Been nerd sniped recently so am working on a Rust version of markdownlint-cli2. I'm tired of having a node dependency in my projects and this seems like a constrained enough problem space that I'll actually get around to doing it.
Readit Newssimonsaysso commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025) · Posted by u/david927
Would love to read a blog post on this. 10 - 15 hours is probably too much but I bet if I learned how to do it I could figure out how to optimize it with all the tools that are available today. Would love if TurboTax just died because everyone figured out they could do taxes on their own with just a little supplemental help from local models or something similar.
10-15 hours is NUTS. I do mine by hand every year and I can get them done in about 3 hours. I would say my taxes are nontrivial thought certainly not super complicated (no K1s)
simonsaysso commented on Rust vs Go: A Hands-On Comparison shuttle.rs/blog/2023/09/2... · Posted by u/mre
That seems like a fair article.
The error handling in Go is SO verbose. When reading my code (or even reviewing other people's code) in order to understand at a high level what is going on, I feel like I'm squinting through a mesh wire window.
Compare this example in Go:
city := c.Query("city")
latlong, err := getLatLong(city)
if err != nil {
c.JSON(http.StatusInternalServerError, gin.H{"error": err.Error()})
return
}
weather, err := getWeather(*latlong)
if err != nil {
c.JSON(http.StatusInternalServerError, gin.H{"error": err.Error()})
return
}
weatherDisplay, err := extractWeatherData(city, weather)
if err != nil {
c.JSON(http.StatusInternalServerError, gin.H{"error": err.Error()})
return
}
c.HTML(http.StatusOK, "weather.html", weatherDisplay)
let lat_long = fetch_lat_long(¶ms.city).await?;
let weather = fetch_weather(lat_long).await?;
let display = WeatherDisplay::new(params.city, weather);
Prototyping even small applications in Go is verbose. And worse still, error prone. It's easy to be lazy and not check for errors and oops 3 months in your code fails catastrophically.
I know a lot of people like Go on here but in my mind Go only makes sense as a replacement for Python (static compilation, better error handling than Python, faster etc). If you don't know exactly what you want to build, maybe it is faster to prototype it in Go? I still would reach for Rust in those instances but that's just me. For large applications there's no question in my mind that Rust is a better choice.
Edit:
people have pointed out that I'm not comparing the same thing, which is true, I apologize for the confusing. But even code where Go propagates the errors, it is much more verbose (and my point still stands)
err := db.Get(&latLong, "SELECT lat, long FROM cities WHERE name = $1", name)
if err == nil {
return latLong, nil
}
latLong, err = fetchLatLong(name)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
err = insertCity(db, name, *latLong)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
This has been my primary objection with Go, as well. I wonder if it's just a lack of practice and that I'd eventually git gud, but I find it so hard to flow through code to get a general idea of what's going on. It's basically impossible to use code "paragraphs" to separate logical groupings of functionality because of the `if err != nil` blocks, and leads to a very choppy reading experience. With any non-trivial logic, I've found Go to be detrimental to my understanding of what's going on.
simonsaysso commented on Harman How to Listen (2011) harmanhowtolisten.blogspo... · Posted by u/Tomte
When mp3 encoding was a new thing, I downloaded an AB tester to see what settings I needed to use. I blind compared compressed music of my own choice using the headphone that I would be using it on.
It turned out that a bitrate of 112 Kbps was completely transparent for me. In the meantime there were forum wars on whether or not 320 was sufficient or not.
The experience humbled me. I cannot hear anything near as much as the pros (apparently) can.
I did a similar experiment on myself. For songs I knew very well on good headphones, I could reliably distinguish up to 320 kbps on MP3 and 256 kbps AAC from the lossless copy. For songs I didn’t know as well, 128 kbps AAC was usually transparent.
My takeaway from the experience was that the bitrate didn’t really matter above 128 Kbps AAC. This was me paying super close attention and trying to find flaws in the encoding, not actually listening to music. I periodically rerun the test in myself as I get better equipment (laptop DACs are quite good now, for example) and get similar results. Age will be a limiting factor soon as it takes my hearing.
simonsaysso commented on Praising children for effort rather than ability (2021) oxfordlearning.com/praisi... · Posted by u/charles_f
> I'd be pretty annoyed, as a child or not, if at every turn I'd be asked to retrospect about an accomplishment or even a failure.
