I think we should ban all users until they provide 10 photos of their face from different angles and lighting. Passport and birth certificates and a lawyer letter confirming it’s really you trying to sign up under the username: LexiMax
Then all this will be synced with govs so can read all your messages. And sell to ad companies to spam you later. (They can link your phone number, email etc to you as you provided real id on all those).
And if you travel to some country that doesn’t approve what you ever said, maybe you broke their law, so you deserve a few years in prison.
And oxygen is also a poison. I don't know what's wrong with HN, but the moment there's _any_ basis for comparison, so many people here are extremely confident that there's no difference between the two things. I'm sure it's an earnestly-held belief, but it's maddening and simply incorrect.
Further, if in some contrived scenario we had to lose HN to get rid of all social media, I'd happily do it.
No, because banning social media at large probably isn't the right answer. It's certain interaction patterns that cause harm. That can be pushed back against either technologically (ex chronological feeds) or culturally (ie via moderation).
There's no perfect solution but some are significantly better than others.
> Countries have the right to cultivate this feeling among their citizens.
I disagree, because what seems to always be the logical next step is "My monoculture is superior, and deserves dominion above your monoculture, which deserves eradication. And oh by the way, if you don't like our monoculture and try to escape it, we'll invade that place too."
That's kind of what the "mono" in monoculture implies. Multiculturalism isn't an asset because it's the most stable form of soceity, rather it's best we've figured out when the alternative is bloodshed between warring tribes.
I don't see it that way. From my perspective, America would be more stable socially if it balkanized. There is a lot of tension borne of cultural heterogeneity. Coasts vs South, most of Texas vs Houston, etc. Nothing about it is positive, except maybe economically.
I guess this might lead to wars via a more cohesive national identity, like how diversity in the workplace reduces unionization efforts, but I largely doubt it would turn out so poorly.
I don't necessarily think it would. But what makes you think that a hypothetical status quo will go any better than what happened in the Roman empire? There are no great options imo.
What is the Roman Empire worse than in your mind? It lasted centuries, its literally perhaps the longest running in history. If it's the fate of the Roman Empire we have to face, then I can't wish for anything better. You can of course say it slid into dictatorship, now prove it was due to the race admixture. Anyone can read anything into the transition and fall of the Roman Empire.
Suppose a future world where all the world, every country is thoroughly mixed up by today's racial standards. There is no "white" country, no "chinese" country, no "black" country. How do you think race wars would be organized, "Lets kill all the [racist slur] bastards of this country" wait what, there's no easy country to point to, already making race war quite difficult. Or do you like having race wars?
Again, I fail to see what exactly is the "loss" or "gain" of a race existing or not? What has it ever given us? It's like religion and nationalism, very little benefits and pure destruction and waste of human life in the balance of history.
I suppose you will then say, you fear your country would become "Muslim" or insert whatever religion you hate. But Muslim is an idea it's not a race. A religion can convert a country without even a single marriage or mixup because it's an idea, so tell me again how do you feel you are safe from a foreign religion just because your "race" is different? And the nice thing is the arabs or whatever race has you wetting your bed will also have had thoroughly had to mix up with the locals by that point, already rendering them "impure". And I have you covered with a great anti-democratic solution for that: forcible state mandated atheism.
If you do believe in anti-democratic system of governance, then I propose we force every person to marry a person of a different race and forcibly make every locality thoroughly mixed up using information theoretic entropy definitions. Why not, why's mine better or worse than your idea of anti-democratic rule?
Why do you feel among all the cultures there, you know which one among them would will out. I see no point in being among my race if it's a communist or fascist country. The race has already failed me then. Hell give me aliens from mars and I'd gladly live among them if they are liberal democratic and capitalistic. To me these three principles are paramount, the identity of the agents executing them is irrelevant.
> I wish there were something that could be done about it.
I find it helpful to think of HN like one would any other social media site. There are things they could be doing to curtail these sorts of accounts. They have apparently chosen not to.
A lot of languages claim to be a C replacement, but Zig is the second language I've seen that seemed like it had a reasonable plan to do so at any appreciable scale. The language makes working with the C ABI pretty easy, but it also has a build system that can seamlessly integrate Zig and C together, as well as having a translate-c that actually works shockingly well in the code I've put through it.
