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xkbarkar

851 karma · joined September 11, 2019

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xkbarkar··on Iceland rejects reopening talks on EU entry
Even though I voted yes I completely understand the reluctance to join. EU has shown gross incompetence in many questions and with chat control they are downright terrifying.

My own yes was because I would have liked to see the strategy and what EU could have on the table. Even if timeconsuming and costly.

And it would have been worth it just to scare the living daylights out of the few mafia families in Iceland that currently hold the fishing quota and treat it as their private playthings.

But I respect the choice of my countrymen and (hope) perhaps in another decade when we are hypothetically rid of Ursula Leyden and possibly Swedens and Denmarks terrifying need to peak into everones private lives, Iceland can look at negotiations again.

xkbarkar··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
Oh no. I use huggingface all the time. Sad news.
xkbarkar··on Willingness to look stupid
The best teams are the ones where “stupid” questions are always alowed.

The worst ones are the teams where members treat everyone as stupid

The absolute best will generate a creative discussion around a “stupid” question.

The absolute worst will deliberately mislead collegues to make them look stupid.

xkbarkar··on Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
Eh. This is pointless.

There will always be at least one country that has not rules and everyone will vpn there.

Danish minister was about to solve that nut airing ideas of banning vpn ( was of course dropped, most politicians have zero technical skills, not even rudimentary ones).

Of course this is all to protect the children.

I am unscientifically convinced that the average 12 year old is more technically apt that the entire adult governmental body of north europe.

If the will is there, they will circumevent it and the only outcome was another pointless level of buerocracy that is impossible to enforce.

target the algorithm instead. Its a more difficult area and harder to design that law and it would require understanding technology, the end result would be targeting the platforms, not the users. Possibly with hundreds of millions in fines and less predatory platform behaviour.

This low quality , protect the children yelp regulation set will have no long term effect whatsoever.

It is far to easy to circumvent.

xkbarkar··on No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams
I have experienced both.

I d argue its not the manager that motivates people that can only be found inbooks. Its the manager that can come in and mend a toxic and dysfunctional team.

The toxic teams end up breaking good managers in the end and they either become part of the problem or leave.

The hero manager described in the phoenix project is a myth.

The motivational one imho is very real but they need a good platform just like everyone else.

xkbarkar··on The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup
This post brings another opinion to the thread and contributes to the discussion of pros and cons. Please stop downvoting because you disagree.

This isnt reddit No need for another fanatic echo chamber on the web.

xkbarkar··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
I suggest reading the few south american comments in this thread hidden by the usual whatever Trump does vitriol fro EU/US commenters.

r/venezuela is one placce to start. Very different tone there than the ill informed commenters here ( and I say that with detest for “that other site”)

Hopefully the Venezuelan people will have a fighting change to restore their country now.

Time will tell I suppose.

xkbarkar··on Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes
Agreed
xkbarkar··on Claude Opus 4.5
This is great. Sonnet 4.5 has degraded terribly.

I can get some useful stuff from a clean context in the web ui but the cli is just useless.

Opus is far superiour.

Today sonnet 4.5 suggested to verify remote state file presence by creating an empty one locally and copy it to the remote backend. Da fuq? University level programmer my a$$.

And it seems like it has degraded this last month.

I keep getting braindead suggestions and code that looks like it came from a random word generator.

I swear it was not that awful a couple of months ago.

Opus cap has been an issue, happy to change and I really hope the nerf rumours are just that. Undounded rumours and the defradation has a valid root cause

But honestly sonnet 4.5 has started to act like a smoking pile of sh**t

xkbarkar··on Show HN: I scraped 3B Goodreads reviews to train a better recommendation model
Have nothing to add that hasn’t already been commented. Like the entries in the add list stay. Other than that, my recommendation list keeps coming up with books I have already read and loved and I am hitting the limit :(.

So filtering would be great,

I have seen a few versions of the same books listed more than once.

Loved this. Hope you get to tune it a little.

Also, thank you for not ruining the site with a single popup, email subscription list offer, chatbot, wheelspin from hell anywhere.

Blessings from the popup hating part of the interwebs.

xkbarkar··on OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly
Death threats are fairly common on reddit.

Reddit is beoynd toxic, its bordering on violent extremism

xkbarkar··on I am a programmer, not a rubber-stamp that approves Copilot generated code
As a response to the AI negativity in the thread. Remember that this thing is in its infancy.

Current models are the embryos of what is to come.

