Our eyes definitely do not see "pretty much without the color". Born and raised in Norway I've watched more aurora borealis than I care to count. On many occassions you could see all kinds of colors and dancing lights with the naked eye, very strong and vivid, too. Important to be in a dark environment without light pollution. At the arctic circle during polar night you will see northern lights that almost match the most stunning photos you have seen.
I don't get the "git has horrible user interface" crowd. Never had a problem understanding git or its commands. It's probably the least complicated tool in my box, and the one that has given me least trouble.
What exactly is so bad about the ux?
Are the ones having trouble people that's never used another CVS? Is it CLI aversion?
> Are the ones having trouble people that's never used another CVS?
I constantly struggle with git. It's the single tool I use daily that I actively hate.
I think my trouble is the opposite of your speculation here: I think that I'm tripped up because I'm very familiar with a number of other version control systems, and git works nothing like them while at the same time trying to use the same terminology as them. I suspect I need to "unlearn" all other VCSes to understand git, but that's hard to do when I also need to use other VCSes.
But I'm not sure. This is something I've put a lot of time into understanding, because I have a serious "git block" and keep trying to work through it. This explanation is as close as I can get, but feels incomplete.
CLI aversion certainly doesn't enter into it, as I prefer command line tools, and slapping a GUI in front of git doesn't make using it any easier for me.
In any case, I find git to be baffling, opaque, confusing, and extremely nervous-making. The two things that strike terror in my heart are the possibility of messing everything up, and having to do merges.
Saying this is not bashing git. My difficulties here are personal issues. I just have yet to be successful overcoming them.
Hi @Fizzadar and congrats on making this and getting it out the door; kudos!
As you craft your "Why this and not Ansible" content, you might actually state clearly what you already noted on the Performance page, namely: "One of the reasons pyinfra was started was performance of agent-less tools at the time." If I read that, it'd instantly make me want to stick around and read some more, play with pyinfra, etc. BTW, i will be playing with it anyway, but just wanted to point out that you likely won;t need to start from scratch for copy (on a comparison or answering "Why this and not Ansible" content). Cheers!
I found the article to be terrible, and his school building analogy falls flat on its ass. Both junior and senior developers can and should contribute to open source, for a variety of good reasons and there are good ways to go on about it.
I don’t think the article is terrible, but it does lean on that analogy a little bit too much IMO. It is worth inspecting where schools and programs differ.
If you could clone a school essentially for free, and also a poorly constructed school was not at risk of killing a bunch of kids, I guess we’d be much less skeptical of amateurs building schools.
I do think people write programs best when they are the primary audience, so the idea of just, like, going around with the explicit intent of finding open source projects to contribute to seems a bit misguided. But the stakes are not very high. If nothing else I imagine most open source projects must be able to ignore non-useful contributions, right?
I think you missed the point, and didn't actually read (or, more charitably, understand) what the author said. Your last sentence is actually a good summary of the article!
The problem is when someone wants to contribute primarily because they think it will be good for their resume, or even just for a more amorphous "I feel like I should give back" type reason. These sorts of motivations often result in contributions that end up being a drag on a maintainer's time, with little upside. People coming at it from this angle usually don't become dedicated contributors who grow and improve over time. They become a time and energy sink.
I've unfortunately witnessed this firsthand many times in my 20+ years of open source involvement.
It's more that I don't agree with what he considers the four or so proper ways to contribute. I also know of longstanding and highly valued contributors who started out in ways the author disapproves of.
why are we inspecting the intentions of the contributor so much? Why do we need to show this piousness in our reasons to get a PR merged? Don't you see the unnecessary barrier here?
Edit: Changed author to contributor as it can be confused as the author of the article.
Rust... what is it good for?
"Systems programming" ...
Rust is not good for raw performance.
Neither for prototyping and iteration.
Personally I think operating systems (kernels) should be as performant as possible, and C/C++ has been good enough for decades.
Anyone really unhappy with Linux/BSD/Windows/macOS performance?
What systems are we talking about that benefits from Rust?
Advanced weapon systems that should absolutely not fail?
Controllers for air planes? Traffic controllers? Radar?
Power grid?
Google, fb, amazon, etc. use C/C++ to squeeze the most performance out of anything I/O heavy, and security is not an issue that deep in the stack, that's not the exploitation layer.
Ok, we're going from a bunch of complaints about Rust being bad for fast prototypes for indie development to the idea that Rust is bad at everything. This is silly.
