Ask HN: What's your most unpopular dev opinion?

Fun fact: my coworkers who use “Show whitespace chars” in their IDE find the padding too distracting. So for them I switch my font before sharing my screen.

I got used to the padding in a few minutes, the first version had a 1/4 space padding and then I pushed it to a 1/3.

To me, the main problem is tabularized alignment. So I don’t use it for example on nginx.conf

I absolutely love this. I did not understand a single thing in your description of the font “proportional and uppercase letters have a 1/3 ….”, and clicked on your link to see it for myself.

In the example I initially assumed your font was the Jetbrains example and thought it was ugly and unreadable. Then when I saw the next example I read it with no effort and almost immediately internalized that the mini-space is not and the wide-space is.

Are there any default fonts that do this on most systems? Mac, Windows, iOS, etc. that I can use if I don’t have access to install a font. I am often on shared devices and this would be a game changer if my first experience is what I think it is - easier and more enjoyable reading.

(Going to install it now on my iPhone to experiment it as a default daily driver)

Perl can do everything bash can do but faster, more portably, safer, and somehow more readable. There's legitimately zero reason to use Bash outside of Bash being the the thing you happen to know.

During this political cycle I learned pretty much nobody knows what DEI is.

No, it's not affirmative action. No, we aren't hiring black people because they're black. It's mostly outreach and employee resource groups. It's completely harmless and no, it doesn't make white people disadvantaged.

Programming languages (and many other programs) should not insist on using Unicode. Unicode string types (especially as the main string types and character types of the programming language) are harmful more than GOTO is, because GOTO won't affect API calls to libraries, while data types do affect API calls to libraries.

Although many programming languages try to avoid the problems of C programming language, some of these things that they try to avoid are not really so bad, and they often make it worse in other ways, anyways.

Computer programs should not have too many dependencies.

You should not use one character set for everything.

You should not use computers for everything, either.

ASN.1 DER is not a bad file format (and is often better than using other formats; I think DER is generally better than BER and CER, and is also generaly better than JSON and CBOR and others).

I also think that systemd is no good, but many people believe that (although also many people think that systemd is good).

Furthermore, HDMI is no good, and USB is no good, and UEFI is no good, and Unicode is no good.

X.509 client authentication would handle authentication better than 2FA, WebAuthn, OpenID, etc. (It can also be used for authorization as well as authentication, and this authorization can be partially delegated to yourself and/or others, therefore making fine grained personal access tokens unnecessary.)

TLS should not be mandatory for connections that do not require authentication (e.g. read-only access to public data), but TLS should still be allowed for any connections whether or not they require authentication. If you are only using the connection to download a file, and the contents of the file is not changing, then knowing the cryptographic hash of the data will be better than using TLS, although you can do both at once if you want to (these are not mutually exclusive).

For security within a computer, capability based security with proxy capabilities is a good way to do it, at the level of the operating system (rather than within a programming language or in a single program).

Programmers should not only program in modern computers, but should also program in old computers too.