jerrac (u/jerrac) - Readit News

jerrac commented on Ask HN: What is our history on trying to standardize configuration languages? · Posted by u/jerrac

bigyabai · 3 months ago

NixOS "solves" this, albeit with a pretty archaic configuration language and deep buy-in. The end result is that I now keep a Git repo with 95% of my Linux config represented as modules. Then I install each module as-needed (eg. terminal.nix for terminal config, desktop.nix for desktop config) for the devices I use and rebuild it with that set of modules.

Works great, even with my laptop, desktop and server sharing the same config. Versioned rollback + nixpkgs has kept me happy for about 4 years with this setup.

jerrac · 3 months ago

Wouldn't that only work on NixOS systems? I'm not sure that counts as standardization.

That said, someday I need to give NixOS a try.

jerrac commented on Ask HN: What is our history on trying to standardize configuration languages? · Posted by u/jerrac

synack · 3 months ago

There are 15 competing standards: https://xkcd.com/927

Augeas [1] does a decent job of translating various formats into a common AST which you can edit and write back out, but setting this up is often more trouble than just editing/templating whatever config and moving on with your life.

Many new projects go straight for YAML/TOML/JSON/INI as they're widely understood and relatively easy to parse. I think this is as close to standardization as you'll get.

OpenBSD's developers have gone in the other direction, defining domain specific configuration languages for each of their daemons. They're all different, but they look similar enough that it feels like a cohesive system. You can look at the yacc grammar and see how httpd's config [2] got started as a fork of relayd [3].

[1] http://augeas.net/

[2] https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.sbin/httpd/pa...

[3] https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.sbin/relayd/p...

jerrac · 3 months ago

> There are 15 competing standards: https://xkcd.com/927 Heh, that is pretty much the answer I was expecting. :)

Augeas seems interesting. I'll have to look into it a bit more than my cursory glance at the github issue queue. :)

Thanks!

jerrac commented on Show HN: I built a knife steel comparison tool new.knife.day/blog/knife-... · Posted by u/p-s-v

whalesalad · 4 months ago

Tangent: I had a decent benchmade griptilian folding knife for the last 10 or so years. Wasn’t the sharpest knife but I loved the form factor, grip, etc.

I left it on the bed cover of my truck the other day while unboxing some towing equipment in a parking lot and took off accidentally.

Looked at Amazon to replace it and they’re going for $200+ now. Is this just Amazon tax? Tarrifs? Something else? No way in hell I paid that for it initially. It was probably $50! It’s listed at $160 on their website right now.

Why?!?! It’s a simple plastic body and a small piece of steel. Make this make sense.

jerrac · 4 months ago

Look up the Ritter Houge, or something like that. I think it's a less (maybe) expensive version of the griptilian from the same designer. I think. Could be wrong.

jerrac commented on My stackoverflow question was closed so here's a blog post about CoreWCF richardcocks.github.io/20... · Posted by u/eterm

zahlman · 4 months ago

I fully expect nobody in this comment section to care about the CoreWCF content. (I don't even know offhand what that is.) In my experience, people love talking about Stack Overflow in places that are about programming but aren't Stack Overflow, so.

(Edit: it seems people do care about CoreWCF ITT. That's nice to see.)

> Screaming into the void of the blogosphere is catharsis for getting my SO question closed.

That's fine. Almost everyone who comes to SO, in my experience, has a fundamentally wrong idea about how the site is intended to work. That includes people who don't have a question and only want to post answers. Unfortunately, it's difficult to explain because people find the model unintuitive - the UI affords using the place just like many others, even though the site was created exactly to get away from frustrations caused by older models (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107). And the real objective is a synthesis of many not-always-compatible ideas (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770). My personal sense is that the community didn't really get a handle on "what SO is" until around the time that new question volume peaked (way back in 2014).

Even then, people can hang around for years and not really get it (e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224) - in large part because the policies have been inconsistently applied on a volunteer basis, and the people who are allowed to e.g. cast close votes are vastly outnumbered.

We generally don't care about people not liking the Stack Overflow model while discussing it off-site. There's far too much of that to worry about. But that doesn't mean we'll change to accommodate everyone else. The entire point is to provide something that isn't available everywhere you look: a polished artifact, an organized repository of commonly-needed, high-quality answers to clear, focused, practical questions.

