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askonomm

3,170 karma · joined January 14, 2021

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askonomm··on James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise
Just thinking about this infinite recursion gives me the mental equivalent of a stack overflow.
askonomm··on James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise
It was my understanding that if two black holes collide, they just form a bigger black hole, but we know there's a black hole in our universe, which then would mean that there's a black hole inside of a black hole that did not merge with the parent black hole, right? Is that something that is considered possible?
askonomm··on Plain – a web framework for building products with Python
Ah yeah, didn't remember that constraint in Python. I thought I read something about a future version fixing that when it comes to just type hints, but I suppose that wouldn't work here, since it's not really a type hint, right?
askonomm··on xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B
Is it weird that if I do not have an account on X, I also have no idea what X actually is? If I go to the home page, it just says "Happening now". No idea what that means though. If I then navigate to the tiny "About" link, I'm not getting any smarter. The "About the company" page takes to a 404. So, unless you know already what X is, you have no obvious way to find out what it is either.
askonomm··on Plain – a web framework for building products with Python
First thing that I don't like is the settings being strings that reference classes. Usually that means that go-to definition does not work (I've seen similar things in Symfony with YAML use). If the config needs to reference a class, or some object, I would like to be able to easily navigate to it as opposed to having to manually search the project for it. If this was an actual object reference as opposed to a string, I could, and I'd also get intellisense for if I typed it right or not, and autocomplete.

Then of course they "solve" it later with a (probably paid) plugin. But why? LSP's support this natively, and for free, just don't use strings.

askonomm··on The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking [pdf]
Must be a place with a pretty bad education system if people can't answer 6 * 7 off the top of their head.
askonomm··on In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants
The conclusion is correct, I would say. I know plenty of Americans who are not the archetype I portrayed, but this is HN, and that’s the HN American I see here a lot. Not all, but a lot. And we seem to be fundamentally incompatible. It’s really unfortunate, but that’s what it seems to me, and I’m sorry for the bitter undertones, it’s just really hard to stay optimistic in the current social climate.
askonomm··on In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants
And yet, by all accounts we have a higher life quality than Americans. Only Americans care about money, because in USA you don't get anything without paying for it all yourself. Here we have minimum mandatory vacations for 4 weeks per year, and many countries have a lot more than that, most countries have a year or more of maternity leave, paid of course, we have plenty of public holidays, paid of course, and we don't need to do work while in a hospital or when giving birth, as that would be illegal for the employer to ask of you. There's also no at-will firing just because your boss doesn't like your face, there needs to be an actual reason proving that a person cannot fulfill responsibilities, and there also needs to be a chance given to improve on the mistakes before firing a person.

Our food is not riddled in toxic waste because of those horrible regulations that Americans don't like, our air is breathable because of those same horrible regulations, companies are not allowed to just steal and sell all of our data or keep it indefinitely, because of those horrible regulations, which makes American tyrants mad because they can't make their billion dollar startups here so easily since they're used to breaking the law, abusing people, or paying off governments to get what they want, which is a lot harder to do here. Much sad, many tear, for the poor American startup founder.

Europeans by and large don't share the same values as Americans. Being filthy rich isn't our goal, our goal is good health, spending time with our loved ones, having plenty of time to rest and dedicate on our hobbies, and being treated fairly and with respect. Americans on the other hand care about money at all cost, doesn't matter if it's at the expense of working class people, and they view people who work less than 80 hours a week as lazy.

