Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | totallykvothe's commentslogin

That's not super subtle any more than it's super subtle that "*" performs multiplication and "+" performs addition. Sometimes you just need to learn the language.

This is not a general defense of Perl, which is many times absolutely unreadable, but this example is perfectly comprehensible if you actually are trying to write Perl and not superimpose some other language on it.*


There's is no fair comparison to be made here with how + and * work is most languages, precisely because + and * work the same in most languages, while whatever perl is doing here is just idiosyncratic.

Even C gets it's fair share of flack for how it overloads * to mean three different things! (multiplication, pointer declaration, and dereference)


I had very similar issues, both as a kid and an adult. I now take 500mg of Magnesium (Malate or Glycinate. NOT Citrate, as that is a laxative) nearly every night, and my headaches are almost completely gone now. I still get one every once in a while, but it's infrequent enough that I no longer worry about my use of Ibuprofen to manage it.

The most popular argument against homeschooling appears to be "the world sucks, so we should make kids worlds suck so they're prepared for it", which is absolutely an abusive way to think and those who use this argument need to sit and think about what it means, then be ashamed.


Not exactly. More like, "The world can suck major at times, so we should make sure kids are prepared to deal with it when confronted." It's kinda like teaching kids to look both ways when crossing the street. Ideally, drivers are looking out for pedestrians, but if that doesn't happen and a pedestrian isn't prepared for it, well, people can get killed.

No one should be ashamed for teaching their kids to exist in a world that isn't always as loving as we all wish it was.


You can't use the word segregation wrt people and then pretend it's surprising or unreasonable when someone assumes you're talking about racism.


They used the phrase "If you can afford it." The charitable assumption would have been that the segregation was tied to income.

I never said it was surprising or unreasonable, I said it was insightful. Your comment is further digging in on that point.


I'll agree on all but one point. The cotton/linen notes feel so much better in the hand than the candy wrapper plastic of Canadian bills. I know it's a dumb reason, but I just hate the feeling.


Australian here. Barely anyone uses cash anymore. It's weird to see debates about moving towards technology we had 35 years ago which we don't even use anymore.


But, a cashless society is not a panacea. It may be higher tech and more convenient, but it can have significant privacy costs, not to mention the issues with payment card networks engaging in censorship, charging fairly high transaction fees, and pushing the problem of fraud on their networks to every merchant. Considering the payment card network market is seemingly impossible to enter, and governments don't seem to be able or perhaps willing to regulate things, there are ways in which cashless is a downgrade. It would be nice if we could back up and try to resolve some of these issues in a durable by-design way, but sadly it's probably never happening.


Electronics continue to fail in severe weather events, and cash keeps working, which is important when we're talking about food.


Does it? What about weather that stops the ATMs being refilled? Takes a lot of weather to bring down satellite internet...


I wasn't aware the satellites also beamed down power, and that all ATMs were connected to satellites instead of cellular networks or wires.

It would also take quite a lot of refilling when everyone in a city needs to use the ATM.

We still need to be able to function during weeklong post-storm/flood power outages, which happen with quite some regularity. Here in New Zealand, the most recent weeklong outage in Southland was only last month, primarily due to 200kph winds.

Let us not sacrifice everything to the gods of convenience.


Going to the US feels like going backwards in time in many ways. Banking, public transit, healthcare, education.

A friend from Australia came to visit and after a day driving around New York State said “it feels half finished”


Yeah I had the weird experience in 2020 of using tap to pay at several places where the server had never seen it used before.


Haha, right. I was using tap to pay at the petrol pump in Botswana in 2016.


Plus US dollars just have that smell to them. I wouldn't mind though if we rotated out some of the faces on the bills, e.g. Andrew Jackson


Is that what cocaine smells like?


Cocaine and feces smells like freedom


You do know who would be the first person to rotate in, don't you.


It would obviously be someone as equally legendary as Washington or Jefferson; noted American Paul Bunyan. We can even call them Big Blue Bucks.


My politics and his don't line up but I'm not against this. It would be pretty interesting to see the impact on cash usage, and faces on money are pretty archeologically useful-- at least on coins.


let's wait a few years before rotating faces to avoid debating another blatantly illegal thing Dear Leader would propose (actually he already did but it was out of the news rather quickly)


That's ridiculous. Nobody gets healthcare equivalent to a third world country unless they just don't try. (Think, an addict or mentally ill person, which is still not a good thing, but much smaller of a carve-out than you've represented)


That's not what the article was about though. It wasn't only a complaint about not using built in niceties of the platform. It was an assertion that the reason we aren't is because of some kind of functional bro boogeyman.


Why the snark? It's a valid preference and he wasn't demanding anything.


What are your gripes with Elementary? I personally use KDE now, but I used to use Elementary a while ago, and it was very polished


Last I played with Elementary (couple months ago), there was a finickiness and latency issue with icons.

Elementary also isn't able to enforce a single unified design pattern the same way Apple is able to from a UX perspective.

Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users (makes sense, given the technical userbase) at the expense of building a user experience that is much more user friendly for nontechnical personas.


> Linux distros tend to overindex on power users and cli users

Funny enough, in my opinion one of the issues holding elementary/Pantheon back is that it’s too much like Gnome in how it prefers bare-faced simplicity over progressive disclosure.

It fades more with every release but I think much of the magic of macOS (both OS X and Classic) is how on the surface it’s simple which makes it palatable and welcoming for non-technical people, but is packed with touches that users pick up over time, effectively turning them into power users. Some of the people who get the most out of thier macs aren’t particularly technical but have just been using macs for their photography business or what have you for the past 20 years and know their way around the OS better than many software developers do. Sometimes they’ve even done a fair amount of script writing and such.

With Gnome and Pantheon, there’s very little of that. What you see is what you get, and after using it for a week you know everything there is to know about it.


Amen. And a lot of discoverability comes from long term vision and a reluctance to break things. (Yes, I know, Apple breaks some stuff from time to time.) But in Linux land, you can have major UX things change completely from release to release, so that there is no use learning all the intricacies of a user interface, because the rug pull is probably close.


The churn is real. For this reason, I’ve thought for a while now that a DE that intentionally locks its overall design and feature set once it hits 1.0, with 95% of engineering effort being put towards optimization and bug fixes afterwards would do well. A DE that doesn’t unexpectedly change even over the course of many years is massively attractive to many.

Probably the closest to this that exists now are XFCE and Cinnamon, but it’s for the wrong reason (those projects’ lack of resources).


Elementary was/is perfectly positioned to adopt Objective C and now that Swift is open source, it too.

Ideally it would have adopted gnustep too but I understand that might have been a tall order to get working. But adopting Objective C and now Swift should have been a no-brainer, at least as a first class supported way of interacting with the APIs, if they didn't want to abandon Vala for themselves.

Instead it's become some kind of Vala Purity Contest it feels like.


I used it in an old EEE PC laptop because of its lower resource usage compared with Ubuntu.

Elementary is (or was at the time of testing) wasteful of screen real state, there are huge spacers on the toolbars and in a low resolution screen it's just ridiculous.

It could look good and also have sensible design. It only looked good and had IMHO bad design.


"The ISO is only 2GB"

0_o


Have you ever seen the size of modern OS installs?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: