zeveb

The answer to 'Windows or macOS' is, of course, 'neither.'

Linux offers all the power — and more — of macOS's Unix core (plus system utilities which have been updated this decade), and runs on the same commodity PCs on which Windows runs. It offers more and better developer tools than anywhere else. It enables one to craft a computing environment perfectly suited to one's needs and wishes.

And, y'know, it is free, as in freedom.

> Every company I've worked at for the last 10 years has developed exclusively on macOS.

Counter-anecdote: I have had a Linux computer on my desktop for over the last twenty years, have used Linux primarily for maybe the last eleven, and exclusively for the last eight.

I do not get the near-religious love for Apple products. Pre-OS X, they really were wonderful, best in class without a doubt. I kinda get the attraction back in the early 2000s, when Linux could still be a chore and Macs were a decent choice to get a computer which had a shell and ran real software. But now? They are just not for me. I want to own my own computer, write my own software and control my own destiny.

In my experience the up-and-coming generation are far, far better at branding than my own generation ever was. Talking to my younger colleagues I generally get a deep feeling that they know what they are talking about, are thoughtful and make good decisions.

But the thing is, that's just branding: they aren't actually much more competent or thoughtful than my generation was at that age, they just seem like it. When I look at the code they write, it is as bad as the code I wrote. They have startling gaps in their knowledge and experience, just as I did (and no doubt still do — there is always something to learn!).

The thing that worries me is that until one gets to more objective measures, they really do seem more competent and trustworthy — which means that others are more likely to trust them, which is likely to lead to more bad decisionmaking at scale.

I wonder, though, if there is really a difference at all. Maybe my generation actually seemed more competent to our betters than we really were, too!

Where, as texasbigdata notes, 'wealthy' would include almost anyone reading this forum, and almost anyone who has enough money saved to retire.

Issue there is that the House and Senate would just represent the people, and no-one would represent the states. That seems contrary to point of a government whose title is the United States.

Agreed on adding more representatives.

I think it would be interesting to have three Houses: Senate, with individual senators appointed by the state legislatures; Representatives, with individuals elected by popular vote; and Citizens, selected by sortition. Legislation could originate in either the Senate or the House of Representatives, but would have to be ratified by the House of Citizens, unless their veto were overridden by super-majorities. The number of citizens per state would be the sum of the state's senators & representatives.

This would take the veto away from the President, and give it to a random selection of people.

Maybe combine it with an amendment stating that all regulations must be passed by the Congress, or at least be ratified by the House of Citizens …

Why is that a problem? I would rather have a doge from a good family, who has been exposed to international trade and great power politics from birth, than one who was sweeping out the stables three days ago.

The non-elite are not inherently purer than the elite, and they are generally less well-educated. I am not certain how 'elite' has become a bad thing: shouldn't we all aspire to be among the elite?

I thought that there was some real genius to the English system, which at one time provided voices for both the great families and the citizenry, roughly balanced under the Crown. So too the U.S. system of senatorial selection prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment.

The earth being round is not universally held, either, but it is true. The military is patriotic, yes, as are its members (it is difficult to imagine how they could be effective were they not), but the military tries very, very hard to be apolitical. Yes, individuals in the military have strong political opinions, just like many other individual Americans.

It seems to me that any country at a point where the combination of its flag together with an oath of office, oath of enlistment or commissioning oath is seen as political rather than patriotic cannot be in a good place. It is not too far from that to one where calling for fair and unbiased administration of elections is considered political rather than patriotic.

Thank you for assisting in the election, and thank you for your excellent software projects, but in this case I think that you were incorrect.

> Search, which hinges on the ability to scan and index your files, is a canonical example.

Of course, search can all run locally on one's own devices. I believe that there are also privacy-preserving search techniques which can run remotely, albeit often with an unacceptable overhead.

Frankly, I would rather have local indexing and search anyway: it is significantly faster, and I am likelier to have more spare resources to dedicate to myself than Google is to have to dedicate for my use. What I mean by that latter point is that while Google are huge (1.18T right now), they must spread their resources over many, many users (that number divided by the number of people on earth — a decent first approximation for their number of users) is only $155, and I have way more than $155 to invest in my infrastructure.

I think that problem is with macOS & Windows, not with rsync. There is no real reason why either cannot bundle it; they just choose not to.

I think that you (and others!) must have misread: I did not write that malicious software would turn on the hardware — I wrote that it 'could turn off the LED when the camera and microphone are running.'