I also don't know what freedom of speech you are talking about since I read the news and USA seems to have everything, BUT freedom of speech. Your education is down the toilet, crime is rampant, police murders minorities on a regular basis, school shootings everywhere, a government as corrupt as can possibly be, people fired en masse everywhere for not replying to an e-mail ...

askonomm··on Ask HN: Why Isn't PHP Dead Yet?
PIE (https://github.com/php/pie) has made PHP extensions also very simple. Still relatively new, but by the PHP foundation and definitely the way forward.
askonomm··on I use Cursor daily - here's how I avoid the garbage parts
So, if I liked being a manager more than a developer, I'd use Cursor, and lean in entirely on AI?
askonomm··on Apple's Software Quality Crisis
It may not be perfect, but the alternatives I've tried have so far been even worse. I have a Windows 11 gaming PC, and oh boy that is an OS that deliberately tries to give you a bad day, and Linux ... well, if you don't want config tinkering to replace your day job then it's simply not something usable for most modern hardware as it doesn't even have a display server that actually works well (Wayland breaks almost all Electron apps, which is like, most apps these days, and makes X11 apps look tiny and horrible due to the clusterfuck that is fractional scaling on Linux) and for some reason every now and again my vanilla Linux install simply just crashes. It has also borked itself mid video call for reasons unclear. Definitely not an OS I'd like to use for any professional work since it seems to have the stability of Win 2000.
askonomm··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
And then in Estonia you can drop your wallet or phone, and someone will take it to the police, and you get it all back without even a cent missing. We have robots on the streets, we can leave things like bicycles outside, every store is 80% self checkout with no security guards to speak of.

I lived in Buenos Aires for a year and it made me realize how good I had it. The contrast is so massive that it might as well be two different planets.

askonomm··on Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox
I suppose I could manually copy paste things, but it's not a great user experience. I'm fine with using beta software, but pre-alpha even is a bit too hard for me to swallow.
askonomm··on World-first experimental cancer treatment paves way for clinical trial
I did mean median yes, my bad. Alright, that makes sense indeed.
askonomm··on Welcome to Ladybird, a truly independent web browser
It's fairly easy to compile and give it a spin to try stuff out. It'll log to terminal everything it does/doesn't do, including things it does not support. You can also then go to https://html5test.co/ to see a bunch of stuff with relative ease.
askonomm··on Welcome to Ladybird, a truly independent web browser
I don't think they'd use Swift for GUI building. Ladybird's GUI's are platform-dependent (Qt on Linux, AppKit on Mac, etc). From what I understand they want to use Swift as a replacement for C++.

I haven't done a lot of Swift, but I did play around with it recently, and it seems to work fine even outside of the Apple ecosystem. It has a LSP you can use so you don't need XCode, they even develop a first-class plugin for VSCode.

askonomm··on World-first experimental cancer treatment paves way for clinical trial
That's why I always think that the _mean_ life expectancy is a much more useful metric than _average_. Not sure why everybody reports the average everywhere. I have the same exact thought when it comes to salaries. Governments and the like always publish the _average_, which tells very little to the regular person. If anything, it would tell the regular person that they must really be very badly off if most make more than them, having a negative effect. Perhaps that's the desired outcome?
askonomm··on Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox
Can't wait for Ladybird to become usable. To be fair, it already is fairly usable, but I'd need history syncing / Keychain sync to make it a daily driver.
askonomm··on EU regulations to look out for in 2025
And yet from some of the HN comments I've seen on this topic it seems that quite a few of the Americans are stockholm syndromed to the point that if you do not want to benefit the ultra rich at the expense of regular people by removing their healthcare, vacations, employee safety and protection rights, ability to unionize, and basically by doing all you can to milk the average worker for your own gain, then you're stupid, and they demean EU by constantly bringing up the tired trope of us not having some mega billion valuation companies here because ... our people have rights ... and so no law-breaking/lobbying silicon valley god wants to come here.

And they say this seemingly without realizing that yes, that is exactly by design. This is what we want. Keep your mega wealthy and 3rd world life quality, and we'll here be poor, but can at least attend our children being born without getting fired for it, and giving our mothers a year or more of paid maternity leave, among many many other things we value a hell of a lot more than making our billionaires richer.