The only thing it didn't do was be 99% compatible with existing C codebases...which was the C++ strategy, the first language I can think of with such a plan. And frankly, I think Zig keeping C's relative simplicity while avoiding some of the pitfalls of the language proper was the better play.
Do you have to bring up D in every Zig related post?
I do like D. I've written a game in it and enjoyed it a lot. I would encourage others to check it out.
But it's not a C replacement. BetterC feels like an afterthought. A nice bonus. Not a primary focus. E.g. the language is designed to use exceptions for error handling, so of course there's no feature for BetterC dedicated to error handling.
Being a better C is the one and only focus of Zig. So it has features for doing error handling without exceptions.
D is not going to replace C, perhaps for the same reasons subsets of C++ didn't.
I don't know if Zig and Rust will. But there's a better chance since they actually bring a lot of stuff to the table that arguably make them better at being a C-like language than C. I am really hyped to see how embedded development will be in Zig after the new IO interface lands.
He doesn't have to, he _gets_ to! Its knowledge exchange. Take it as a gift and not self-promotion. There's no money in this game so don't treat it like guerilla marketing. Treat it like excited people pushing the limits of technology.
I think the history of D having a garbage collector (and arguably exceptions / RTTI) from the beginning really cemented its fate. We all know that there's a "BetterC" mode that turns it off - but because the D ecosystem initially started with the GC-ed runtime, most of the D code written so far (including most of the standard library) isn't compatible with this at all.
If D really wants to compete with others for a "better C replacement", I think the language might need some kind of big overhaul (a re-launch?). It's evident that there's a smaller, more beautiful language that can potentially be born from D, but in order for this language to succeed it needs to trim down all the baggage that comes from its GC-managed past. I think the best place to start is to properly remove GC / exception handling / RTTI from the languge cleanly, rewrite the standard library to work with BetterC mode, and probably also change the name to something else (needs a re-brand...)
My post was not about betterC, it was about the super easy interoperability of C and D. This capability has been in D for several years now, and has been very popular as there's no longer a need to write an adapter to use C source code. The ability to directly compile C code is part of the D compiler, and is known as ImportC.
One interesting result of ImportC is that it is an enhanced implementation of C in that it can do forward references, Compile Time Function Execution, and even imports! (It can also translate C source code to D source code!)
>Do you have to bring up D in every Zig related post?
I dont think that is the case here, and in all previous encounter. I see this every time Ada was mentioned in Rust as well.
He is not brining up about D in every Zig post, he is simply replying whenever people said something about only in Zig, he is replying that D could do it as well. Which is fair.
Same with Ada, when Rust people claim to be the only language doing something, or the safest programming languages, there is nothing wrong in providing a valid, often missed out counter argument.
A subset of D could have been better C, or "Das C". Unfortunately I dont see anyone craving that out as a somewhat separate project.
This is, like, the most ironic comment ever posted on HN. An article about cat nutrition could hit the front page and the Rust fanbois would hijack the conversation.
In this case, however, Walter was not the one that brought up D. He was replying to a comment by someone promoting Zig with the claim that only Zig and C++ have ever had a strategy to replace C. That is objectively false. There's no way to look at what D does in that area and make that sort of claim. Walter and anyone else is right to challenge false statements.
> claim that only Zig and C++ have ever had a strategy to replace C
What I actually said was that it was the second language I have seen to do so at any appreciable scale. I never claimed to know all languages. There was also an implication that I think that even if a language claims to be a C replacement, its ability to do so might exceed its ambition.
That said I also hold no ill will towards Walter Bright, and in fact was hoping that someone like him would hop into the conversation to try and sell people on why their language was also worthy of consideration. I don't even mind the response to Walter's post, because they bring real-world Dlang experience to the table as a rebuttal.
On the other hand, I find it difficult to find value in your post except as a misguided and arguably bad-faith attempt to stir the pot.
No, he never stated that "claim that only Zig and C++ have ever had a strategy to replace C", you made that up.
And "Walter was not the one that brought up D" , he actually was.
Did the text get changed? because it seems you claim exactly the opposite of what is in about ~5 sentences, so it also can't be credited to "misunderstanding".
But didn't find any "D evangelism" comments in his history (first page), but then again, he has 78801 karma points, so I am also not going to put energy in going through his online persona history.
I do feel like allowing for in-place source upgrading was critical to C++'s early successes. However, I feel like this ultimately worked against C++, since it also wed the language to many of C's warts and footguns.
