Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | WorldMaker's commentslogin

Helldivers 2 is probably the most vogue infantry with powered battle suits and heavy weaponry game right now.

Also I suppose almost the entire Halo franchise was always about that.


They are the worst of both worlds: not enough battery range to satisfy on long trips plus the weight and maintenance headaches of a gas tank and engine, especially silly to lug that around if 90% of your trips are in battery range.

As a 2012 Volt owner I think EREV was a great idea in the 2010s given battery tech and networks at the time. In the 2020s, they seem a weak compromise that I wouldn't recommend to people.


> especially silly to lug that around if 90% of your trips are in battery range

The same argument works for large batteries, right? On 90% of your trips, you're lugging around several hundred pounds of battery you're not using.

If you want to tackle the weight argument, you could always drop 40 kWh battery capacity from the truck. That frees up around 600 lbs you can now use for the genset.

The maintenance thing is a real problem, of course. A 50 kW genset that almost never runs will be much better on mainenance than a classic ICE car, but still add significant maintenance cost to a BEV.


Which is part of why I think Range is often a distraction in EV discussions. The people asking for 600+ mile Range EVs may see those built because it always sounds like there are plenty of people "demanding" that, but the weight trade-off in batteries isn't going to make those great cars, most of that range will be "waste" given average trips. But it is easier to get to 600+ miles of range by adding more (and better) batteries than by making larger gas tanks and engines.

& battery tech continues to evolve at high speed. China is already selling 1000v 5min charging evs. Semi solid state are shipping. 500+ mile range cars exist. EREV is going to be obsolete in a few short years, if it isnt already.

Motor generators allow for new engine form factors that are much smaller and lighter.

They have artificially worse prices in the US where EVs are mostly only getting sold as "luxury" vehicles and competition is hobbled by dealer networks and dealer laws and import tariffs.

Most other parts of the world EVs are starting to be cheaper than the equivalent ICE in the same category.

Range often doesn't need to get better, the impression of range needs to change. That's where a lot of misconceptions play into effect, over-focusing on things like gas-station-like charging stations over at-home charging. Over-focusing on "zero to full tank/battery statistics" when no one keeps a gas vehicle with a full tank overnight every night. Over-focusing on high speed charging and ignoring boring but useful "Level 1" charging, which is "just about everywhere" because our society has been building electrical outlets for a long time. Sure, the experience changes in things like long distance trips, but experience changes aren't "worse" by default of being a change.


I still have to pay the price whether it's artificial or not

It's interesting because #1 is still suggesting a shell script, it's just suggesting a better shell to script.

I had no idea 'pwsh' was PowerShell. Personally not interested, maybe if your a Microsoft shop or something then yeah.

"pwsh" is often used as the short-hand for modern cross-platform PowerShell to better differentiate it from the old Windows-only PowerShell.

I think pwsh is worth exploring. It is cross-platform. It is post-Python and the Python mantra that "~~code~~ scripts are read more often than they are written". It provides a lot of nice tools out of the box. It's built in an "object-oriented" way, resembling Python and owing much to C#. When done well the "object-oriented" way provides a number of benefits over "dumb text pipes" that shells like bash were built on. It is easy to extend with C# and a few other languages, should you need to extend it.

I would consider not dismissing it off hand without trying it just because Microsoft built it and/or that it was for a while Windows-only.


It's also both a larger download and slower to start than Java, which is not known for being light and nimble. In fact, PowerShell is so slow that you can both compile and run the equivalent C# program before PowerShell finishes launching. Not ideal for a shell or a scripting language.

Also, the newer versions aren't included with Windows, which would have been useful – instead Windows includes an incompatible older version that admonishes you to download the new version. But why would you download several hundred megabytes of pwsh when you can equally well download any other language runtime?

Also, it sends "telemetry" to Microsoft by default.

Also, the error handling is just awful, silencing errors by default, requiring several different incantations to fix.

Also, the documentation is vague and useless. And the syntax is ugly.


It gets faster to boot on subsequent launches and some distros are now packaging pre-baked versions.

The new versions aren't included in Windows and the old versions are still in Windows for the exact same reasons of Windows backwards compatibility requirements. But at this point the bootstrap on Windows is as easy as `winget install --id Microsoft.PowerShell`.

The error handling isn't far from the bash defaults, but the magic incantations actually tell you what they do versus the number of bash scripts littered with `set -euxo pipefail` is the exact same as the number of scripts that need an `$ErrorActionPreference = "Stop"` and/or a `$PSNativeCommandUseErrorActionPreference = true`.

I find the documentation less vague and more useful than the average `man` page and the syntax is fine (and better than bash) to me, but I understand how much of that is personal preference and familiarity.


It's actually a pretty good shell! FOSS and cross-platform, too.