askonomm··on EU regulations to look out for in 2025
I for one am also happy to live in one of the few places left on earth that focuses more on the betterment of people than the few ultra rich, and tries to prevent the ultra rich from abusing the people.
askonomm··on Do you want to be doing this when you're 50? (2012)
I'm sitting at my home office, able to play with my dog during breaks, while simultaneously having a lot of autonomy at my job. I love it, and would not trade it for anything. People seem to really get used to their way of living and lose perspective, then becoming unhappy. We've got it really really good.
askonomm··on A.I. is prompting an evolution, not extinction, for coders
To be fair I figure it was only because I applied for a Clojure job, which is a pretty niche thing, and so perhaps that attracts people who are actually interested in you as a human being and not just a number in a spreadsheet. Since then I've gone back to mainstream and it has not happened again.
askonomm··on A.I. Is Prompting an Evolution, Not Extinction, for Coders
Here's me hoping that hiring managers / HR will finally start actually calling references and/or checking open source contributions. I have plenty of both, and in my 14 year career have had only 2 companies call my references, 1 check my open source work. So far they all just give me some bs test job to prove that I can do basic CRUD programming despite being a senior engineer, over and over and over again, which could all be avoided with just a phone call and a basic conversation about tech stuff with their technical team ... but they are either lazy, incompetent, or a combination of both, so I get a bs test job - sometimes even before I manage to actually get the first interview. I decline all of these, of course, but there's so many and it has made job searching quite difficult.
askonomm··on AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
And so that self-selects for people who already are unemployed then, right? Most developers I know (including myself) look for a new job while still having a job, as to not create a financial hole in-between. I'd be curious if that doesn't then end up with lower quality candidates who ended up unemployed to begin with?
askonomm··on Apple’s closed-source approach is losing out to AI app builders
Maybe all humans should speak 1 language. Maybe there should be no countries. Maybe we all should be the same color and have the same culture. While this may be an interesting idea to discuss over a beer or two, it is so far removed from how the world really works that it's just plain stupid to use it as a argument. Wishful thinking is great and all, but this is never going to happen, and especially with the multiple decades of legacy, disagreements over usability and user experience, non-compatible accessibility systems and API's, the different platforms are very very far from each other.

Now I understand that accessibility is most likely not a high concern for a React dev, but there are people out there who want to give the users of their platform of choice the best possible experience, and that best experience would be delivered with said platforms native tools, because they have the best integration with that platform.

askonomm··on HP Acquires Humane's AI Software
Why have regulations at all then? Why regulate water purity when you can choose to not drink water you're skeptical of, or why regulate food if you can just not eat food that you're skeptical of? Regulations are there not for you, who perhaps knows better, but there for the people who do not. Most people are not tech-savvy. Most people believe whatever marketing is being shoved down their throat.

An average person does not do or know how to do the due diligence of product validation, and I'd argue even the tech-savvy of us are unable to figure out if a product is going to stick around or not since what info is being given to us for analysis is limited, and heavily watered down.

askonomm··on X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
So the Public Town Square with Freedom of Speech has become the most censored, and private social network out there?
askonomm··on Doge-affiliated employee expected to seek access to IRS system
When Idiocracy the comedy film becomes a documentary.
askonomm··on Rust Is Eating JavaScript (2023)
Getting kind of tired of this Europe vs US trope. Europe is a huge place with each country having a rather unique economy, making a blanket statement like you just did entirely ignores that, and where does this constant need to compare one place on the planet with another place comes from? I don't live my life comparing everything about my country with another country, do you? Development trends themselves tend to also be cyclical.

As for LLM's, from what I see the languages that LLM's are most often used for are those with the lower barrier to entry / and those that UNI's and bootcamps teach, which would very much also include Java. However, what I see is actually my salary going up as the average candidate quality has been also decreasing, almost in correlation with the usage of LLM's. So while maybe the junior/mid-level salary goes down, the senior salary, in my observations, has not. And I keep hearing from companies how finding actually capable developers has become harder and harder, so I expect my salary to only go up.

Now, of course, being a one trick pony has never been a good thing, I agree on that (did you assume that I'm a just JS dev?), but I was just answering to your original comment.

askonomm··on Alzheimer's biomarkers now visible up to a decade ahead of symptoms
I'm in Estonia, should I also be worried about the toxic algae? I had no idea about this.
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