"Syzbot and the Tale of a Thousand Kernel Bugs" [1] is my favorite talk on this subject. The Linux kernel is adding security bugs faster than they can be fixed. This is an unsustainable situation--it is not "good enough"--and nobody really has any ideas to significantly improve things beyond adoption of memory safety.
> Ok, we're going from a bunch of complaints about Rust being bad for fast prototypes for indie development to the idea that Rust is bad at everything.
No, not at all, that's not what I meant. I think it's forte for now is better security at the cost of some performance and productivity (iteration speed).
> Anyone really unhappy with Linux/BSD/Windows/macOS performance?
I wasn't unhappy with Windows' performance in the 90s until I saw BeOS. This is the kind of thing we're in the dark about what could be because the faster, rewritten fron scratch, free from API baggage systems are nowhere to be found.
Haven't used BeOS, but to clarify, I do have issues with Windows and performance, especially general input latency and responsiveness when compared to Linux, as I use both daily. But overall I think it's decent, and at the very least, not the fault of the language used, but more about legacy issues and technical debt. Anyone having worked with winapi and mfc knows the codebase is a mess.
Well, as far as I can tell, in the big language shootout (which is still the only decent language benchmark I know, but if you have others, I'd be happy to read them), in all the individual benchmarks I've looked at Rust is either first or within 3% performance of being first. So, this suggests that Rust is actually pretty good for raw performance.
In addition, I know that I'm way more productive for prototyping and iteration in Rust than in C, C++ (and I used to write C++ code professionally for a while), JavaScript, Go, Python (and I've been writing professionally in these three languages for a while now) etc. I _might_ be more productive in Java or OCaml. Yes, this is entirely anecdotal and it depends heavily on the kind of problems you're dealing with. I tend to focus on problems that have complicated invariants, and for which reproducing/pinpointing the issue in a debugger is a big annoyance.
> Google, fb, amazon, etc. use C/C++ to squeeze the most performance out of anything I/O heavy, and security is not an issue that deep in the stack, that's not the exploitation layer.
Interestingly, all these companies are migrating some of their systems to Rust. This suggests that they find the language convincing enough.
> Interestingly, all these companies are migrating some of their systems to Rust. This suggests that they find the language convincing enough.
I feel most large companies and some smaller ones are interested in trying out Rust, it's trendy. But time will show for which parts the switch was advantageous; and I'm very interested in the findings. The premise of the language is indeed convincing a lot of people. People do however, choose the wrong tool for the wrong job all the time, OP's article in point.
> Personally I think operating systems (kernels) should be as performant as possible, and C/C++ has been good enough for decades.
If that how you want your OS, that's fair enough. But I think a lot of people are happy to trade (to some degree, at least) performance for security, and would prefer that their OSs are as secure as possible first, and as performant as they can be second.
No, I'm not concerned with Linux/BSD/macOS performance, it's pretty good (I took Windows out because it does have performance issues [0]!). What I am concerned about is security bugs, memory errors, buffer overflows etc, all of the things Rust attempts to solve [1].
I think for weapons & flight control, ATC systems, we already have Ada that's designed for "can't fail systems".
I agree, operating systems should have less out-of-bounds memory issues. Is that Rust's place? Replacing the parts of OS code where it's OK to sacrifice some performance?
Ada has a foothold for sure, but there's a surprising amount of C++ in military planes and weapon systems.
I didn't read [0], but the parts of Windows that's poorly performing is not the fault of the language.
> What systems are we talking about that benefits from Rust? Advanced weapon systems that should absolutely not fail? Controllers for air planes? Traffic controllers? Radar? Power grid?
You seem to be listing niche, specialised systems where a failure would be critical. But a simpler answer that is missing: mainstream operating systems — as I said, both Windows and Linux have been investing in Rust. Mainly as a way to increase memory safety.
Of course, it's extremely subjective, but how about naming a few artists who have appeared in the last few years that you think make better music and are more talented musicians than those who came before?
There's a tremendous amount of talent in contemporary music. Comparing musician against musician is silly.
Some of these have been around longer than others.
Jacob Collier, Vulfpeck, Cool Sounds, Sylvie, Bobbing, Abigail Lapell, Big Theif, Tank and the Bangas, Richard Houghten, Kurt Vile, Thundercat, Little Simz, Nora Brown, Barrie, Dominique Dumont, Lusine, Cory Wong, Billy Strings, DoomCannon, Cory Henry, Mark Lettieri, Nate Smith, Yussef Dayes, Yumi Zouma, limperatrice, Slow Pulp, Vetiver, Bibio, Altin Gun, King Gizzard, Julian Lage.
