No judgement either way, I get that developers want to be compensated for their time. I just always found the difference in culture curious. I guess it's because if you're willing to spend the extra premium for Apple products, you're probably also willing to spend a little extra premium on the software too.

I am also part of some very niche communities on the internet, and although they are small they are certainly thriving.

I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".

https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2025-06-05-green...

> According to the latest edition of the report, electricity consumption by data centers — which power AI development and deployment, among other uses — increased by 12 per cent each year from 2017 to 2023, four times faster than global electricity growth.

> Four leading AI-focused companies alone saw their operational emissions increase in the reporting period by 150 per cent on average since 2020. This rise in energy that is either produced or purchased – known as Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions – underscores the urgent need to manage AI's environmental impact.

> In total, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions reported by the 166 digital companies covered by the report contributed 0.8 per cent of all global energy-related emissions in 2023.

It's worth noting that it's not all gloom and doom. As the report optimistically notes:

> Renewable energy adoption: 23 companies operated on 100 per cent renewable energy in 2023, up from 16 in 2022.

> Dedicated climate reporting: 49 companies released standalone climate reports, signaling greater transparency.

> Scope 3 consideration: The number of companies publishing targets on indirect emissions from supply chains and product use rose from 73 to 110, showing increasing awareness of industry impacts.

So the environmental impact is alarming, but at least companies seem to be growing more conscientious about it. We must continue to hold tech companies accountable for their environmental impact, and keep pushing for renewable energy.

Now I realize I am going against HN Guidelines by focusing on style over substance, so to tie this into the content of the article:

The lack of capital letters makes me feel lost in a sea of stream-of-consciousness, much like an infinite stream of Instagram reels. Capitalization makes everything more readable. In contrast, social media doesn't want to be readable, it just wants to be absorbed.

Of course language is always evolving, and we are right to sometimes eschew outdated conventions. However, capitalization exists for a good reason. Capital letters mark the beginning of a sentence more clearly than a simple period. They stick out and give your eyes something to latch onto when scanning the page. In addition, capitalizing proper nouns sets them apart, drawing attention to non-standard words.

Capitalization smooths the reading experience with structure and boundaries...which it sounds like the author could use a bit more of in their life.

A farmer with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage must cross a river by boat. The boat can carry only the farmer and a single item. The wolf is vegetarian. If left unattended together, the wolf will eat the cabbage, but will not eat the goat. Unattended, the goat will eat the cabbage. How can they cross the river without anything being eaten?

Would rather eat poo that tastes exactly like chocolate, or poo that tastes exactly like poo?

Fortunately I think these days there are a lot more options for kids to learn programming, but back then the options were pretty limited.

The sales lady gave us a hard sell on their "complete package" which had basic C programming but also included a bunch of unnecessary topics like Microsoft Excel, etc. When I tried to ask if I could skip all that and just skip to more advanced programming topics, she was adamant that this wasn't an option; she downplayed my achievements trying to say I basically knew nothing and needed to start from the beginning.

Most of all, I recall her saying something like "So what, you made a calculator? That's so simple, anybody could make that!"

However in the end I was naive, she was good at sales, and I was desperate for knowledge, so we signed up. However sure enough the curriculum was mostly focused on learning basic Microsoft Office products, and the programming sections barely scraped the surface of computer science; in retrospect, I doubt there was anybody there qualified to teach it at all. The only real lesson I learned was not to trust salespeople.

Thank god it's a lot easier for kids to just teach themselves programming these days online.

A similar but related lesson: the best way to teach something is to design a task that is just difficult enough that the learner can figure it out on their own.

When I was reading parenting books in preparation for my own kids, this is one consistent theme that kept coming up, sometimes called "scaffolding." The idea is that you provide a safe environment, design a task that is just the right level of difficulty, then let the child figure it out themselves. (For example, rather than directly holding a kid climbing up a ladder, let them climb it by themselves while you stand by to catch them just in case.) As a result, they develop more independence, self-confidence, and the lessons stick.

"Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life." -- Jean Piaget

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41441087

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Glad I'm not the only one! Despite programming for over a decade, I still mix up the order of `update` and `condition` sometimes in `(initialization, condition, update)` for loops. Probably because I spent too much time with Python and became so accustomed to only using `for x in y` style loops.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/27/us/required-reading-smith...

For example, public Minecraft servers often get harassed by cheaters and griefers. Some servers try to circumvent this with all sorts of complicated anti-cheating mods and moderation tools... but ultimately the easiest solution is to just have a whitelisted server with only people you trust. This tends to work better because every player is accountable, and has the bonus side effect of fostering a community of people who actually know each other.

Private, moderately sized, self-policed communities really do seem like the only sure-fire approach to avoiding cheaters in online multiplayer games. Otherwise it's just a constant cat-and-mouse game with the cheaters usually coming out on top.

> Driven by the frustration of creating charts within design applications and inspired by typefaces such as Beowolf and PicLig, Travis Kochel saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process.

Reading between the lines, "design applications" is very likely referring mostly to Adobe InDesign and Illustrator. I can see it being useful for the (somewhat niche?) use case that the creator had, which is quickly creating simple charts within Adobe products.

[0] https://assets.vectrotype.com/specimens/Chartwell-Manual-24-...