Hacker News: xedrac

New comment by xedrac in "YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they'll be unskippable"

xedrac — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 17:39:50 +0000

Maybe this will help people kick their doom scrolling habit.

New comment by xedrac in "Beagle, a source code management system that stores AST trees"

xedrac — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:35:52 +0000

This sounds good in theory, but it means Beagle needs to understand how to parse every language, and keep up with how they evolve. This sounds like a ton of work and a regression could be a disaster. It'll be interesting to see how this progresses though.

New comment by xedrac in "France's homegrown open source online office suite"

xedrac — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 14:55:14 +0000

> I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.

Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.

New comment by xedrac in "CEOs Say AI Is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story"

xedrac — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:14:54 +0000

You say it hasn't saved you any time because you're doing more work now - e.g. documentation. I would say that's being pedantic, but I guess the expectations shift with it, so in practice, you can't just maintain your old output level and reclaim the saved time.

New comment by xedrac in "California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years"

xedrac — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 05:01:17 +0000

Yeah, I want another 950" of snow at Alta Ski Resort again. That year - 2023 I think, was unreal!

New comment by xedrac in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

xedrac — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:33:38 +0000

Having a family solves this issue nicely. I have a wife and five kids, and none of us are lonely because we have each other. It's one of the choices I made in life that I am most grateful for.

New comment by xedrac in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

xedrac — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 17:59:56 +0000

> The current Linux desktop didn't get us there, but we believe that what was made, can be unmade.

This is a strange thing for them to say when they are pretty much a clone of Fedora Silverblue, with a few minor tweaks.

If Bluefin works for you, great. But I find their marketing rather pretentious.

New comment by xedrac in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

xedrac — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 17:43:04 +0000

I would argue that hardware support in Linux is superior to any other operating system on the planet.

New comment by xedrac in "Eat Real Food"

xedrac — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 05:08:00 +0000

There certainly is: https://www.researchwiki.org/read?id=2

New comment by xedrac in "Eat Real Food"

xedrac — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:14:33 +0000

One thing I would add to this site is to avoid seed oils like the plague. PUFA is in almost everything that is processed, and it absolutely wrecks havoc on your metabolism.

New comment by xedrac in "Extensibility: The "100% Lisp" Fallacy"

xedrac — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 04:36:26 +0000

I tried the latest nightly release AppImage on Fedora 43 and got a nice undefined symbol error:

    /usr/lib64/gio/modules/libdconfsettings.so: undefined symbol: g_assertion_message_cmpint
    Failed to load module: /usr/lib64/gio/modules/libdconfsettings.so
    /usr/lib64/gvfs/libgvfscommon.so: undefined symbol: g_task_set_static_name
    Failed to load module: /usr/lib64/gio/modules/libgvfsdbus.so

So I tried out the container version with podman and that worked. I am familiar with Emacs, so some things were natural to me. I like Lem quite a bit. But to really drive with it, I need:

    - Solid LSP support
    - Project scoped buffer switching/searching
    - Great vim keybinding support (this seems to have improved since last I tried lem years ago)
    - Tree-sitter support for the languages I care about.

According to the website, LSP support is still a WIP. I didn't want to go through the hassle of testing it out in the docker container. From what I can tell, there is no project scoping for buffers, but I might be wrong.

All in all, a big improvement from a few years ago when I last tried it!

New comment by xedrac in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

xedrac — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:23:27 +0000

Yes! I love growing my own food. I have 1/4 acre with 10 fruit trees, 12 grape vines, and a 20×60' vegetable patch.

New comment by xedrac in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

xedrac — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:37:32 +0000

I'll take my sprawling suburb with a big yard to grow ample food any day over a densely populated and carefully planned cityscape. With the advent of cheaper solar panels and electric vehicles, it's not a big issue.

New comment by xedrac in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

xedrac — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:16:27 +0000

Any privacy benefits of blocking ads are incidental compared to the usability improvements it brings. I have near zero tolerance for ads.

New comment by xedrac in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

xedrac — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:11:47 +0000

I would go as far to say that ad blockers are the primary value proposition of Firefox at this point. If they lose that, I have little reason to use it on my phone or my workstations.

New comment by xedrac in "The Tor Project is switching to Rust"

xedrac — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 06:01:42 +0000

I've written C++ for 15 years. It's the language I have the most experience with. And yes, pattern matching is a must, particularly for any language that has sum types.

New comment by xedrac in "The Tor Project is switching to Rust"

xedrac — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 15:47:46 +0000

I agree it probably won't make it faster. But there is absolutely no comparison when it comes to safety/stability. I've written a ton of C code, and it's just not even close. Rust really outshines C and C++ in this regard, and by a very large margin too.

New comment by xedrac in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

xedrac — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:26:23 +0000

Both can be true. The question is, do the benefits outweigh the consequences? I'm of the opinion that parents need to help regulate teen exposure, not the government. It does feel a bit like censorship.

New comment by xedrac in "Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg"

xedrac — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 05:10:24 +0000

While I generally think constructive criticism is usually the right choice, I suspect Github will never get the message unless there are some very strongly worded criticisms. In Andrew's defense, he did post some constructive evidence of things he considered problematic.

New comment by xedrac in "Git 3.0 will use main as the default branch"

xedrac — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 02:51:08 +0000

I've never felt more like a slave than under the tyranny of a bad scrum master.