What I mean is that a user could leave the hardware switches in the microphone- or camera-on positions, but malicious software could turn off the LEDs, so that the user would think he had privacy but in fact did not.

> The Dell privacy driver sent out on Tuesday for the Linux kernel is about manipulating the relevant LEDs and tracking the status of the hardware-based controls where as the actual toggling of the audio/video support is handled by the hardware.

This is incorrectly designed: the LEDs must be hardware-driven, not software driven. Otherwise malicious software could turn off the LED when the camera and microphone are running.

> The whole time, Boomers are stoking the coals on this fire, explaining this is “earned equity.” If you want your own, you need to work as hard as they did. Standing by as each irrational player enters the market is exhausting work. Boomers also had to save uphill for a down payment… both ways, in the snow or something.

Why the needless dig at Baby Boomers? I am not one (and normally as ready to enjoy a dig at them as the next guy), it just felt … off.

I can't blame someone who thinks his asset is worth something and who has made decisions based on that belief wanting to preserve that perception!

> Imagine world where there is no Wayland, how is it better? I fail to understand who forces you.

You answered your own question. It starts with distros defaulting to Wayland, despite it completely missing features I currently rely on in X11. No big deal, I can always manually switch to X. It's only a small pain! Then more and more software starts being Wayland-only, because most people are using it by default. Not a huge deal, I can stick to older versions of software. Then drivers are only released for Wayland, because at this point the only people left running X are me and a few other folks like me. Meanwhile, the features I consider absolutely necessary are still missing, because the primary source of funding is no longer hobbyists but corporate vendors.

I have seen it happen before, with GNOME. A decade or more after the cascade of attention-deficit teenagers started stripping out features it is still missing plenty.

> People created Duvian. If systemd is such an awful choice it should be amazingly popular.

You miss the corrupting influence of money. Money means resources, and resources mean being able to extend tentacles into every project. Resources mean being able to present an offer to other projects that they can't refuse: patches that implement needed functionality and, oh yeah, also mandate systemWaylanD.

It's not fear, it's resentment: the old ways worked, and often worked quite well, and everyone has mostly settled on reasonable ways to work around where the old ways were broken; the new ways quite simply don't work in ways that the old ones continue to work just fine, and we resent being forced to lose functionality we appreciate having.

Systemd does offer some nice functionality, but in return it makes certain unreasonable demands (.ini files everywhere, binary logs, systemd-{resolved,homedir,consoled,all-the-things}. Wayland does offer some nice functionality, but it is not ready for prime time yet. It is nowhere near ready for prime time yet. It cannot replace X11, because it utterly fails to replace key X11 functionality today.

Next year, or the year after, it might be different. It probably will be. I genuinely look forward to adopting Wayland when it upgrades X11. But I would utterly resent being forced to use it today, and I am very worried that I may soon be.

> The difference is that I write new functions on a daily basis, while I almost never need new control flow constructs.

I wonder if perhaps you only think you rarely need new control flow constructs because you are using languages without good support for macros.

Where a Lisp or Tcl programmer might just code up a true DSL (cf. CLOS or the condition system), perhaps you just write functions, never realising how much more readable and understandable your systems could be.

> Yes, it's great that you can write your own control flow constructs. So what? A sane language already includes those constructs, and they're known and understood by all users of the language without having to first read the documentation of some third-party lib (haha, just kidding, there is none – read the code, dummy!).

I do not believe that novel control statements are any different from novel functionality. A sane language already includes plenty of standard functions, but that doesn't relieve the need for more. New functions, like new control statements, may be poorly documented.

The fundamental power of computing is abstraction. Functions, macros and control structures are all different types of abstraction. The only way to build a successful, malleable large program is to abstract, and to avoid macros and new control structures is simply to require larger teams (because someone has to hand-write all the code which the computer could be writing for you) and more ad hoc approaches.

A large difference is that Lua source is not in the form of Lua tables — and that makes all the difference! Having full access to your complete language at read, compile and run times is what makes Lisp Lisp, and that can only sanely be done with a homoiconic language.

> uBO, Privacy Badger, and DecentralEyes are all the extensions I need.

I want Stylus.

> Sure, it might take one additional tap to open a new tab, but I'm fine with that.

Why? Why regress? What possible use did it serve?

> Linux on Windows might work really well … and be the superior experience in total for lots of people.

