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One other thing - latency.

The newest Macbooks have insanely powerful hardware (I have an M4 Macbook Max). Yet they do not feel as speedy or instant on my machines with i3. There's always a perceivable milliseconds of latency, with response time from the keyboard to the screen. As someone who has tons of key bindings, I find this tolerable, but it can get a bit grating compared to just how instantaneous everything is on my Linux.


The way sidebars feel is really "sticky". This has got worse with SwiftUI. The List component used for this has notoriously poor performance and a really inflexible API.


The one interesting thing (as a heavy user of both OSes) is that since the past decade there now are plenty of high-quality games (if those count for apps) on the Linux, that still don't work as well or as plentifully on Mac.

Linux is bound to be the number one gaming machine in time; general apps aside.


Yes, that's a game changer. I also wonder why businesses and governments continue to use Windows and macOS. In many aspects, Linux is more intuitive, almost all major software supports it, and the free office software is fully featured, beautiful, and free.


I use CopyQ. Love it because it's so cross-platform, and consistently works across my Mac and Linux machines with minimal fuss; it handles images really well too.


And you can sync your clipboard history across devices! Super handy feature


I have some doubts about your statements. If you can't get a job at FAANG or the major startups, sure - that makes absolute sense. Competition is crazy.

If you can't get a job at all, that makes no sense, and probably speaks more to the fact that you might be an academic parrot who can talk code, but not write code, as an actual software developer with practical abilities. And that goes more to your lack of practice, rather than lack of knowledge. The world is not to blame in that regard but you.

Alternatively, try different domains - your skills might work little wonder in the software world, but might move mountains in other (especially labour-intensive) domains.


While I love this insightful analogue, your statement seems exactly like the kind of text you copy-pasted from some LLM, which you then regurgitated to Hacker news with some modifications.

It even ends with that trademark conclusion-style statement... which is a hallmark of ChatGPT output.


I'm not sure why allowances are made for Zig's verbosity, but not Go's.

What's good for the goose should be good for the gander.


FWIW Zig has error handling that is nearly semantically identical to Go (errors as return values, the big semantic difference being tagged unions instead of multiple return values for errors), but wraps the `if err != nil { return err}` pattern in a single `try` keyword. That's the verbosity that I see people usually complaining about in Go, and Zig addresses it.


The way Zig addresses it also discards all of the runtime variability too. In Go, an error can say something like

    unmarshaling struct type Foo: in field Bar int: failed to parse value "abc" as integer
Whereas in Zig, an error can only say something that's known at compile time, like IntParse, and you will have to use another mechanism (e.g. logging) to actually trace the error.


Yep. Errors carry no context whatsoever and you have no idea where they came from.



I mean, this is definitely not a strong suit of go either. In Zig you can just pass in a pointer though to add additional context.


Zig's verbosity goes hand in hand with a strong type system and a closeness to the hardware. You don't get any such benefits from Go's verbosity.


I think a better word may be "explicitness". Zig is sometimes verbose because you have to spell things out. Can't say much about Go, but it seems it has more going on under the hood.


What "ugly things" exactly did he say?


Just search for "Scott Adams racist posts". There's no need for more links to it.


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Thanks for the context. I hadn't heard about this before. Loved a lot of the comics but that does change my opinion about him.

To get a bit off-topic...

R.E. "It's okay to be white": I think this slogan is the perfect example of effective propaganda. Out of context, at face value, it appears mundane and uncontestable. But in context it holds a wildly different meaning. I definitely saw members of my family fall for this exact trap. Retired parents spending too much time watching "news" aren't so different from terminally online incels.

Important because it should remind us that when we think people are acting wildly obtuse that we should question if we are missing something. Seems like the best way to combat getting caught in those echo chambers and identify propaganda. I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning.


> "It's okay to be white": I think this slogan is the perfect example of effective propaganda.

It's so effective because negative polarization is so powerful. People see something that makes them mad on the internet and then make it their whole mission in life to fight it. That slogan was designed to bait people into saying "it's not OK to be white", which is obviously absurd and guaranteed to cause white people to get angry and say racist things in response. Magnifying the Internet race war that they want to break out.


