their APIs and made a better app on top of them; the app is comically bad with little to no improvement since I've started using the product.
They absolutely earn it though. Steam just works.
Heck, I've not bought games because they were not on Steam or required another launcher. Ubisoft and Rockstar are so bad that I held off on buying some games I really wanted to play; they're just that awful. EA's Origin was also pretty bad last time I checked.
I guess it's an actually hard problem to make a somewhat decent launcher in big companies with too many PMs playing turfwars, but still, almost everyone except Valve is shitting the bed so hard that as a consumer I'd happily pay quite the markup if it would allow me to avoid other launchers. They're that bad.
One of those "I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."-moments.
Time to rewatch "Vice"; Bale is incredible.
It's a common rhetoric from someone who has no clue about financial markets (the person you replied to).
I think what OP meant is that producing all this fancy advanced tech just to play the financial game isn't all that much benefit for society.
And when looking at societal development in the last couple of decades with the increasing gap in distribution of wealth, social mobility and overall life expectancy declining and other such metrics, I think it's a valid standpoint that maybe, the collective smarts of our society could be allocated a bit better than putting them into companies like Jane Street; as impressive as their work is.
if they've seen your content 1,000x vs a couple of long reads. [..] From there, you can capture their email to touch them on another channel (inbox), push them to your YouTube / Twitter / community, etc.
The endless game of catching people's attention. Focus on actual value creation? Nah, let's just mind-hack everyone into buying the product.
It works, it's obviously a game worth billions, but I find it deeply depressing.
I'm one of those apparently super rare weirdos who just shut down any computer over night. Takes me just a tiny wee bit longer the next day to get started, but given all the issues my work colleagues have with battery life and whatnot (something I've never had troubles with on several machines going 5+ years), I just stick to it - and stories like OPs are definitely reaffirming :)
"‘If you feed Gazans, they eventually eat you,’ the Israeli stand-up comedian Gil Kopatz posted. ‘It’s not genocide, it’s pesticide.’
I have such a hard time understanding how such statements can find an accepting audience in this day and age; in Israel of all places.
Replace "Israeli stand-up comedian" with "some Nazi propagandist in the 30s/40s" and "Gazans" with "Jews", and I'm sure it would be a perfectly accurate historical quote.
I have run into a lot of JS wtf's trying to write code for work
JS certainly does have plenty of wtfs but honestly, when sticking to somewhat modern JS, it's not so bad anymore these days. Function-scoping-shenanigans can mostly be circumvented by simply sticking to const/let, use a 3rd-party-library like date-fns instead of the dumpsterfire that is native Date and you're almost there - throw typescript into the mix and I have a very hard time imagining running into the meme-worthy JS-warts on a daily basis.
Because as is your company probably won't survive in the market
Then maybe that business isn't adding all that much value to society to begin with and it's just not that much of a loss if it goes away.
If a company cannot survive without shoving their product into the view of eyeballs appealing to our most basic monkey brain instincts, it's maybe just better if it dies.
Many thanks for your work! Definitely looking forward to the upgrade - especially the performance-boosts with regards to tsc will be very welcome in our relatively large code-base, and the changes to discriminated unions will probably help us big time in a very specific scenario where so far they fell short.
That being said, I'm fully understanding of the reasons for the somewhat odd versioning given your special situation, but still, I'd wish there would be a 4.0.0-package for folks like us who simply don't need to worry or bother about zod-version-clashes in transitive dependencies bacause those don't exist (or at least I think so; npm ls zod only returns our own dependency of zod). If I understood correctly, we'll need to adapt the import to "zod/v4", which will be an incredibly noisy change and will probably cause quite a few headaches when IDEs auto-import from 'zod' and such, which we then need to catch with linting-rules.
But that's probably a small gripe for a what sounds overall like a very promising upgrade - many thanks for your work once again!
I use Duolingo to learn French, for a few years already. It definitely can bring you up to A1/A2-levels of proficiency (at least for French), which is definitely a solid starting point to engage with the language further. In my case, I've started to take weekly evening-courses. If I started another language, I probably would start again with Duolingo for the super basic stuff, then start to learn vocabulary with Anki, and then start with some paid, organized course that guides me through the more complex parts.
I still use Duolingo almost daily to have some continuous language exposure, for which I still find it useful (especially as the gamification helps with staying engaged). It has its limitations but it does help me. Just to give a bit of a counterpoint; I find your statement a bit overly broad.
RIP. He was a likable guy with the heart in the right place, always struck me as deeply humble.
The world would be better off if many a leader these days, religious or otherwise, would be a bit more like him.
Oliver Deiser, Einführung in die Mengenlehre
I'm definitely by no means capable of giving proper advise here as it's been a long time since I've last interacted with kids of that age. But one anecdote:
When I was in the early teens (so quite a bit older than the kid in your case), I got my hands on a book about set theory, and it absolutely blew my mind. The concept of countability, axiomatic definition of functions and so on really gave me a completely different perception of math. Up until then, math seemed to be something that follows nature, so to speak, three plus two makes five because if I have three eggs and two eggs its five eggs or whatever primary school taught me. I remember back then that I'd wish that some teacher would have made me aware earlier of a more formal, axiomatic approach to math and all that, that there is a more fundamental basis to it than "that's just what it is". It really furthered my interest in math, and while I ultimately eventually moved over to CS, it definitely had quite a fundamental impact on me back then.
