Hacker News: com

New comment by com in "Claude for Small Business"

com — Thu, 14 May 2026 11:38:00 +0000

WhatsApp and other over the top messaging and calling apps destroyed “the rivers of gold” that the telcos had in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Net neutrality was triggered by their attempts to block VOIP and messenger apps.

I knew one telco who made €3Bn clear profit a year from 2 Dell servers and a team of five to keep SMS messages flowing. Their billing infrastructure was bigger, much bigger than the SMS servers.

New comment by com in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

com — Tue, 12 May 2026 05:50:10 +0000

These days even without trying I get more nine than GitHub.

Arguments against self hosting have to change as our SaaS overlords are decaying in front of our very eyes.

New comment by com in "Over 97% of the 'Linux' Foundation's Budget Goes Not to Linux"

com — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:26:39 +0000

Really? Your rhetoric seems to miss a LOT of new global businesses, as well as older ones that are much bigger than ever before.

Spotify, Wise, Adyen, DeepMind just off the top of my head, but there are loads more.

The fact that you don’t know about them is because many tech bros in the USA are pretty parochial and haven’t been exposed to international businesses or indeed tech.

New comment by com in "Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit"

com — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:55:36 +0000

I’m seeing a lot of similar things during code reviews of substantially LLM-produced codebases now. Half-baked bad idea that probably leaked from training sets.

New comment by com in "The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code"

com — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:20:20 +0000

Not quite; for wide-bodies at least RR pips GE for fuel-efficiency, but there’s not much in it for the latest generation of power plants.

New comment by com in "Engineering team looks healthy. It probably isn't"

com — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:04:10 +0000

You know, this is also true for a lot of non-AI shops. It’s just that they’re not really delivering at all.

New comment by com in "The CMS is dead, long live the CMS"

com — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:23:54 +0000

I suspect that you mean the opposite of “dearth” (figuratively “scarcity; a lack or short supply”) something like “excess”, maybe?

New comment by com in "A Year with the Framework 13"

com — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:09:02 +0000

It’s Le to chime in and say I’m really happy with mine too. It’s less portable than my old MacBook Air, but it is just a dream machine with Debian 13!

New comment by com in "Slovenian officials blame Israeli firm Black Cube for trying to manipulate vote"

com — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:38:22 +0000

You’ll get crickets.

These people don’t want a state of citizens, they want a kingdom of serfs because they think they’ll make it into tiny aristo élite.

New comment by com in "Why I'm launching a feminist video games website in 2026"

com — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:32:57 +0000

It's already looking good:

https://www.mothership.blog/

New comment by com in "Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology"

com — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 09:05:44 +0000

There were Eurobooks and they were pretty well bought out by Facebook. Hyves and so on. The online CV networks were bought by LinkedIn.

New comment by com in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

com — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:00:16 +0000

Never heard of that, and I've worked in about 7 EU countries...

New comment by com in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

com — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:59:47 +0000

It’s not just the Internet. It’s politicians and businesspeople and more generally, shameless citizens.

There’s a lot to dislike about shame as an enforcement mechanism but I’m starting to miss some of the upside it delivered.

New comment by com in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

com — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:55:10 +0000

Could you expand on the other problems with Europe other than hiring and firing laws?

New comment by com in "Radboud University selects Fairphone as standard smartphone for employees"

com — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:37:43 +0000

Me too. I've seen that horror too :-)

New comment by com in "How Markdown took over the world"

com — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 14:11:01 +0000

This might be the new location:

https://gistdeck.github.io/

New comment by com in "Open Infrastructure Map"

com — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:30:22 +0000

Because obscurity works against insider threats and OSint /s

New comment by com in "Bill to Eliminate H-1B Visa Program Introduced in Congress"

com — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:47:59 +0000

I ran a corporate networking team in the 2000s with two of the five network engineer team members, being two years out of retraining (they were welding specialists in the former local shipbuilding industry). Non-white collar supervisory and work ethic issues, but excellent work in general. Had an issue with the team on-call car getting bullet holes once (suspect some drug dealing on the side, long story!) but excellent colleagues in general.

I've worked with a lot of retrained and second-career people and I can't sing their praises enough.

New comment by com in "Ask HN: Cheapest / most efficient way of pre-filtering candidates"

com — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 11:56:41 +0000

Hiring from your own and employee's network.

Provide significant referral bonuses to employees and ex-employees if a new hire stays on board for more than 6 months with above-average performance reviews.

Run evaluations with external recruitment firms - do quality shoot-outs with three recruitment firms for the same open role - each may present only three CVs. Never run any position with less than two external recruitment firms and let them clearly know that you're tracking quality metrics (CV fit, interview quality of candidates, job role fit, and six month retention and above-average performance review) and will retire your partnership if they drop below mean.

Run an empanelling process for the recruiters for each role and learn how to do it properly and repeatedly. This is a simpler process than the one you run internally with the hiring exec (you?), hiring manager and interviewer pool. You have an empanelling process, right?

New comment by com in "The Quiet Unraveling of the Power Grid Monopoly"

com — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 11:42:02 +0000

Traditionally, network effects have allowed us to socialize costs (and socialize benefits) in power, water, gas, roads and communications. We've used very different models in different places for each of these "natural monopolies" that get constructed.

When consumers opt out en masse, these systems collapse if they're not actually socialized - and where there is no actual financial benefit to consumers for going "off-grid" since they're still paying with taxes or equivalent.

I'd love to see an analysis of the different approaches in the different phases, possibly including TV-for-public benefit, like the BBC or NPR too.