No, it will not and — without massive changes at Microsoft and in Windows — will never be. Source: have a Windows box, am repeatedly amazed at how bad it is. Seriously, it is embarrassing to use Windows. I think the only reason people enjoy it is the fact that they have not gotten a chance to really spend time in a good tiling window manager on X11/GNU/Linux. The GUI is ugly and laggy. The ads are an insult. The shells are either childish or stupidly (emphasis on the stupid) verbose, and gratuitously incompatible.

There seriously is no comparison: in 2020, Linux is head and shoulders above Windows on the desktop.

> Sometimes I have to reply to those company and especially in a Mail client setup it becomes difficult to reply from <company-name>@mydomain.tld

This was very easy with Unix mail clients twenty years ago — what is wrong with Mail that it doesn't support this functionality?

I would be really interested to see this model applied to software. I am unaware of any firm that has done it this way so far — which is odd, because it really does seem tailor-made to suit our sort of work, no?

Or maybe I am missing something.

> There's a reason senior engineers are paid what they're paid, and it's because it saves time like this

The right senior engineers, yes. The wrong ones, OTOH, would have gone further down the crazy path, inventing an all-new programming language and runtime for the server-distributed code (for 'security' or 'performance' or whatever other reason seemed to pass muster).

> They have a shop where designs are done in caffeinated weekend pushes without input from other developers.

I have a strict rule on my teams: no development outside of work hours (whatever 'work hours' means for an individual, where there are roughly 8 work hours in a day and five work days in a week). It is absolutely vital that developers get to recharge their mental batteries, in particular because a symptom of overwork is bad judgment, and a symptom of bad judgment is being less able to judge one's own decisions. Log out, go home (or walk away from one's desk), spend time with one's family: the work will still be here tomorrow, or Monday.

> I don't know why we don't switch to Teams.

If you'd used Teams, you'd know why. It is hilariously bad, gratuitously slow, ludicrously weird. I have periodically had to use Microsoft's team chat tools over the years, dating back to Yammer or perhaps even further, and for whatever reason it seems they just do not get chat.

Better question: why not just switch to Mattermost?

> But this is entirely rational when you live in a society not far removed from subsistence farming, threatened by civil wars and with relatively weak civic institutions: social capital is simply more reliable than material capital.

Heck, I worry about that in our society as well. The generations after the Baby Boomers have not saved terribly much, and as they begin to age and retire the social pressure to support them will get higher and higher (which is good: one doesn't want folks to be indigent). But ultimately that is likely to mean legalised raids on the retirement accounts of those who did spend.

Why save today if it will just be confiscated in a couple of decades? Might as well spend today and enjoy whatever one buys. Or buy portable wealth …

> Are you getting a one time allowance to buy your home office setup (desk, external monitor, etc)?

Note that this really should be a recurring stipend. Nothing lasts forever; everything has a service life. I think a three- or four-year depreciation makes sense on a lot of these items, although this is probably something which should be considered an industry standard.

Do you have any concerns about the so-called 'right' to be forgotten? Are you concerned that anyone who was active back then might lose a job now due to his postings a couple of decades ago?

That's one thing I really like about Common Lisp: a project can be untouched for over a decade and still work perfectly with the very latest versions of SBCL/LispWorks/Allegro/CLISP/whatever.

Sometimes a library can just be done.

> To suggest he did nothing is a flat out lie.

The deadline for nominations was eleven days after his inauguration. What did he do in those eleven days — other than not being Mr. Bush — that made him merit the prize?

Seriously, when I saw the headline here on HN I thought, 'oh sheesh, what now?' and was pleasantly surprised to see it go to a deserving organisation this year. That is how poor their decision 11 years ago was: over a decade later and I view the award with suspicion.B

> Pre-modern science, while not blind to utility, sought knowledge primarily in order to understand philosophical questions concerned with meaning, being, the good, and so on. Modern science, by contrast, grew out of a revolution in thought that reoriented politics around individual comfort through the mastery of nature. Modern science dismisses ancient metaphysical questions as (to borrow Francis Bacon’s words) the pursuit of pleasure and vanity.

Curious, because I think to a pre-modern philosopher the pursuit of knowledge and mastery is itself the pursuit of vanity & pleasure.

After all, (pace Aubrey de Grey) all men will some day die, no matter how much knowledge they have or what levels of technological control over the natural world they achieve.