Do we accomplish that goal? Hell no, not by a long shot. But there are some real gems in there - and a few of them have millions of views. And as the rate of new questions slows, users who put on the "curator" hat become able to keep on top of the incoming queue, filter through for what's of value (and not a duplicate), and even turn attention towards the old Q&A to improve it (incidentally, a lot of that work is rounding up old duplicates that went unnoticed).

> I had forgotten that any external links are a big no-no in SO land, so my question immediately attracted 2 close votes.

The problem isn't simply including an external link (we'll happily just edit those out if they aren't necessary). The problem occurs when a question appears to depend upon the externally linked content. We can't accept that (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254428) because of link rot and licensing issues (someone who wants to answer you often needs to be able to cite the code; posting on-site automatically licenses the content appropriately, per the terms of service) but mainly because of scope - a question that's suitable for the Stack Exchange format would fit neatly within the actual question text.

We don't want to do detailed analysis of the problem you encountered, even if we're capable of it, because questions are for everyone. They need to be able to reflect a problem that other people could a) have; b) plausibly search for; and c) recognize if they found it. Answers to a question need to make sense in general to people who would ask - not just in the specific context of one person's original problem. In short, we want a question, not a problem - and extracting a proper question starts with (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/261592) your own analysis.

"How do I do X?" questions are usually much easier to ask in the format, and are very valuable and can end up very well regarded, even when they're on very basic topics. But "what went wrong with Y code?" is not fully refined. What we're really looking for is more like "why does Y' code construct do Z?" - where the specific, exact cause of failure (https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example) is extracted from your own debugging session (along with reproducing input and actual vs expected output).

> Two days later my question got it's third vote for closure, and remains unanswered and now closed forever.

This is literally not how Stack Overflow works. The OP has at least (https://stackoverflow.com/help/auto-deleted-questions) 9 days to fix the question and nominate it for reopening until it gets "deleted"; but even then it's a soft deletion (delisting) which is still reversible - you can find the question from your personal listing (https://stackoverflow.com/users/deleted-questions/current while logged in; or replace 'current' with your user ID), edit and nominate for undeletion.

The established policy is that we intentionally close questions that don't meet standards (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476) as quickly as possible (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263). The main point of this is to prevent the sort of people (notice that https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271684 is over 10 years old; and the original complaint https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731 is from before the official launch, during the private beta) who would otherwise hang out on a traditional discussion forum 12 hours a day from trying to read the OP's mind, repost the same basic explanation of the same basic idea dozens of times, etc.

(Unfortunately, the incentive system is completely broken - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 - and the company's interests are not aligned with the community, so this is a losing battle.)

And, in fact, your question has been reopened, as of about 3/4 of an hour after your comment that I'm replying to. Stack Overflow is not at all immune to external pressure - after all, many regulars there are also on HN and other usual-suspect sites.

It also looks like your edits have actually improved the question. In particular, adding in a definite conclusion from your profiling attempt.

(We understand that a lot of people in a situation like yours wouldn't necessarily know how to use a profiler and wouldn't necessarily be able to come up with a theory about what's wrong. That isn't our problem. We aren't offering tech support. It's a bitter pill for almost everyone, but Stack Overflow by design is not there to make your code work. It's there to answer questions that arise during your attempt. And a question like yours, properly refined, can help those other people.)

jerrac · 4 months ago

> Almost everyone who comes to SO, in my experience, has a fundamentally wrong idea about how the site is intended to work.

True. I quit trying to do anything there once I realized that SO was fundamentally not useful to me. It advertised as a gamified Q&A platform, but was actually a knowledge base psudeo wiki thing structured in way that didn't lend itself to answering the questions I needed answered.

So, I think a lot of the negative reactions are deserved, because SO looks like something it isn't.

People want a place to get help. SO looks like a place to get help. But SO is a place to ask for help only if your problem fits a specific set of requirements. And since most problems will never meet said requirements, most people can never actually get help on SO.