I’m the complete opposite. I might be irritated if people made me relive a sore defeat too soon, but I love “stewing” in the victories.
If people ask me “amazing win man, how’d you do it?”, I’d revel in retelling the story, especially if I took a shot and was clever. “They all said my way wouldn’t work but I showed them”
Ha, and I’m the opposite in a different direction. I _hate_ positive feedback. What motivates me is failure and a fear of failure. I go out of my way to downplay accomplishments but will talk your ear off about how and why I failed or almost failed or knew about a failure condition.
Maybe the actual takeaway is to figure out what kind of feedback a child responds best to and use that most of the time. You know, paying attention to the kid.
simonsaysso commented on San Francisco: An Elitist Bubble Ignoring a Crime Epidemic? dustin-godevais.medium.co... · Posted by u/nlsvb
Why would you age out of having amenities closer to you? If anything, as you get older things should be even closer.
I would agree in principle, but from experience it seems people are less interested in the energy of the city as they age and acquire more things, and prioritize building their own space around them instead of utilizing the city around them.
simonsaysso commented on San Francisco office values fall hoover.org/research/san-f... · Posted by u/xqcgrek2
Mid west and north east basically have no natural disasters. But cold winters and hot summers. Depends on your definition of livable. I don’t mind wearing winter clothes in winter and AC in the summer.
The great appeal of San Francisco is that you don’t have to think about what you’re going to wear at least 300 days of the year. If you’re outdoorsy at all it’s very hard to go to the rest of the US and feel trapped inside. Unfortunately for me, family moved there after I moved to be close on the west coast, so I get to experience that 2 weeks every year.
I would also dispute “no natural disasters”. There are serious winter events in those regions (and crazy floods depending on where you are in the Midwest) that happen basically yearly.
I don’t think any part of the world is without significant tradeoffs, you just have to find the ones that matter to you.
simonsaysso commented on The World’s Greatest Freediver (2021) gq.com/story/freediver-al... · Posted by u/wallflower
I was lucky enough to dive Alexey and his mother 15 or so years ago.
I was terrified of swimming in open water so only joined the group for a deep dive once and my memories are mostly people talking and laughing on the boat, but I remember feeling crazy when people talked about air control. What do you mean I have to exhale into my mask at a certain depth? And I should inhale it back as I’m coming up? I need to take _too big_ of a breath on the surface so I can distribute it as the pressure increases?
With just a little coaching from Alexey’s mother and some encouragement from my family, a high school kid who couldn’t hold his breathe for much more than a minute spent almost 2 minutes underwater and dove to 19 meters on his first day.
I’m still terrified of deep water, but I gained a respect for the “weird” sports out there. It’s often a bunch of people just trying to have fun, and sometimes they turn out to be really, really good at what they do.
Well, I sometimes wish I was born an eagle because I like travelling, flying and chasing the sun.
I am not going to try to have a surgery to make it happen.
There is nobody with no gender, there are rarities with natural double gender features, but strictly speaking, nature assigns a gender during early pregnancy.
All the ideas about gender changes occur to people later on and based on personal feelings/factors. The mind is something that develops by education and experience, not genetic urges as far I am aware.
If schools and parents would educate kids saying theres no such thing like gender and you get to choose and society lets the promoters of such go rampant, I imagine this would not lead to a net positive outcome.
You are using gender to mean both sex and gender. You are assigned a biological sex by… biology. You get to choose your own gender.
If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/, or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ?
It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with VS Code/Helix/Zed, which are pretty great out of the box, and which were built to be used as rich development environments instead of extensible text editors.
I've spent months tweaking Neovim/Emacs configs in the past and I ultimately end up conceding that I'd rather spend that time hacking on projects instead of my editor config. I do feel the pull of these editors, though. I'd love to understand what those who stick with them are doing differently, other than perhaps being more susceptible to sunk cost fallacies. :-)
The sunk cost fallacy is real.
Most important to me when I started tinkering with him was the speed/feature tradeoff, and portability. I was working on 7 machines at one point doing pretty quick edits of config files and Python scripts, so launch speed and availability across different environments drive me to vim.
Now there are alternatives, but back in 2015 these were all in their infancy. And now I _know_ vim and it keep adding more features. The incremental cost of adding language server support is much less than the cost of learning how to move around VSCode, so my (neo)vim config keeps growing slowly but surely