C++ cannot seem to let go of the preprocessor, which is an anchor hurting the language at every turn.
BTW, in my C days, I did a lot of clever stuff with the preprocessor. I was very proud of it. One day I decided to replace the clever macros with core C code, and was quite pleased with the clean result.
With D modules, imports, static if, manifest constants, and templates the macro processor can be put on the ash heap of history. Why doesn't C++ deprecate cpp?
I'm not so familiar with D, what is the state of this sort of feature? Is it a built-in tool, or are you talking about the ctod project I found?
In most languages, I've found that source translation features to be woefully lacking and almost always require human intervention. By contrast, it feels like Zig's `translate-c` goes the extra mile in trying to convert the source to something that Zig can work with as-is. It does this by making use of language features and compiler built-ins that are rather rare to see outside of `translate-c`.
Obviously the stacks of @as, @fooCast, and @truncate you are left with isn't idiomatic Zig, but I find it easier to start with working, yet non-idiomatic code than 90% working code that merely underwent a syntactic change.
It's hardwired into the D compiler binary. It will even translate C macros into D code!
Well, most macros. The macros that do metaprogramming are not translatable. I read that Zig's translator has the same issue, which is hardly surprising since it is not possible.
So, yes, the translation is not perfect. But the result works out of the box most of the time, and what doesn't translate is easily fixed by a human. Another issue is every C compiler has their own wacky extensions, so it is impractical to deal with all those variants. We try to hit the common extensions, though.
If you just want to call C code, you don't have to translate it. The D compiler recognizes C files and will run its very own internal C compiler (ImportC) to compile it. As a bonus, the C code can use data structures and call functions written in D! The compatibility goes both ways.
> This will sound crazy but this is why I still use 4chan. Everyone is anonymous, there is no voting, and the only moderation is to remove illegal things or flagrant rule breaking.
What you see is a mirage.
The problem with 4chan is that the loudest voices are the ones that have no lives, and can flood the board with their bullshit. You could be having a conversation with someone in one thread, meanwhile they're busy posting about the same damn thing in 3-4 other threads at the same time.
And that's assuming the person on the other end is real. These days, there are bot armies of paid shills or AI to worry about, flooding the zone with their narrative to the point where your voice gets drowned out.
You cannot have a decent social space without some form of active moderation and some protection against sockpuppeting. Not every place with both of those gets it right, but without both you're guaranteed to fail, and 4chan has neither.
Most of the social spaces that I frequent don't have the amount of political topics posted as HN.
Would you like to know the difference between those spaces and here? It's that in those spaces, regardless of if the members are left right or center, the community is on the same page in terms of authoritarians, and authoritarian apologia will get you tossed.
Therefore, there isn't the same sort of desire - or need - to point out the obvious and show the uncomfortable realities to the crowd.
Refusing to take a stand on this sort of thing and leaving it for the community to sort out will only make things worse. It's functionally no different than the kind of combative environment you get on major social media networks; the only difference is the amount of tone policing caused by the user-facing moderation tools.
What is preventing Microsoft from pulling an Oracle and suing Valve, CodeWeavers, or individual Wine maintainers for re-implementing Win32?
This question has been nagging at me for a while. Regardless of how much validity there is to the lawsuit, I imagine that going to trial would be supremely risky, because if you happen across anybody working on Wine that saw something they weren't supposed to, you could sink the whole project.
I cannot imagine Microsoft sitting by and quietly letting their Windows monopoly vanish between their fingers. Selling Windows may not be their primary focus these days, but why give up an advantage like that?
First, they probably wouldn't win. Oracle lost Google v Oracle. Wine is pretty serious about clean-room principles -- they won't accept a patch from anyone who's ever so much as looked at Microsoft-owned source code.[1] Valve has the means and motive to fight a lawsuit to the bitter end.
Second, it would be a PR disaster. "Microsoft sues to kill the Steam Deck" is an awful look for the company. Their strategy in recent years has been to say "actually we like Linux now" and play friendly to try to win developers; this would run completely counter to that. There may not be much of an immediate consequence to this, but in the long run I think we'd see developers try to reduce their reliance on Microsoft/Windows.
Third, I don't think it would actually stop the tide. Wine and Proton are a big piece of the movement away from Windows, but they're not the only piece. The legal process would take many years to play out; during that time, we'd likely see tons of movement on making it easier for developers to create native Linux builds, and perhaps even new projects that try to find other ways to do Wine-like things without actually reimplementing Win32. Losing Wine would be a huge blow, but I don't think it'd be the end of the story.