> I think we're getting so used to crazy (rather, the perception that others are crazy) that we aren't setting off these "alarms", where we would if we were talking about "real people". IDK what it says about how we view one another, but I think it is concerning.

I don't understand what you mean. Political ideologies are real, most people aren't crazy or duped by propaganda. They aren't just haplessly regurgitating 'white lives matter', it's a slogan that aligns with their beliefs, we should take that seriously and not pretend like 'they just don't know what it actually means'.


I don't think it's nearly so easy to disentangle a person's ideology from the propaganda they have been exposed to. The way propaganda works is by nudging ideology.

This goes for all of us. Some people do a worse and some a better job of separating out the truth from the manipulation, but everyone is susceptible to some degree.


I don't know Mr. Adams but my father was born in 1943 to a rural balkan community and this sounds just like him.

Except the focus on black americans, being most of his life in europe he mostly hates the gypsys and serbians.

But no worries, he's older than Biden and he'll be gone soon and we can make the world what we want it to be.


[flagged]


Ok, can you help me understand what he's saying? I don't get it.


The rest of the quote is:

"It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."

My takeaway of the point was there are situations in which you will end up in an unsympathetic quagmire of "well, actually..."

You can see it in this thread, and I guess I'm walking into the trap in this very post


> And you don’t argue when a woman tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar.

I think it's misleading to group these you-should-not-argue about statements together. They're not the same.

Can you explain why someone would want to "well actually" a woman who says they only earn 80 cents on the dollar versus men?

To me sounds like "Well, actually, men don't have that much of an advantage over women. So could you please stop trying to raise women's earnings?" Tell me where I'm not understanding.


Multiple things can be true at the same time:

- on average there is a pay gap

- not all of it is an apples-to-apples comparison of job/experience/hours

- not all of it results from discrimination

Put another way: is all of that pay gap due to "sexism"/"discrimination"? If not, then simply removing discrimination won't necessarily result in equality. What else might be at play, and what does that mean for public policy?

As an example, this study (https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_genderga...):

> Mechanically, the earnings gap can be explained in our setting by the fact that men take 48% fewer unpaid hours off and work 83% more overtime hours per year than women. The reason for these differences is not that men and women face different choice sets in this job. Rather, it is that women have greater demand for workplace flexibility and lower demand for overtime work hours than men. These gender differences are consistent with women taking on more of the household and childcare duties than men, limiting their work availability in the process (Parker et al., 2015; Bertrand et al., 2015).

The original (provocative) "80 cents" statement seems to imply that the problem is simply solved by making sure we don't discriminate in pay (or perhaps just boost women's pay to compensate, or, as I described here, offer higher referral bonuses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890123) and that's that, we've solved it. But it sounds like there's more to it, doesn't it?

See also "why is there a gender pay gap" (https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality-by-gender#why...), which discusses various adjustments, which in that dataset (contemporaneous with Scott's post, coincidentally) brings it to roughly 90 percent. So right off the bat there exists "well, actually, it's closer to 90 cents when adjusting for..."

To me it was an inflammatory way to say, "for a happier life, just smile and nod and do not engage with the topic", set up to provoke exactly the sort of internet back-and-forth to illustrate the point. Parent at least tries to look for some good faith, whereas its sibling straight out yells that I must be a sexist bigot.


>My takeaway of the point was there are situations in which you will end up in an unsympathetic quagmire of "well, actually..." IF YOU'RE A SEXIST BIGOT.

Well thanks for revealing yourself for what you "well, actually..." are.

It's only a "trap" if you you're a sexist bigot, and don't want people to know what you are, but you just can't keep your mouth shut.


Point made, in spades

Or do you really think there is zero nuance to the subject of the gender pay gap?

Nah, best just to shout that I must be a sexist bigot. Problem solved!


> "It's okay to be white" (IOTBW) is an alt-right slogan which originated as part of an organized trolling campaign on the website 4chan's discussion board /pol/ in 2017. A /pol/ user described it as a proof of concept that an otherwise innocuous message could be used maliciously to spark media backlash.

