foopdoopfoop

> As a keen NixOS user/contributor, if your only needs are i3 and Firefox, then I do not recommend NixOS to you. ~Any distribution can meet your needs.

I really disagree with this. NixOS is also great for simple use cases like this because it's robust. I know a lot of people who switched to Linux, need to get something to work, follow some online tutorial/directions blindly, and just break shit pretty badly.

This isn't contrived: even seemingly-inoculous commands like "pacman -Sy" on Manjaro/Arch can fuck your shit up (it basically amounts to a partial upgrade).

NixOS doesn't let you break shit like this. (Literally, upgrades are atomic and packages can never have missing dependencies.) And, even if somehow you did, you then have a nice configuration.nix to quickly get back up to speed.

Concerning fiction only: I see books as a way to experience things that I cannot experience in my (rather repetitive) "real" life otherwise.

I don't necessarily mean this in terms of the fantastical but also in terms of more pedestrian books. I still get to connect with characters (people) in ways I wouldn't in real life, experience emotions that terminals aren't very good at evoking, and have thoughts that wouldn't have otherwise occurred to me.

I don't really remember what I read very well. I can't quote some famous passage and after a few months my memory of the book is reduced to basically a blur. Since HN is ever pragmatic, one has to ask what exactly I'm walking away with in the end. I think reading (fiction) gradually imparts you with a wider soundstage through which to view (hear) life and is generally enriching in that sense. It also, unquestionably, makes you a better writer--good writers are rare in technical fields and learning to write well is really sort of arcane in some ways, so I wouldn't underestimate that. (Nor would I underestimate the value of good writing: bad writing sullies the fuck out of an otherwise good paper.)

Since I'm a student, I'll often have periods for many months where I don't read a single page. But whenever I come back to reading, I always find myself asking why I didn't keep the habit up. Reading encourages a sort of mindfulness (almost a meditation of sorts) that I always find myself missing once I rediscover it when I start reading again.

Weather still isn't climate and while the abstract states their model detect climate change within a very small time-frame (a day), it still requires global data to do so.

I'm sure the converse is true too and that models should be able to detect climate change locally within a large time-frame.

Yes, literally by eating less. You can lose weight on a diet of pure granulated sugar.

For the purposes of weight loss, exercise is absolutely overrated, especially the low intensity cardiovascular type that most individuals trying to lose weight engage in. The actual number of calories burned for the mental effort/discipline is garbage and that effort would be better spent on better dietary discipline.

High intensity training and weightlifting have better results due to increasing metabolic rate for a long period after the activity, but the key to weight loss is diet.

> but if you have a good ISP already, there’s no privacy/security benefits to be had by using a VPN when surfing from home.

This is just not true. You cannot sign up for an ISP without disclosing at least your name and address. Many VPNs support complete anonymity.

It's a different middle man that--if you choose the right one--will absolutely know less about you.

Why haven't you tried a CLI client? Also, Office 2016 seems to be fairly well-support on any number of those wine-based compatibility layers.

Sounds like you've barely programmed in Haskell and don't know what you're talking about.

> It is extremely hard to learn

Haskell was the first language I learned. I didn't think this at all and I still don't. It doesn't strike me as any more difficult than learning Java or something.

You may think this because Haskell is a different paradigm than what you're used to, so while you may be able to get quickly started with Rust coming from a C++ background, Haskell will take more work because what you already know doesn't intersect with what you need to know quite as well. You may misconstrue this mismatch as Haskell being more difficult to learn.

> extremely confusing + needlessly complicated syntax

I think Haskell syntax is less confusing/complicated than many other language. Unlike a lot of other languages, Haskell doesn't have a lot of things baked-in. As an example, lot of oft-used functions are "user-space" functions that anyone could define themselves. Like `($)` or `otherwise`.

> If I stood up in a corporate business boardroom meeting for tech analysis on a new project and said "I want to write it in Haskell", I'd get laughed + kicked out.

This is such a stupid argument: what relevance is the opinion of boardroom meeting attendees on the suitability of Haskell for a project?

It sounds like you're hating on Haskell out of ignorance and some personal encounter with the language that went poorly. Instead of actually being informed.