Another point that makes everything different is that MS has contributed to the wine project. They've both sent in code changes to wine itself and they donated mono to the wine project.
How is the Xbox market related to SteamDeck? SteamDeck plays PC games (which XBox doesn't), and XBox plays its own console games (which PCs and thus the SteamDeck don't)
The Venn diagram of Xbox games and PC games is very close to the Xbox circle just being completely inside the larger PC circle. The number of Series S/X exclusives is literally zero at this point, at least I'm fairly sure, and if there are any, my bets are on them being shovelware. The Xbox One only has one exclusive game of note, which is Halo 5.
I don't think the performance of the Steam Deck is up to play all Xbox games at Series X quality, but that's a nitpick assuming future Steam Decks arrive.
Isn't the xbox market dead after after having to code for the weaker series s lead to the last generation of consoles being outsold massively by the PS5?
It will kill GitHub I suspect. Who will trust them if they can pull the plug on open source projects using the dumb "API is copyrightable" claim? I'd say last time they tried to pull that by backing Oracle in that legal case, they already damaged their reputation enough.
There's no way. GitHub is already pretty hostile, but the only people who care — like in most hostile platform cases — are the ones who are directly affected.
It's a reputational thing. There is already a trend of exodus from GitHub. This Oracle style garbage will just exacerbate it. Whether they care - who knows, but it can be a reason.
But in general - as a developer you surely don't want to host your projects using someone who thinks APIs are copyrightable.
(And, of course, Microsoft would also have to consider whether such a lawsuit would have greater benefits than costs. I would like to think that customer goodwill has more than zero value, for example.)
This fact pattern (reimplementing API functions for emulation or interoperability) tracks even more closely with the Connectix case than Oracle. Google reimplemented a huge swath of the Java API surface so developers could reuse libraries, but actual applications still needed porting, so there's less protection from a fair use perspective; and even then copying APIs was still ruled to be fair use.
I just don't see how Microsoft could contort the facts to achieve a meaningfully different outcome. It doesn't matter if APIs are copyrightable if copying them is fair use for just about any purpose.
I think there are two reasons this hasn't happened: (1) Wine might be useful to Microsoft at some point for providing backward compatibility in Windows itself; (2) it would be an extremely bad look/PR disaster to go after this project after spending so much time and money positioning yourself as an open source supporter
If anything Microsoft will give up their advantage by making Windows 11 a UX dumpster fire. If Windows 11 had an official way to turn off all of the garbage and opt out of their monopolistic PM-brained “features” a lot of us who switched to Linux probably wouldn’t have happened.
i was using wsl2. and got weird slowness and high cpu. appeared it was their built in antivirus(av). i disabled av, but it autoenabled later and did same.
it is possible to secure windows other way without active protection btw.
i used git on wsl2. it got weird issues with git connectivity over wifi.
github ticket not solved. one of most popular and essential dev tools is not stably working in wsl2.
many rust crates supported only mac, bsd and linux. nobody cared windows.
so even without ux of recent version, i had to leave.
for my wife is still run windows.
but. she had fully official surface laptop with official office. not 3rd party or pirated things.
and... office became very very slow just typing... it was 3 years ago.
i have run script disabling all things. it good for 3rd year now.
but how they managed to make their laptop new one, with all their things so bad?
It does work reliably enough though. A huge portion of games on Linux do so via pretending to be windows via wine/proton. It’s what allows the Steam deck to exist as a product at all.
And Linux on those handheld devices out-performs windows to such a degree that Microsoft has noticed and is trying to make windows perform better on those devices, basically making a gaming mode / handheld mode for their Xbox Ally.
It's not nearly enough to matter to Microsoft. An absolute tiny percentage of desktop computers/laptops run Linux.
This is actually a good thing if you're hoping WINE avoids a legal fight with Microsoft. It doesn't matter who's right, Microsoft has deep enough pockets to drag anyone through expensive litigation.
I'm an active Linux user and I play tons of games via Proton. But this isn't something I'd suggest to normal people. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit keeping Linux working.
They also served as a foundation for much of my career growth. But I understand it's not for everyone.