And boy were they right about that. Nobody on earth is easier to bait than journalists.


The way the statement "it's okay to be white" has been vilified, by associating it with racist groups, supports the narratives pushed by people like Adams.

It would help if the mainstream culture admitted that racism against white people exists too, and that it is unacceptable, as every other form of racism is.


You have to go one level deeper. Not all racism has equal consequences and white people enjoy a privileged position in our society. Focusing on anti-white racism while we still have an overwhelming problem of racism against non-white people hurts the cause of racial equality.

Saying "it's okay to be white" is innocent statement only if you ignore any societal context around it.


Either racism is bad or it’s not. Whether the consequence of it is better or worse for one group or another is irrelevant if the principle that racism is bad is adhered to.

And I’d argue the consequences aren’t that different. If someone is passed over for a job, pulled over by cops, denied the ability to purchase a house, those all have equal levels of consequence for the person on the receiving end.

I think the statement as art was brilliant. It forced those who play lip service to “all men are created equal” to put themselves and try to explain why a rather uncontroversial statement was so controversial. It was wild seeing them twist themselves into a knot trying to explain why it was so bad.


> And I’d argue the consequences aren’t that different.

This is wrong. (Systemic) racism (still) exists. Someone who has natural advantages in society (white men) does not suffer the same consequences of the events you listed:

- "passed over for a job" Jobs are easier to get for white people in the US, no? - "pulled over by cops" really? - "denied the ability to purchase a house" redlining has denied a lot of wealth to black families in the US

> those all have equal levels of consequence for the person on the receiving end.

So, this is not true.


Whether something is “more bad” is irrelevant to whether or not it “is bad”.

Whether I punch you once or twice in the face, it’s still bad, so both are against the law.

What you’re saying is “its ok to punch someone in the face once because it’s not as bad as punching them in the face twice”

Clearly an absurd position.


>Someone who has natural advantages in society (white men)

White men no longer have natural advantages. As a matter of fact the Supreme Court agreed that White and Asian males are now at a natural disadvantage.


Yup. It sad to see leftists contort themselves into loving racism as long as the target is approved by the Party, academia, the previous administration, etc. Since the clergy has approved the target, it is therefore just and moral.


Disagree. All racism is unacceptable and it's not at all evident that there is less systemic racism against white people.

Example:

Participants across experiments were twenty five more likely to shoot unarmed White suspects than unarmed Black or Hispanic suspects, and were more likely to fail to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White or Hispanic suspects

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/results-...

"More than a third of white students lie about their race on college applications, survey finds"

https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/57...

Instead of trying to tally up the racism against each group to decide which group is more victimized, all forms of racism should be abolished.


>Instead of trying to tally up the racism against each group to decide which group is more victimized, all forms of racism should be abolished.

So you support impeaching Trump, then?


[flagged]


Vilifying anyone complaining about racism against white people as racist is exactly what I'm referring to.


I find it ridiculous how "writing scripts to keep things working the way I want" can be a source of frustration.

To me, that's a source of pleasure.

I've never expected Windows or Mac to work exactly how I want them to. In fac, they can't. So given that, how can Linux be a poorer experience/

The truth is that for virtually everyone, Linux will be the absolute closest experience to having everything work exactly the way you want things to, because it is that open to being modified.


For you, it's writing scripts so that things work the way you want. For the author, it's writing scripts to be able to use the computer at all. And how would that work if you have to write the scripts in a state the computer doesn't work for you? That's the difference between being fun for you and being agonizing for someone who has to rely on it un order to use their computer.


Swift's become so feature-heavy, and complex, whilst the documentation is all over the place. That's not even counting things like SwiftUI, or its rather arcane CLI tooling.

Out of curiosity, I put in more than 150 genuine hours in 2024, trying to get deeply into Swift - and eventually just abandoned the language.

In comparison - I got very far experimenting with Go in the same amount of time.

Unless one needs to get into the Mac ecosystem, I see no reason why learning Swift should be necessary at all.


I'm willing to bet there's a dragon in that egg.


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