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Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
211–220 of 417 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#212Books
related: English grammar
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#213Nix package manager's `nix-shell` is something I wish more people knew about. Nix is gaining some popularity, but people often think of using it has to be a really big commitment, like changing your Linux distro to NixOS or replacing your dotfiles with a Nix-based one (using the Nix package manager). What I wish more people knew was that you don't need to do those things to get value from Nix. Create project specific…
Have you tried compiling software with a nix shell? It gets linked to the Nix store. Needless to say it was a frustrating revelation.
The missing link for me is nix-copy-closure, which I learned about from a post by mitchellh: https://mitchellh.com/writing/nix-with-dockerfiles
conceptually a game changer for me. In practice it's far from a silver bullet (because every language prefers its own package management so you still have to manage those), but when it works it's quite magical.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#214Nix package manager's `nix-shell` is something I wish more people knew about. Nix is gaining some popularity, but people often think of using it has to be a really big commitment, like changing your Linux distro to NixOS or replacing your dotfiles with a Nix-based one (using the Nix package manager). What I wish more people knew was that you don't need to do those things to get value from Nix. Create project specific…
Have you tried compiling software with a nix shell? It gets linked to the Nix store. Needless to say it was a frustrating revelation.
You can patchelf to link to the host system libraries instead, or some projects can statically compile (inc musl) with less drama than usual, since your cross compilation toolchain can be part of your nix-shell.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#215pen and paper
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
nix is far simpler for consumption. My coworkers don't like fancy new things, and they haven't had any complaints. They don't have to dick around with half a dozen different commands to get everything set up, or bother with docker volumes/port mapping/etc. They just run nix-shell and it all works. That's all you have to do with a shell.nix file, it's very simple. It is harder to write on average atm, but it's very mu…
It's the same thing for Docker. Just one command. The nix is much harder to deal with mainly because shell.nix is harder to read and write then a Docker file. Additionally nix uses shell hacks to get everything working. Docker uses an os primitive DESIGNED for this very use case. And additionally, because docker uses os primitives you can use docker-compose to manage multiple processes on multiple different environme…
You're seriously overestimating how hard this is, especially with poetry2nix. I like docker just fine and have used it in a development workflow and it's a pain in the ass and should never be used for that. It's great for packaging stuff up for prod, though.
Also, one man's "DESIGNED" is another man's hacks. I don't see anything wrong with how nix works. Potato/potato, I guess.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#217Turn your Postgres database into a REST API: https://postgrest.org Previous discussions on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgrest
Is there anything similar for Sqlite?
Don't overlook https://datasette.io/ even though it does much more than endpoints.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#218Nix package manager's `nix-shell` is something I wish more people knew about. Nix is gaining some popularity, but people often think of using it has to be a really big commitment, like changing your Linux distro to NixOS or replacing your dotfiles with a Nix-based one (using the Nix package manager). What I wish more people knew was that you don't need to do those things to get value from Nix. Create project specific…
It's good for a c or c++ project where libraries are very environment specific. But most modern languages have their own package/environment managers which makes Nix redundant.
Most language package/environment managers do not come close to giving you the guarantees that Nix does.
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#219Definitely Forth and Factor. Every programmer should get a little bit familiar with the concatenative style. 3 days ago i discovered a channel on YT which talks about Forth, even Chuck Moore himself did a talk there talking about GreenThreads and the like. Given that webassembly is a stack language with no GC, i do expect a comeback of concatenative programming some time in the future. https://www.youtube.com/@silico…
Came here to say this, so I entirely agree. I found Forth and the concept of concatenative languages after deep study of the fundamentals of computing, specifically studying Lisps and the Lambda Calculus. Eventually found combinators and the Iota combinator. Finally hit the bottom of the rabbit hole!
It really does give the lightbulb moment. “Don’t try to generate code, that is impossible. Only try to realize the truth… There Is No Code (only data)”
Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?
#220I don't know if they're "unpopular", but I think the BEAM family of languages, Erlang, Elixir, LFE etc. could be used more. I read more and more problems people have on here and just think that they go away on the BEAM.