I post this in part because I'm still saltly about how much time I wasted trying to get help only to get downvoted, but also because if SO actually wants to do what they say, they really need to restructure into something that actually looks like what they want to be.

My suggestion would be to have two sites, one that is actually a general Q&A site like what everyone is after, the other is the kind of knowledge repository that SO wants to be. Then you just promote the really good questions from the Q&A site into the other site.

I'd also recommend ending the whole "downvote" idea. I have yet to see it not result in cliques and in discriminating against viewpoints the people with downvote permissions don't like. Let a lack of upvotes cause poor content to drop to the bottom.

jerrac commented on I spent 18 years in the Linux console eugene-andrienko.com/en/i... · Posted by u/blakespot

darrmit · 8 months ago

This is reminiscent of my own experience with Linux, but I didn't go the developer route and instead ended up in product management via sysadmin and consulting. Through the years, the thousands of hours I spent experimenting with Linux in ~2004-2008 as a teenager has stuck with me. I fondly remember printing the Gentoo install guide out and installing it offline because I had some early Linksys wireless adapter that was super flaky.

jerrac · 8 months ago

Gentoo was the first distro I got working with internet access because it supported the little phone line based network my family had, so I could share dial-up via the parents windows computer. And, yes, I also printed off the install guide.

Man, I should find time to dig into Gentoo again.

jerrac commented on You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase consumer.org.nz/articles/... · Posted by u/lancewiggs

Aurornis · 8 months ago

> In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS?

That’s not really a minor point. It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.

Even for certain CAD software I use that has Mac and Windows versions, the Windows version feels so much more performant and responsive. I’ll switch to Windows for anything serious.

Also, YMMV, but in the past 5 or so years my Windows workstation has felt less buggy and more stable than my Macs. I’ve dealt with a lot of annoying quirks on the Mac over the years where the only solution is to wait for the next update and hope it’s fixed. Even today, accessing network file shares is incredibly buggy on Mac in certain cases.

jerrac · 8 months ago

I daily drive Linux for everything except games, and gaming on Linux has come far enough that I'll be switching over soon. My 60+ father also uses Linux for most of what he does.

And, yes, software working on your OS is not a minor point. That's the whole reason I used to go with the "best tool for the job" approach. Windows Recall is what changed that for me. I can't see using an OS with spyware built in as a "feature".

In my opinion, Apple is no more trustworthy than Microsoft, so...

> It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal.

So, the number of video editing, photo editing, CAD, gaming, and so on tools that work on Linux has grown a LOT. It's not just for basic stuff. You can do almost anything you need to on Desktop Linux. Yes, a lot of things are rough around the edges, but they're that way because people haven't invested in them, not because they're bad tools.

jerrac commented on You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase consumer.org.nz/articles/... · Posted by u/lancewiggs

jerrac · 8 months ago

Makes me wonder what it would take for governments to actually hit Microsoft hard enough for it to hurt. I remember when they were hit with anti-trust fines here in the USA due to how they were bundling Internet Explorer as the default browser. I mean, did they ever stop? I can't recall ever turning on a new Windows install in the past couple decades and not having IE or Edge as the default.

It also makes me wonder what it would take for IT people to finally stop gritting their teeth about having to use, or having to let others use, Windows and start just dealing with the learning curve of switching to some Linux distro. I mean, Windows Recall is spyware. If it didn't come from Microsoft, Windows Defender would be sure to mark it as malicious... What's the name for a screenshot based keylogger I wonder...

I used to just figure that Windows was just all some people could use. And if that was the best tool for them, then ok. But now? I can't say that anymore. It's out and out malware at this point.

In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS? Or is there something good about Windows that you like?

jerrac commented on Show HN: Yami – An Open Source Music Player with Spotdl Integration github.com/DevER-M/yami... · Posted by u/DevER-M

c0balt · 9 months ago

Both VinylPlayer, Foss on fdroid, and Symfonium, commercial/ paid with free trial, have worked for me.

VinylPlayer even has the ability to edit Metadata of titles with multiple artists.

jerrac · 9 months ago

VinylPlayer is a fork of Phonograph. :)

Symfonium looks interesting. I think it actually does support the multiple artists and genres like I want. Thanks for the tip on that one!