Hacker News: innocentoldguy

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Tesla Roadster"

innocentoldguy — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:06:38 +0000

How is that different than any other car? Most modern cars lock their doors when you put them in gear, making breaking the glass the only option to get in during an emergency.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Tesla Roadster"

innocentoldguy — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:01:02 +0000

The manual override is so obvious that half my passengers use it instead of the button.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore"

innocentoldguy — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:11:20 +0000

I use Rust and prefer Elixir over Gleam because Elixir has Lisp-style macros (Gleam doesn't), uses OTP directly, has the fantastic IEx REPL (Gleam has no counterpart), and has Phoenix, the best web framework I've ever used.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Go Concurrency Distilled"

innocentoldguy — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 07:06:21 +0000

Comparing learning one language's concurrency model with learning another language's entire ecosystem is incommensurable.

Having learned both Go and Elixir, I found Elixir easier to learn and a lot more enjoyable to work with. I'm not alone in this opinion. According to Stack Overflow's 2025 "admired" languages, Elixir scored 65.9% compared with Go's 56.5%; Phoenix was the most admired web framework of 2025 at 79% and has held that spot for the past three years.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Omarchy Histerya"

innocentoldguy — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:30:47 +0000

Yeah, but ddevault is well-known for being abrasive and disagreeable when people don't do all the things that he wants to do.

EDIT: I'm not excusing this behavior at all. I find it detestable. I'm just pointing out that ddevault is always like this.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Omarchy Histerya"

innocentoldguy — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:28:34 +0000

Why don't you install it in a VM and try it instead of embracing biased presuppositions that may or may not be correct?

Also, I disagree that it has 0 improvements. For example:

1. Defaulting to the Windows key instead of Control for cut, copy, and paste out of the box is a nice touch that brings keybinding consistency across the terminal and other apps and makes transitioning over to Linux easier for Mac users.

2. Having Hyprland pre-configured as nicely as Omarchy is something few other distributions do, and none do as well.

3. I've used the AI integration to find and fix a segfault issue in one of the apps I regularly use, as well as fixing a LUKS issue on my laptop that all Arch-based distros exhibit. It took a couple of minutes and saved me hours of debugging. Very nice!

Yes, I could set all this up myself, and I have, but isn't the point of creating and using different Linux distributions to have things work the way you want them to, without all the hassle of doing it yourself?

I switch distributions all the time just to see what's going on in the Linux world. I've used Omarchy for about six months now and like it as much as any other Linux distribution (especially the 4.x release). I haven't found it or its community disrespectful at all. DHH is just enthusiastic about his latest interests. In my opinion, that enthusiasm has made him successful.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Taste Is All That's Left"

innocentoldguy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:01:19 +0000

Isn’t that expected, though? If 100 of us were to write a five page essay on the chaffing mechanics of an Underoos wedgie, the likelihood that any of them are the same is pretty small, isn’t it?

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Taste Is All That's Left"

innocentoldguy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:56:16 +0000

I'm a writer with what may be an unpopular opinion. I have a college degree in creative writing; I do technical writing and programming for a living, and I used to publish technical articles on Linux, Python, Elixir, and other topics—complete with em dashes—long before AI was a thing.

When confronting AI as a writer and deciding how I feel about it, I've landed on the conclusion that I've never accused mathematicians of churning out "calculator slop." A calculator is just a tool to make the complex work of mathematics easier. I now view AI as a calculator for writing, among other things. If the idea is good and the information is sound, I don't let the occasional awkward phrasing bother me. The truth is, most people can't write very well anyway, so if AI helps them communicate better—even if it is obviously generated by AI— more power to them.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

innocentoldguy — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 02:01:19 +0000

Yes. They work fine in Chrome. Mellel is the only app I can think of where they don’t work.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated"

innocentoldguy — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:11:16 +0000

Vitamin D is a lifesaver for me. I'm severely deficient, and if I don't take about 10,000 IU a day, I seem to get colds every five minutes.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

innocentoldguy — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:24:53 +0000

Yes. Basic emacs keybindings work pretty much everywhere in macOS. I have run into a couple of apps that don’t behave correctly, but 99% of the time they work.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users"

innocentoldguy — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:00:47 +0000

I was going to trade in an old truck and buy my daughter a Tiguan this weekend. I guess I’ll rethink that.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

innocentoldguy — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:44:32 +0000

Self-help non-fiction books killed themselves by focusing on entertainment, in the form of amusing anecdotes, rather than substance. Most self-help books could be reduced to a 3-by-5 card without losing any of the core information.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "A key remapping daemon for Linux"

innocentoldguy — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:49:46 +0000

I use Karabiner-Elements on macOS, and finding keyd was a godsend on Linux. I cannot deal with standard keyboard mappings and the lack of hold/tap keys.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

innocentoldguy — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:15:57 +0000

I made a modal editor, like Vim and Helix, in Rust that has some prose features I wanted, and with a keybinding system I find more logical and consistent.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring"

innocentoldguy — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:07:17 +0000

I've found that if I apply for any company that uses Workday, it's an immediate rejection, so I don't bother with them anymore.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Use boring languages with LLMs"

innocentoldguy — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:40:08 +0000

Neither do I.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Use boring languages with LLMs"

innocentoldguy — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:39:17 +0000

LLMs seem to have an easy time with Elixir and Phoenix in my testing.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "Migrating from Go to Rust"

innocentoldguy — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:53:18 +0000

I find Elixir's memory and threading models much more compelling than Go's for web services. There are many great libraries for Elixir as well, but if you need something else, Elixir makes rolling your own libraries very easy. I'd recommend giving Elixir a try, if you haven't already.

New comment by innocentoldguy in "VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS"

innocentoldguy — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:58:41 +0000

I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s. I wish I had something to run them on.