Hacker News: SvenL

New comment by SvenL in "Microsoft Teams is a red flag"

SvenL — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 19:56:09 +0000

I’m not quite sure, but the reasoning that some technology is frustrating users and therefore is not calculated in when optimizing cost per seat could apply to every software. In a large enough company there will be always people complaining about this and that. If you google you will also find people complaining about Slack.

I like Teams. Especially the Meeting feature. I like that I can join with multiple devices in a meeting. Sharing stuff in a meeting is also pretty cool and easy. I also like the integration into other products.

The only thing which could be better is performance - even the new WebView2 thing is not enough. But this is sadly common for most tools like this.

New comment by SvenL in "Volkswagen Plans to Cut 50k Jobs Amid Dire Need to Reduce Costs"

SvenL — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:53:55 +0000

I would add transition to a more digital era. Apps, distribution, website, in car entertainment etc…

New comment by SvenL in "German industry pushes to restore 40-hour working week without extra pay"

SvenL — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:11:47 +0000

That’s not how this works. Let’s assume there is a correlation between productivity gain due to AI usage and outcome per working hour. No manager/CEO would say “hey, due to AI my workers get the same work done in 30h for which they needed 40h before - let’s cut their working hours down to 30h with same salary”.

No, that’s not happening. Shareholder value has to increase so keep working 40h and produce more outcome.

New comment by SvenL in "Fewer Americans Pay to Use LLMs Than Still Pay to Play World of Warcraft"

SvenL — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:36:49 +0000

Imagine creating something people still like to pay for after over 20 years. Incredible! Disclaimer: I also have still a subscription.

Regarding LLM: I guess if you count in enterprise/company subscription, LLMs would win. Interesting would be how many really want them or just have to use them…

New comment by SvenL in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

SvenL — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:56:42 +0000

Aren’t ads payed also via „impressions“, like 10k people saw your advertisement so please pay x money?

New comment by SvenL in "Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol on an NP-Hard Problem: Does /goal help?"

SvenL — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:03:11 +0000

Isn’t it weird to think a LLM “fully understands” something? What does this mean?

It reminds me of this printing trick “until you are 95% confident”…

Would really be interested to know how this influences the work of the LLM. Also, how would it be if I write “until you certainly understand it”?

New comment by SvenL in "If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe"

SvenL — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:15:03 +0000

I guess the main issue is that HTML was supposed to be a language to describe documents. We abuse it to design interactive applications. I would rather like to not have one technology to support to different use cases. It’s a shame we are riding that abomination for developing apps.

New comment by SvenL in "Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS"

SvenL — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:45:46 +0000

I think ACL is only a part of the solution. If he runs the agent with his account, the ACL would not really help. But I do admit, I might have an outdated understanding of ACLs.

New comment by SvenL in "Sperm donors need limits, says a European fertility group"

SvenL — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:17:33 +0000

I think the issue is could be that your new partner might be your half sister/half brother which could yield some problems.

New comment by SvenL in "How to Survive 3 Years in North Korea as a Foreigner"

SvenL — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:42:44 +0000

Based on the topic, this could be intentional.

New comment by SvenL in "US Supreme Court Just Blew Up EU-US Data Transfers"

SvenL — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 21:27:32 +0000

Does it need to be infra only? Is there also a risk by using go/rust/java etc? Like some of those projects are hosted on US sites? During Iran conflict access to US sites was cut (GitHub/NPM/Maven etc is hosted on US entities). To be really independent would mean much more I guess. Even languages who were invented in Europe are mostly dependent on US entities.

New comment by SvenL in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

SvenL — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:21:37 +0000

New comment by SvenL in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

SvenL — Sat, 30 May 2026 21:38:10 +0000

People always laugh when I mention C# in this regard. It has so many things, like pointer, you can define that memory alignment works like in C, SIMD, AoT compilation, Span. I think you can do pretty much C like programming in C#.

New comment by SvenL in "Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy"

SvenL — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:35:43 +0000

I was referring to this:

>I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.

I just wanted to give an example of such accurate physics props, that this is not only due to Oppenheimer.

This was not about the historic accuracy.

New comment by SvenL in "Archaeologists find Egyptian mummy buried with the 'Iliad'"

SvenL — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:26:24 +0000

Well, interstellar has also some nerd stuff in it. If I remember correctly Kip Thorne did physics consulting on the movie and they even use a simulation running on a cluster to visualize the black hole physically correct.

They could have used some arbitrary CGI…but no, they wanted it accurate according to science.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808

New comment by SvenL in "Introduction to Beaver Triples"

SvenL — Sat, 09 May 2026 17:22:12 +0000

What a weird site, my iPhone 16 is heating up and Safari crashes.

New comment by SvenL in "Show HN: Perfect Bluetooth MIDI for Windows"

SvenL — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:18:38 +0000

Actually I thought the same for macOS for certain things, like window management was way better on Windows than on macOS (snapping etc.) Luckily after years macOS finally has something decent to organize windows. I know that there were 3rd party apps like rectangles but something simple like organizing windows missing from a desktop OS always felt weird.

New comment by SvenL in "The peril of laziness lost"

SvenL — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:29:19 +0000

I also struggle with this all the time, balance between bringing value/joy and level of craft. Most human written stuff might look really ugly or was written in a weird way but as long as it’s useful it’s ok.

What I don’t like here is the bragging about the LoC. He’s not bragging about the value it could provide. Yes people also write shitty code but they don’t brag about it - most of the time they are even ashamed.

New comment by SvenL in "Am I German or Autistic?"

SvenL — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 06:42:04 +0000

You are absolutely correct and the context is also right. My comment was a little bit out of frustration (happend several times). I only heard about it from an amazing ccc talk (https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10652-bahnmining_-_punktlichkeit...).

New comment by SvenL in "Am I German or Autistic?"

SvenL — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:51:33 +0000

The Deutsche Bahn rather cancel trains completely instead of them being late - which also says something.