A lot of this article certainly is saying "Look at this photograph."

A part of me still thinks the peak was somewhere around System 7.

Sure "top-line" of the message (the subject line of the email) should be concisely "what" changed, but the rest of the message (the body of the email) should be the details of "why" and "how". More details on the "what changed" is often redundant because by that point you are seeing the diff itself, but the "why" and "how" is often the real important part to a commit message.

Yes, this is what I meant exactly.

The "lossy aspect" feels like it tells me a lot more that the author doesn't know what commit messages are for.

If you count LSP (Language Server Protocol) as a VSCode plugin-compatible layer as LSP was built and standardized by the VSCode team (so many do), then Emacs and Neovim are full of VSCode-compatible plugins today. One of Neovim's selling points right now over bare Vim is better/more direct LSP support.

Ah, if LSP is what parent meant with "VS code plugin compatible layer" then what you say makes sense, I personally also moved from vim to neovim mainly because of better LSP support.

But I understood "VS code plugin compatible layer" to mean there is something that lets you run VSCode plugins with other editors, which is what I haven't seen anywhere (yet?).


Except Emacs doesn't have "plugins". They are called "packages" and not plugins for specific reasons - they are more like libraries than plugins. In Emacs, one can change/override the behavior of any function (built-in or third party) with some enormous flexibility not easily achievable in other editors.

There's a lot of opinions and anecdata in that. Firefox was almost never as bad as it was marketed to be (by its competition), and Chrome was certainly never as good as it was marketed to be (by an evil ad company pretending to be a good, well adjusted internet benefit company).

Firefox used to be the first browser with decent developer tools thanks to the Firebug extension.

Then Chrome pushed heavily the development of its own development tools and crushed Firefox in the process. Chrome has now been the best browser for developers for the last +10 years.

The consequence is also that when the new generation of headless browsers were developed (Puppeteer) they were based on Chromium because it is so hackable and developer friendly.

This means that Firefox lost a big chunk of the developer community which constituted also a non trivial amount of their user base and advocates.


I don't know why people left Firefox, but I know why *I* did. And it was three or four years ago (after using it for 15 years) because I got annoyed at them for removing many features that I used over the years, and because I tried a Crommium based browser and it just had better performance and better ad-blocking. That's just one anecdote, but feel free to correlate it with other anecdotes to find some patterns and reach your own conclusion.

My father, who is very non-technical has never left Firefox and stuck with it for decades, even against Microsoft and Chrome's tactics to try to claim default browser and constantly install them into his face. My father particularly hates Chrome because he never understands how it keeps reinstalling itself despite his best efforts. His taskbar is often a mess of all three browsers because he can't figure out how to keep Edge and Chrome unpinned. My father sees Chrome installing itself and auto-pinning to his taskbar and Start Menu as the exact same IE-level adware/spyware shenanigans that led to him fleeing to Firefox in the first place.

I returned to Firefox again after years of IE8+ and Spartan Edge. I've never liked the "mouthfeel" of Chrome, have generally felt it to be bloated and slow and ad-heavy adware (though not as strongly as my father and I often do know how Chrome gets backdoor installed through shameful adware deals like with Adobe), and when Edge switched to being just another Chromium I still felt the same in my dislike of Chromium and I went back to Firefox. (Spartan Edge had so much better performance and battery usage than Chromium. It's death was not mourned by enough people.)

Feel free to correlate these two counter-anecdotes with more and see if you find some patterns to reach your own conclusion. That's the fun of anecdata and marketing, there are patterns on every side, you can interpret it how you want. "Popularity" isn't facts, pattern matching based on popularity of certain anecdotes can lead to incorrect conclusions. Especially when Marketing is involved. Marketing is about making popular things that aren't necessarily facts, especially when an advertiser is unscrupulous and no one is busy enforcing truth in advertising laws.


These anecdotes say the people still using Firefox don't like Chrome/Edge and that few cared when Edge switched from Spartan to Chromium. I don't think anyone disagrees with any of that. It's the anecdotes about the different reasons people actually stopped using Firefox for under debate, not the reasons a few have still stayed anyways.

I.e. IE (couldn't resist :)) can be said to have used the exact same shenanigans, as mentioned above, but there were other reasons droves of people still decided to install and use Firefox back then anyways. People no longer make the same decision to install and use Firefox, so if the shenanigans haven't changed... then what did? This is where the common refrains that Chrome managed to be a better browser (particular on mobile) for that decade or that Firefox managed to regress in certain ways come from. Sure, Chrome absolutely got its growth blasted forward by marketing and bundling, but people decided to stick with it and stop using Firefox for reasons unrelated to that. Sometimes niche reasons, sometimes general reasons, but the story was never something like "Chrome invented marketing and bundling, which resulted in Firefox losing its easily gained massive market share of the time".


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: