cbdumas

I haven't found the lack of GPU page rendering to be much of an issue, what problems do you experience because of it? Only difference I can see personally is marginally smoother scrolling.

I have however found the lack of hardware accelerated video decoding to be a HUGE bummer, watching youtube absolutely destroys my laptops battery life. That is also a problem in Chrome though as far as I know.

> Many of the people who came up with or promoted the idea of dynamically typed languages had decades of experience working with punchcards, assembly code and statically typed languages

The problem IMO is that the languages used at that time mostly had ad hoc, poorly specified, unsound type systems. I find that more "modern" type systems are helpful rather than burdensome, but the theoretical foundation for them didn't really exist until the 70s.

So I get the sense that PHP is sort of the tool of choice for web development at small or medium businesses which are not primarily software businesses, but are looking to create a website and maybe do some ecommerce? Is that right? If so I guess it makes sense that I wouldn't have seen it, most of my consulting work has been at relatively large enterprises.

Often when there is a post about PHP I read over these treads sort of subtly trying to figure out how a language with such a large user base has remained basically invisible to me. And I don't think I live in the HN bubble, though I do use a lot of Python, in my consulting work I've also done plenty of work with .NET, JVM to a lesser extent and other "boring" tech.

But PHP has literally never come up, even as a suggestion or as a tool that is a small part of the company stack or whatever. It feels like I'm looking into a strange parallel universe of software development reading through these threads. PHP devs, where are you?

I went from a software dev role at a B2B SaaS company to a consulting role about a year and a half ago. It has been eye opening to say the least.

One of my first projects was helping a Fortune 500 company run analytics on AWS with data sourced from their Db2 mainframe, which had been in production for multiple decades. Most clients are very uncomfortable with Linux, and Microsoft stack is definitely the default. IT usually keeps the corporate network and individual workstations under VERY strict control, so getting new tech onboarded or new processes implemented can be a multi-week territorial battle.

It truly is a different world at most places.

ETA: I forgot to mention that things at FAANG companies may not be as different as you think. I am currently working with a business team at one which is using a few tools based entirely on Excel and VBA.

In my experience an ORM will cause issues if used thoughtlessly throughout an application. Objects created by an ORM can be used "naively" and cause many round trips to the database, very inefficient queries, etc., but they boilerplate they can save is really helpful also.

I worked on a simple Python CRUD app project a few years ago with some folks who were absolutely against using an ORM for those reasons. There was so much code written that basically just took tuples returned from the DB and instantiated Python objects with them (and vice versa for inserts) that making changes to anything was absolutely maddening. I find that SQLAlchemy Core can be used very simply to essentially take a DB query and return Python objects.

I can tell you why I personally care about it. I recently upgraded my gaming PC and I wanted to reinstall Windows on my new SDD. Only I forgot where I put my Windows 7 product key all those years ago and could not for the life of me pull it off of the existing Windows 10 install I had. I spent hours tracking down my key and did eventually find it, which luckily saved me from buying another expensive Windows license. All for what? I don't want Windows, I just want to play the games I've already paid for. If my games and hardware worked reliably on Linux I wouldn't even have to think about it, just download a fresh .iso and I'm off.

Video games being locked into Windows is a huge drag.

With hw rendering enabled, opening a single Firefox window and browsing works fine. However when I try to open a new window the browser and desktop immediately become incredibly laggy and eventually unresponsive. I think I was able to successfully open a different tty and kill Firefox, which then fixed the issue, but it repro'd every time. Open one Firefox window, everythings fine. Open two, things slow to a crawl.

I'm surprised you were able to get WebRender working as well, I think I recall Firefox instantly crashing when I tried that. This was a few weeks ago.

Yes definitely! Things have come a long way in 10 years, in my opinion. If you are looking for something more "set up and forget about it" though I would definitely recommend Ubuntu over Arch. I use Arch because I (usually) enjoy tinkering and customizing and setting things up exactly how I want.

Edit for a little more detail: I used Ubuntu for a long time on my desktop and actually did quite a bit of gaming on it. Mostly stuck to games that have native Linux support but from what I hear the compatibility layer that Valve has released is actually really good. If gaming is your thing.

All this is to say, things that were once supposed to be impossible on Linux are now very much possible.

I may give that a shot, although I think chromium still requires XWayland, right?

So I'm no expert but I believe there are actually two different notions of hardware acceleration at play here:

1) HW accelerated rendering in Firefox, which despite being unfortunately disabled by default on linux can in my experience be enabled (on about:config) without issues. This makes the experience of scrolling much smoother, so I usually do that. I don't think this has any observable effect on battery life for me. However, enabling this in Sway results in some very odd behavior that breaks certain things so I've had to disable it. I can go into more detail on that if you like.

