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Software I’m thankful for (2021)

crawshaw.io

301–310 of 530 posts

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#301
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you roll your eyes at yourself whenever you, say, drive a car? We're surrounded by things that have their company's branding prominently plastered on them. Hell, stuff like luxury bags (eg: Louis Vuitton) exist specifically to flaunt a company's branding. Of course, it would be nice if we weren't surrounded by marketing and advertising everywhere all the time, but that's beside the point.

Uh, no, I don't; obviously aesthetic judgments are much more subtle than that. > but that's beside the point. uh that is precisely the point. Hence if there is some trivial way to avoid it, I like people who do it. For instance yeah your car has branding you can't avoid. But you know what you can avoid? Those stupid license plate holders that dealers put on to advertise themselves. Better than nothing.

> Those stupid license plate holders

In some jurisdictions you can avoid this problem by having no licence plate at all and if you upgrade the car frequently enough, you can avoid ever having a plate.

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#302
post #44

JetBrains IDEs. I need to work with three different languages and it is just a blessing that every IDE works exactly the same.

Not to mention, there are so many helpers built in and it's one of the few pieces of software that I don't have any major complaints about.

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#303
post #3

This reminds me of Steve Jobs' email to himself. In 2010 he wrote: I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I…

Discussed here:

Steve Jobs emails himself (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32761060 - Sept 2022 (247 comments)

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this as edgy pessimism, I see it as pragmatic optimism. The author isn't complaining about JSON, they're acknowledging JSON as the best choice despite its warts.

I understand his intention, but “the worst form of encoding” is pretty ridiculous.

Yeah, I'd just say "good form of general-purpose encoding."

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#306
post #291
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is a very good operating system. Windows haters don't hate for technical reasons, but for religious or political reasons. And I like Microsoft. Microsoft makes some products, that's it. Not experiences, or promises of freedom. They are software products, with problems, qualities, end.

I'll give you a technical reason: the Windows API isn't POSIX. Furthermore, it's a monstrosity compared to POSIX. If you've never felt this pain then be glad you've missed out on the multi-decade cross-platform low level programming nightmare. Modern stacks abstract all this away, and the youngins don't know what all the fuss was about.

>I'll give you a technical reason: the Windows API isn't POSIX

Is not POSIX is a technical reason? I have more problems between Linux distributions than between Linux/Windows when it comes to programming.

> If you've never felt this pain, be glad you missed the multi-decade low-level cross-platform programming nightmare.

I started my professional career in 1999. I understand and worked at the time of cross-platform hell.

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#307
post #298
post #41

vim? Really you said this? OMG.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we're trying for a different sort of forum here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No post body was provided.

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this as edgy pessimism, I see it as pragmatic optimism. The author isn't complaining about JSON, they're acknowledging JSON as the best choice despite its warts.

I understand his intention, but “the worst form of encoding” is pretty ridiculous.

It's a reference to the old adage about government

> Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried

https://blogs.fcdo.gov.uk/petermillett/2014/03/05/the-worst-...

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software development is a much better experience on Linux compared to Windows (unless you stay within Visual Studio). If you do tasks that are well supported by your OS, your experience will be mostly good. Don't run servers on MacOS, don't develop on Windows and don't game on Linux. Or do it anyway and deal with the unpolished aspects of it.

I've done lots of dev on both linux and Windows. Neither is "better" IMHO. I started on Linux, but today my main work and personal systems are both Win10. I also have a persoanl Linux laptop I use sometimes (currently Pop_OS, because I felt like trying that). There's certain things easier on one or the other, usually caused by silly hardcoding of paths (or other OS-specific assumptions). I've run into this with pytho…

Are you able to compare scoop to Chocolatey? I've stuck with choco for years now, because it has so many packages that I haven't wanted to try out scoop or WinGet.

Regarding PowerShell, I've found that it has become incredibly customizable these days. For example, I just enabled Emacs keybindings for it a couple days ago. So it feels almost like a bash terminal.

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