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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

You’re not crazy. Duck-typing a lazy functional language in a zillion KLOC repo with broken stack traces is crazy.

At my work those “O RLY” meme book covers are in vogue this week, and my last one was “Nix Haskell Overlays for Fun and Murder: Homicidal Ideation for the Working Hacker”.

It was my job to get Clash (the VHDL/Verilog synthesis tool on Haskell) building under Bazel via Tweag’s rules_haskell and playing nice with all our other Haskell shit. That’s 14 hours straight I’m never getting back.

But… because it’s Nix I never have to do that again. Even if I upgrade everything else I can keep nixpkgs at that version in my flake.lock and that will always work forever. So I’m cool with it.

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> But… because it’s Nix I never have to do that again.

This is the killer feature for me. My use-case for Nix is vastly different from yours, as I use it for centralized declarative configuration through NixOS, but I have an immense sense of satisfaction knowing that hell can freeze over but I'm still only a single command away from my exact setup running on (almost) any machine on the planet.

This might not matter much for most people, but making my machine work for me is something that took me years, and I can sleep well knowing that it's finally safe under Nix vs. multiple different configuration files for multiple different programs scattered across my filesystem.

Our use cases might not be that different. Whether it’s Mac laptops, physical dev machines, or cloud instances, our domain/scale is such that our machines are “pets” rather than “cattle”, i.e. they have names.

Making NVIDIA drivers work with either Xorg on someone’s desk or CuDNN on the GPU boxes with like two friggin lines in the NixOS stuff is like, doing drugs or something in terms of sheer feeling great after years of chasing that shit all around Ubuntu’s broken-ass standard of living.

> Nix Haskell Overlays for Fun and Murder: Homicidal Ideation for the Working Hacker

good god pls share the link

Haha sure. I don’t know anything about image hosting on the fly so pardon the sketchy ass link: https://ibb.co/Dr5Jsrx

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