2) Hardware accelerated video decoding. In contrast to the fist one, this makes a HUGE difference in CPU usage and battery life. However this unfortunately cannot be used in any browser AT ALL in Linux, regardless of setup or configuration. The way I watch youtube videos on my laptop is usually with mpv, which does use hw decoding if it is configured to do so.

I'm running Arch, which I find to be the most frictionless when you're trying to do sort of "bleeding edge" stuff like this.

I've been using swaywm on my laptop (XPS 13) with XWayland disabled for a few months now and have had very few problems with it. As far as I can tell Firefox works perfectly, except for some very strange behavior if I try to enable hardware acceleration.

I love how easy it is to configure via config files, external monitors work great, scaling on HiDPI displays has been totally painless. My days off fiddling with xorg config and xrandr are behind me.

I know the creator of sway hangs out here, so if you're reading this, thank you!

You're right I didn't mention it, but that fact is actually crucial to my point. I'm lucky enough to live in a place where walking, taking the bus, riding a bike (the one I own or a bike share), or taking a Lyft get me almost everything I want at a very reasonable cost. And as new transportation services emerge I need my car less and less. So I'm hoping that in the near future there is some service that can take over the few things I do need a car for. Something like Car2Go or ZipCar is actually almost there.

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying. Are you talking about some kind of monopoly or trust that prevents Uber/Lyft et al from getting access to self driving cars? That seems unlikely to me. As far as the various industries centered around car ownership I don't see why they'd go anywhere. Self driving cars will still need maintenance, oil, tires, etc. The only thing changing here is who owns the car. I don't want that to be me. As soon as it is economical for me to pay for transportation as a service and get rid of my money pit that is parked outside my apartment 24/7 I will do so.

Why would I want to own a "far more expensive" self driving car? I would love to get rid of my car and rely on fully autonomous Uber/Lyft. Even factoring in car rental for travel or moving or whatever I think it would be far cheaper that way. My car is a never ending money pit with insurance, gas, maintenance, registration, tires, it never stops.

I learned recently that my home router runs a forwarding DNS server. I suspect many people are already doing this and don't know it.

If you are hoping that moving to AWS will give you access to "intuitive" setup, I have some bad news for you.

I got to web development pretty late (circa 2015) so my perspective may be skewed but CSS in JS seems much more natural to me than separating markup from style and then linking them up later with global class names.

It reminds me of when I was in college learning C where all of your code is just dumped into one namespace, and then later learning Python (or basically any other modern language) with actual modules and namespaces. After seeing it done that way it just makes no sense that it would ever be done the old way again.

<speculation> Honestly I think they had only a very few locations in mind when starting this "search" anyway, but wanted to frame it as this big, open-ended, national competition in order to wring the highest dollar amount out of their favorite spots. They were never going to take the risk of attracting workers to Tulsa, Detroit, or {insert other city in Middle America} over an existing large pool of talent in an attractive metropolitan area. </speculation>

If Amazon hadn't turned this whole "HQ2" thing into a national drama they could have built a huge presence there without riling up so much backlash. Hopefully this ridiculous stunt is a lesson to them.

Yeah it has bizarre margin and positioning styles set forcing the text off screen. How odd.

It seems that most commenters here didn't read the article. The root of the problem is that the cost to use space in the street is zero everywhere, while the cost to park off the street is (to some degree, usually) driven by demand. That is, high demand areas (downtown, near retail, etc.) have high parking fees buy they have NO fees to use the street. This doesn't make any sense, and it sets up an incentive to cruise over parking. This incentive exists today even without autonomous cars, the only difference is that "cruising" with a human driver always has the additional cost of a humans time.

The fix presented in the article is properly pricing the use of the street.

Which is by far the biggest pain point of using Ubuntu on my XPS 13. YouTube absolutely destroys battery life if I watch it in my browser. Only solution I've found is to watch Youtube videos with mpv, but I feel a bit bad about that because it deprives the creators of ad revenue.

"I then got hold of a 3.2TB Micron 9100 PRO NVMe SSD"

How does one "get hold" of a $3k SSD? This is awesome though, you clearly put a lot of work into this.

I could be missing something but saying this language has ADTs is stretching the definition of ADT a bit much for me. ADTs are defined by combining simpler types (usually with sum and product types) but that does not seem to be possible in Coconut.

I regularly charge my Switch with my Dell XPS 13 charger. Never had an issue.

What incentive would I have to use a well branded debit card over a credit card that gives cash back?

I haven't used Skype outside of work for probably 10 years

He made it most of the way there. Increasing demand drives UP prices, which drives DOWN yield.