I moved to another country 15 years ago, but I was never going to learn a different keyboard layout after having already been quite proficient in my previous one. And if I use e.g. a Mac at work and Linux at home, I want certain special characters to be available with the same key combinations (for some reason, that's not the case by default), otherwise I'll just confuse myself.
I thought the same as you. I arrived in a new country, paniced at the foreign keyboard, had family send me my keyboard from home ASAP. It arrived 4 weeks later. I tried to use it but my fingers had already gotten used to the foreign keyboard and it would have been more work to switch back. So, I was wrong. I did get used to it. I got so used to it that when I moved back to my home countries I kept using the foreign keyboard for ~2 years. Until I got a laptop with a local keyboard. At which point I finally switched back on my desktops.
Thanks for writing this. I hadn't clicked on the link and wasn't aware that the person you responded to was using data that's 20 years old. It's really awful that that is currently the top-rated comment.
> a lot of the comments take a particular political stance about the topic.
And oftentimes, these political stances are US-centric and don't make sense to anyone else, e.g. you might have an article about the efficacy of masks and then you'll read a dozen comments saying that "Fauci lied to us", which is completely irrelevant to anyone not living in the US (if you really wanted to generalise it, you'd have to claim that politicians in most countries lied to their people which IMHO is a much harder sell, but whatever).
Whilst much of Europe is well past climate denialism, with the exception of the petro-fascist state of Russia, there's still an active English-speaking denialist community in the UK, less so in politics than in the largely right-wing / conservative press, with such people as Matt Ridley leading that brigade.
I spend a great deal of time reading and listening to news from across Europe, and the degree to which climate, degrowth, and energy transition are treated as mainstream topics is far ahead of the US, another petro-state.
(Notably, Norway doesn't seem to have followed the lead of other petro-states in climate denial that I'm aware, though its own oil-wealth legacy is distinctive on several grounds.)
If I try to put it into (very reductive) descriptive terms, I might say that the "left" puts more emphasis on the fact that people are victims of circumstances, while the "right" puts more emphasis on the idea that everyone's the architect of their own destiny.
Both of these perspectives are correct to some extent - you could argue about it endlessly, from a philosophical point of view. But it's maybe also not that surprising that people who are (to some extent) aligned with a hacker ethos and have had success in life by working on hard problems would find that second point of view much more enticing - after all, it's much more satisfying to think that your success is due to your own virtue than due to your luck (when it the end, it may very well be both).
There are of course also sometimes elements of hypocrisy in it, in situations where HN users feel they have less agency. While there is a strong (though definitely not unchallenged) sentiment among a segment of the userbase that companies should do whatever they want when it comes to their products and business practices, you very rarely see that same sentiment applied when it comes to things that affect developers in their daily work, such as home office, meetings, Scrum, etc.
I have no idea what GP was trying to say with his "it's mostly European users" comment, but as a European who does worry about climate change, I don't think that climate change denialism is somehow less extreme in the US than in Europe.
I agree that the tone shifts depending on the user base, but your comment appears to imply that there are more fringe takes when European users are online. I don't think that's the case and I also wouldn't know why Europeans are somehow more fringe (we do tend to have different cultural expectations, but "climate change denialism" is, I think, not one of them).
I didn't mean that Europeans make more fringe takes. I think the rate is consistent with American users.
IMO, the difference is there is less usage during peak EMEA hours, which makes fringe takes more prominent and visible, but by the time West Coast is using HN, that is peak overlap time for all users of HN globally.
> The whole COVID Pandemic and the 2020 election definetly brought a lot of nuts out of the woodwork, and they never left.
HN was downright insufferable during the pandemic, it really made me think about leaving. Thankfully, nowadays the "bad" topics (mostly politically very polarised ones) tend to be fewer and can more easily be avoided.
Same here, except it just made me combative on HN.
I'm waiting for the day dang blocks my account for a violation AND deletes all my posts, because YC won't honor a CCPA request without proof of identity, and I'm a bit too close for comfort with the YC community so I do not want to furnish that to him or YC.
If there was a way to filter accounts created after 2021, or with a polarity score, I'd be happy staying on here, but at this point it's a form of social media addiction due to the dopamine rush of the occasionally level headed conversation and debate.
> Cherry-picking a highly successful, well-known example doesn't prove a point.
There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of successful scientific discoveries that went into something as complicated as the moon landing, and if you still don't think that's convincing, just look at the world around you - which looks just radically different from the world of, say, just a couple hundred years ago.
I'm also a bit skeptical about Kotlin multiplatform, but I haven't seen it become an issue so far. Spring e.g. fully supports Kotlin (and so do tools like Gradle) and I've never had any issue with things not working.
Calling Java code from Kotlin may not always be 100% idiomatic but it's still by far the best interop between two different languages that I've ever seen (compare that e.g. to Scala). The interop is more than good enough to be viable for a migration scenario where old stuff is written in Java and new things are written in Kotlin - I definitely wouldn't recommend keeping writing both new Java and new Kotlin code, though.
Build times can be an issue (though hopefully improved with the new compiler), but incremental compilation helps (something that maven unfortunately sucks at, so it's better to use gradle). And in any case, the compiler does more (useful) work in Kotlin, so I think it's ok that it takes a bit longer.
> that's just operator overloading and it exists in many statically typed languages too
My point is that Python's "typing" guarantees allow a caller to call a function with the wrong type, and get back a wrong answer and/or silently lose data.
Strong typing is pointless if the language is unable to actually prevent common footguns, like passing in the incorrect type.
I'm moving more and more to the opinion that arguing about the spectrum of strong <-> weak typing is stupid, because type utility is on the spectrum of static <-> dynamic, with dynamic being full of footguns.
I moved to another country 15 years ago, but I was never going to learn a different keyboard layout after having already been quite proficient in my previous one. And if I use e.g. a Mac at work and Linux at home, I want certain special characters to be available with the same key combinations (for some reason, that's not the case by default), otherwise I'll just confuse myself.
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