The particular book I've read was in German (I still have it) and unlikely to be ideal for a 5 year old; just wanted to give this little personal anecdote somewhat related to your question.
Out of all of HN’s biases, the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided.
Interesting, I perceive it exactly the other way around. I'm surprised this thread is as high up as it is, usually as per my perception, anti-advertisement sentiment gets shot down hard, presumably because a large part of the HN-crowd works for companies like google or facebook which rely on ads as a business model, or start-ups whose products are only used because users were shown ads for them.
My take: The human mind is hackable; it's just too easy and efficient to appeal to our emotions and most basic instincts. And while it was mostly fine to ignore it while it was "only" increasing consumerism, we currently see what happens when the same is applied to elections, with predictably terrible outcomes.
Your stance is still the old HN stance; the market actually works, any change that would impact the status quo is neither welcome nor needed, etc. etc. - this was the gospel for at least a decade, but we're finally awakening to the fact that hey, maybe this is actually bad, even if it made loads of money for many of us. Maybe it led us to the awful situation we're currently in, with big, ad-based monopolies, an absolute clownshow in the highest of offices and CEOs of said monopolies playing the lackeys.
Most big social developments in human history were non-serious and silly to many people before they actually happened.
Unlike other corporations, they actually didn't really do all that much to make it a monopoly though. It's kind of an organic monopoly simply by being better than everything else, by a wide margin.
There's not much "lock-in" apart from the games one owns on the platform; and the social aspects of steam are mostly negligible or niche - sure there's the friendlist, but no gamer I know uses steam voice-chat so the friendlist is mostly replicated in discord and similar anyway.
Steam really is a blessing for gaming. It just works.
The absolute trash that especially ubisoft tries to push on its users made me hold off on buying some of their games. It's just that bad.
As a matter of fact I'm of the opinion politics everywhere would be a lot better if plenaries, committees and hearings were not recorded or televised in the first place.
At that point we might as well get rid of the press, as otherwise someone might be able to hold someone actually accountable to their actions and decisions. Taking the argument ad absurdum, might even go back to monarchy so we don't have to deal with informed (or quasi-informed) voters to begin with.
I get where you come from, that the public perception of politics is mostly soundbite-driven is indeed a huge issue, in my opinion probably one of the biggest issues of our century, as it allows absolute incompetence a democratic pathway to power by playing to human basic instincts and emotions.
But as long as we want to cling to democracy, the voters _must_ have a way of knowing who is doing what, who is involved in which decision, and what favors are being traded. How else is a voter supposed to make an informed choice?
EDIT: To address the soundbite-problem, I think systems that are more oriented towards consensus democracy (proportional elections, chance for referendums etc.) rather than competitive democracies (first past the post, majority takes all) are more stable against it. Election systems should favor choice of opinion rather than choice of persons, if that makes sense. I think especially the US (for context, I'm Swiss) would benefit a lot from such changes; right now it seems all outrage-driven.
Same here - it's really quite something. The future is looking good!
That being said, there are currently still some hurdles. Necessity for explicit file-extensions in the imports is definitely the big offender (it's invalid typescript syntax without the allowImportingTsExtensions-flag).
The trend is definitely clear though, most devs want ESM, most devs want types; it's just a matter of time until the ecosystem adapts. I suppose for types to finally land in the browser, TC39 will have to undergo the "progress is one funeral at a time"-principle, which will probably take another while.
Stick to a few git commands
This was my approach for my first few years of git. I always tried to approach git via its commands, and I horribly failed - until I finally took a little bit of effort to understand how git actually works under the hood, which really made it click for me.
For anyone who has ever spent a modicum of time (e.g. while getting a CS degree) trying to understand datastructures, it's probably really straight-forward to "get git". The datastructure underneath is really quite simple. A branch is a pointer to a commit, a commit is a pointer to a tree, a tree is a list of pointers to other trees and files. That's already pretty much all there is to it.
Once the datastructure of git is understood, the commands start to "make sense" on their own - at least most of them. They still have tons of obscure options that one doesn't realistically need in a daily work flow, but the general idea what the commands do (and how to recover from screwups) was, at least for me, pretty simple after understanding the datastructure.
As someone who doesn't really often look at these sort of charts... traffic coming via chatGPT being higher than Bing was quite the surprise to me. Makes of course total sense, but still astonishing to see the actual numbers in comparison.
I wish there wasn't a need for a business-model to begin with for social media. Honestly, being business-driven is what turns them all to shit, as far as I'm concerned.
That being said, the lights need to be kept on somehow... some model similar to what Signal or wikipedia does might be a solution. Content-moderation is probably the big challenge though that they do not have to deal with to the same extent, so not quite sure how that could fly either...
As enthusiastic as I am about node's typescript-support, calling it "just works" is a bit of a stretch. Not entirely sure if it's still the case anymore on the latest versions but last I checked it was required to use `.ts`-suffixes for all the imports, something a standard typescript project will hardly ever have and needs to be specifically configured to be considered valid syntax (allowImportingTsExtensions:true).
But yeah, there's progress, and once this gets solid traction (which I'm sure it will) it might finally be the last drop in the bucket to convince TC39 to stop being so antagonistic to having some notion of type-support directly in Javascript.