Code quality of the current models is not replacing skilled software engineers, network or ops engineers.

Tomorrows models may well do that though.

Venting the frustrations of this is all very well but I sincerely hope those who wish to stay in the industry, learn to get ahead of AI and utilize and control it.

Set industry standards (now) and fight technically incompetent lawmakers before they steer us into disaster.

We have no idea what the effect of tomorrows LLMs is going to have, autonomous warfare is not that far away eg.

All while todays tech talent spends energy bickering on HN about the loss of being the code review King.

Everyone hated the code review royalty anyway. No one mourns them. Move on.

xkbarkar··on Show HN: Pyscn – Python code quality analyzer for vibe coders
Hard disagree. Vibe code has its downsides but is not nearly as terrible as threatened coders on the forums make it seem.
xkbarkar··on EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies
right and so do libertans ,communists and socialists. Hanging on to false ideologies, no matter how disastrous, is not exclusive to right leaning its a human trait.
xkbarkar··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
In Denmark its not recommended for women over a certain age.

So please don’t get it regardless of age. Its not really considered effective for women who have been sexually active for some time.

Which is why its only recommended for girls, not women.

https://www.ssi.dk/vaccinationer/boernevaccination/vaccinati....

Tldr; Dont rush to get a vaccine that is probably not effective for you. Make an appointment with your doctor and discuss it with her first.

xkbarkar··on Amish men live longer
One of the few times I have used the downvote button in Hn for a comment.

Its not a huge effort to at least try to add some source with such a claim, besides the comment does not even bring anything of value to the discussion.

xkbarkar··on EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy
You know what, let’s turn popular city parks to windmill and solarparks. NY central park for example. Copenhagen has a few beloved open green places we could clean out and replace with solarcells, so does Berlin.

Im unscientifically guessing support for nc energy would rise very quickly and wed have a whole bunch of them within a decade.

Source, I live near a windmill, they are loud as f*k. I drive by solaparks nearly every day.

They remind me of those horrible deforested areas in Sweden called kalhygge. Nothing green about those atrocities.

xkbarkar··on ‘Overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI
I agree, article is pretty low quality ragebait. Not good journalism at all.
xkbarkar··on Why our website looks like an operating system
First ( and maybe only time ) I approve of usage of cookie bannner.

Chuckles…

xkbarkar··on The Guardian flourishes without a paywall
I agree, don’t really see as much quality journalism on the guardian as the thread implies.

I donated for the longest time until they succumbed to rage bait journalism.

For a while I started avoiding it entirely, especially during the worst of the Trump and C19 years sanity and objective information seemed to have left everyone.

Also HN remember this is NOT reddit, downvote only if the comment brings nothing to the discussion. The above comment is simply disgreeing with the current blind guardian admiration.

They do not deserve all that praise, and those who point it out are not breaking HN rules and thus should not be removed from the discussion with mindless downvotes.

Read the rules ppl !!!

( wish reddit users could just stay in their own ruined toxic echo chamber and leave the still relatively healthy forums alone. Dont you people have a Tesla somewhere to scratch??)

xkbarkar··on U.S. Government Removes Tornado Cash Sanctions
US government ( sigh ) only did what they were told by a federal judge after the conclusion that sanctions do not apply unless the entity is foreign. Tornado cash is not foreign.

OPs headline feels like cheap rage bait.

xkbarkar··on Happy 20th Birthday, Y Combinator
indeed
xkbarkar··on Why Go's Error Handling Is Awesome
strictly speaking you could use the must pattern and wrap err in there to avoid the constant if err != nil

Albeit it transfers repetition from one place to another.

xkbarkar··on X.com Is Down
Why are you downvoted? It is what the site says. What the hell has happened to HN?

Its not even a controversial comment. Da hell?

xkbarkar··on A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work
Not sure why you are being downvoted. I live in welfare mecca with the worlds highest tax pressure and heqlthcare is breaking under the load.

Staff is overworked and underpayed, waiy lines for crucial procedures can count to decades.

The workforce is aging because young people have stoped reproducing and fear of losing welfare money and the sight of brown faces prevents authoritiesfrom importing competent foreign non eutopean workforce.

This will collapse. There is no doubt this is not sustainable.

This is not an uneven distribution of wealth. Its a monster system that costs more than the national GDP can reasonably sustain in the long term.

Now I am no proponent of privatized healthcare, the current system does not work though.

Everyone suffers like this.