I could go on.. give me an artist you like or a genre and I could likely find you new music.
Let me preface by saying I listen to a lot of genres, but that jazz & funk is not my "main expertise".
Of course there's no denying we have lots of creative and talented new musicians, but very seldom do I think they beat "the greats", or are even on par. Usually they feel more like knockoffs, and I find I'd rather go back and listen to the original instead.
I'm not familiar with these artists, but I had a listen to about 20 of them, and I will say that I can hear where a lot of them got their inspiration from, but they (not all of them) feel lightweight compared to artists from back in the day.
In these genres I'd much rather listen to the following artists than any of the ones you mentioned:
Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Townes Van Zandt, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Isley Brothers, Johnny Cash, Coltrane, Gillespie, Miles Davis.
"Nate Smith" in particular sounds so much like your stereotypical modern artist. Everything from the production, melodies, his voice and vocal chain sounds like at least 20 other artists. Very uninspired in my humble opinion. This is what we can expect AI to produce.
I think you may have found a different Nate Smith than the one goosejuice was referencing. They were likely referring to the drummer named Nate Smith (he's collaborated with at least one of the groups mentioned).
The guy has a lot of interesting work, but I think the thing that blew me away the most is the composition 'Warble'. If memory serves, that's the piece where he explored 64th note and dotted 32nd note displacements in order to mimic J Dilla's 'wonky' swing. I've tried capturing the Dilla swing; it's nearly impossible to do on the drums without sounding like you don't know how to play the instrument. Nate Smith, on the other hand, makes it sound fantastic.
Of course they were inspired by existing artists and by a greater set of them! This is central to my argument that music is only going to get better with greater exposure.
Those are all great artists you listed but to attempt to quantify that they are any more talented or creative than contemporaries is a silly exercise. It's art.
This is a small list of random artists that I've listened to over the past few years. Jacob Collier is a perfect example of exceptional generational talent who not only is technically mind blowing but also incredibly original. I bet every one of those artists you listed would say the same about him (if they haven't passed of course).
Nate Smith likewise would be welcomed as the drummer in any one of those bands. Did you listen to the right Nate Smith?
I don't know, maybe you're just not hearing what I'm hearing. Watch Cory Henry on Snarky's Lingus. Jacob Collier do his recent crowd work with the NSO. Cory Wong talk about Vulfpeck and their MSG show and never rehearsing. Hiromi and Tank and the Bangas on NPR's tiny desks. I'd say Abigail Lapell adds tremendously to the folk of the era you are referencing.
Watered down is just not how I'd describe any of the musicians I listed
Show me someone great who when you go to their inspiration you can't find they themselves very much creating watered down versions of their inspirations.
You seem hyper focused on comparing all that you hear to what you already know you like. If you really want to appreciate new music, cut it out. You're introducing bias at the outset. If you approach a new artist as if their work is isolated, and give it some time to settle in, I think you'll be surprised.
At the risk of just mouthing off my favorites, there are a lot of genres today are the best they've ever been. The post-punk revival out of the UK is great. The "chambery" Black Country, New Road and the "mathy" Black Midi are some of the best we've seen and there are other exceptional talents in that scene. Noisy-shoegazy-indie rock is also a great scene right now with artists like Jane Remover and Mitski releasing what will be important albums for ages to come.
Note, Mitski debuted in 2013 but most of the strongest records over the past few years, from hip-hop, pop to experimental rock to metal, seems to be by artists or individual who've been making music for around a decade-ish roughly. Maybe this disqualifies the whole lot and you're trying to highlight some weakness in the debuts of the past few years. If so, maybe you should wait a decade? If not, I can assert that some of the most talented artists of history are making music today. By any metric.
I could spend hours writing a response to this. I am mid 30 and my style of music changes with every season I am not within trends but most songs I enjoy most are not older than 3 or 4 years. Not all of them are well known.
Even something established like Punk reached new heights with more modern approaches (ex. Sleaford mods, Team Scheisse in German)
I think music is very subjective still but new music never stopped to impress me.
I just discovered Team Scheisse a week ago (they are from city!) and now I come across them on HN, what a coincidence (obviously this might be the Baader-Meinhof-Phenomenon at play but since they are a comparatively small band I would say the effect is rather small)!