I don't think it matters very much. It's not a matter of "if" but of "when": one is consistently getting worse, and the other is measurably getting better and more compatible with the former. Unless of a drastic paradigm change, Linux will see more and more users. Trump dismantling of the global system of trade might also add another nail to this coffin (the recent talk by Cory Doctorow at CCC gives a good picture of how and why).
I'm always open to being wrong. At a minimum European governments should switch to a Linux distro based in Europe like Open Suse.
I don't believe this is going to be enough of a dramatic shift where Microsoft would see it worth while to try and shutdown WINE.
This is a good thing though, if Microsoft really wanted to they could sue WINE. Even if WINE isn't doing anything wrong, Microsoft could easily make things really difficult.
We saw this with Nintendo and the Switch emulators.
Maybe I came across as a bit harsh, I run multiple Linux computers, I just can't see this being a realistic concern for Microsoft
> I just can't see this being a realistic concern for Microsoft
I think Microsoft strategy for Windows shifted a long time ago, from being their most precious engineering product, to a necessary component for their sales teams to bundle B2B services. The focus went from "pleasing users and enabling things" to "seeking rent in the gregarious corporate world by building a captive monopoly". I suppose that makes perfect shareholder-sense, but that leaves the door open to a competition that actually wants to make operating systems, in the traditional way.
Now that this model is being threatened, with a real geopolitical incentive to leave captivity and to reconsider past practices (like OEM installs), I think it'd be silly for Microsoft not to immediately course-correct. And that means doing something much more significant than suing Wine: without trade agreements, the US has no jurisdiction and no IP that's worth a dime outside of its borders. That means doing something that, for once, would put them so much ahead of the competition that choosing Microsoft would be a no-brainer. I don't believe Microsoft has it in itself to execute such a thing.
Microsoft has subsidiaries all over the world. They'd still have standing to sue, even if say Germany and France ignored American IP laws( which they definitely won't).
Plus it's not out of the question for them to personally sue WINE contributors. It's not about winning, a simple DMCA takedown notice to any entity hosting WINE code would probably be enough to stop the project.
I want a future of competition between different OSes. I use Linux everyday, but I don't think a market share of 3.86% is sweating anyone at Microsoft.
I could see Lenovo, which is ultimately a Chinese company, making more aggressive steps to offer Linux. But outside of certain ThinkPads you can't even buy a laptop with Linux pre installed.
In my dream world you'd have to buy Windows separately with any hardware. I guess Best Buy could still offer Windows installation as a service though.
DMCA takedown has no legal basis outside the US. And it's funny you bring that up: the only reason why this has any relevance at all is because of the established norm for countries to sacrifice some of their sovereignty in exchange for being allowed to trade with the US. Now, with the US breaking trade norms and agreements, those countries can (and eventually will) stop complying, because they have nothing to gain (and everything to lose) promoting hostile foreign competition.
I agree the DMCA has too much power, but I think your getting ahead of what's realistic.
Maybe in 20 years some EU court will declare US IP to be up for grabs, but that's not now. Microsoft is deeply embedded so many different businesses and government IT departments.
With Wine, the main problem is that you may easily encounter some programs that do not work under it, as they rely on unimplemented Windows features.
However the programs that do work, usually work very well, sometimes even more reliably and faster than under Windows itself.
Many older MS Office versions work very well under Wine.
In general many older Windows programs work very well, because the older they are the more chances are that someone else already tried to use them under Wine and eventually any quirks have been fixed.
Trying to defer to native widget rendering per platform was a mistake, and every time I've touched wxWidgets in the past decade and a half I've regretted it.
FLTK on the other hand is ugly as sin, but I've found it reliable enough to not act in surprising ways, and it's also small enough to where you can vendor it and build it alongside your program.
Somehow I feel like GIMP's lack of popularity has more to do with its reputation for having a horrendous and impenetrable interface than its name.
At one point in the recent past there was a fork of GIMP named "Glimpse," yet weren't a sudden influx of users who were waiting for a more polite name.
BUT, lack of users might just be that it's too late, now. People use web-based tools like Figma, I wouldn't think a lot of people are looking for a Photoshop alternative.
Krita is doing just fine. It has the subjectively "better" name, but also the improved UX.
We're missing the last part of this quadrant with a Krita-like app that has great UX but a bad name, but the preponderance of the evidence thus far tells me that it is more likely than not that the name didn't matter, or at the very least that the UX definitely did matter while the name might not have.