Note: My employer provides private healthcare insueance for us. I live in the richest part if the world. The Nordics. My private insurances gets me same day medical appointments.

The poor sods that cannot afford it have to wait weeks.

Tell me how this is fair and how wonderful the nordic welfare is??

Its americanized and terrible for almost twice the price

xkbarkar··on USA restricts Swiss access to AI computer chips
Covid kills a billion people without government?

Covid response is still one of yhe dumbest most cruel over reactions done in modern time. And the response and its after effect ( including the increase in vax mistrust and inflation ) probably killed and will continue to kill more than the virus ever would.

Polio or smallpox response is a much better description for government necessity.

Covid response is why the extreme libertans are gaining so much support.

Without government response we would still have smallpox and our children would still face paralyzation by polio. Those are much bettet examples of how critical good healthcare and vaccines are and they are provided via governments.

All covid response has done is ruin trust and split us up. O credits to any government exeot Sweden. 1 country on the whole planet kept reasonably sane.

The governmental over reach nutcracker covid response, backed by hysterical reddit, twitter and facebook users, has brought the danger of preventable lethal diseases back on the table.

I have never seen so much mistrust in authorities, healthcare and safety information since the utterly incompetent c19 response and media coverage.

I still cant get over how MAGA rallies killed people but BLM rallies a week later somehow did not.

  I even saw an article in Nature defending BLM rallies.   



If democracy ultimetly fails Id day the covid response was the first step its demise .
xkbarkar··on To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
I call German and Danish windmills bordering on greenwashing.

For any energy to be truly green, it must also be pragmatic. It's not green energy if it's so expensive ordinary households cannot afford to use it.

Id like to see you rejoice if your electricity bill went from 0.4kr to 8kr per kwH because your neightbour countries' "awesome green energy supply" fails to support its citizens needs.

This is not a constant occurrence fortunately but happens enough to anger the Swedish and Norwegian authorities.

They are already quadrupling the electricity cost with a myriad of taxes ( green, state, maintenance, municipality, what have you ) so this price hike due to failed windmills and lack of daylight at the neighbours' makes them look incompetent.

Sweden and Norway does not want to lower the taxes to leverage energy bills for the average tax payer because Germany and Denmark cannot get ther sh!t together, that's for sure.

xkbarkar··on To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids
Heh, author of this should try living in south Sweden that allows Germany to suck them dry when the wind turbines stand still over there.

Quote: Summary of Thursday’s Electricity Prices:

Electricity areas 3 & 4 (Southern Sweden): SEK 2.5-3.6 average price per kWh, peak at SEK 8.

Electricity areas 1 & 2 (Northern Sweden): 17 öre and 9 öre per kWh, respectively.

[source| https://www.timber.exchange/news/details/in-depth/electricit....]

Denmark is trying to do to Norway what Germany has done do the Swedish in that respect. I fully understand that the Norwegians want to cut the cable to the south.

xkbarkar··on The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job
Interesting article and congrats on the original solutions, but wow!

Is there any other field where applicants are subjected to this?

Nepalese Ghhurkas perhaps ?

I once backed out of an interview when they sent me an 85 page manual on how to prepare for the interview with them. It was not even a FAANG company, just a small IT solution with mediocre benefits.

xkbarkar··on Being overweight overtakes tobacco smoking as the leading disease risk factor
Heh. This comment sparked some angry commenters but in fact I agree.

Was a single parent with full time job and took evening college classes.

I watched what I ate and went out for a 30 min run whever I could. I also bicycled and did bodyweight excercises in front of the tv in what was my livingroom/bedroom when the kids were put to bed.

This is 30 years ago and I am middle aged now and my stupid menopausal hormones make me gain weight if I so much as look at a croissant. I frequent the gym several times a week anyway. That menobelly covers my once flat stomach but I am still as strong as I was 30 years ago. Even stronger in fact. I rarely see people my age, especially women, at the gym. Thats a shame. You should join. Resistance training is crucial for women my age.

Be angry or offended all you want people. Not taking care of yourself will be yours and yours only to pay.

It starts with the kitchen, we need to watch what we eat. Eat nutritious foods. And we need to move those muscles and get the heartrate up a few times a week.

And this is health we are talking about. Thin and fat free != healthy

Your body could not care less about political correctness, if you ignore it, it will lead to devastating lifestyle disease and untimely death.

I am shamelessly going to plug Caroline Girvans videos on youtube or her app.

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