Hacker News: ilikerashers

New comment by ilikerashers in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

ilikerashers — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:19:31 +0000

Thing is, if you are a good developer/architect, you have lots of options to make this elsewhere. £100k is not a very high salary in London.

Most of the GDS crowd (who were good), left to go elsewhere due to boredom/frustration.

The cost of not having good staff is very high to government. DEFRA were recently hiring senior enterprise architects on £70k. They could burn a lot of money (millions) on poor technical decision making but somehow saving 30-50k is the priority.

New comment by ilikerashers in "Familiarity is the enemy: On why Enterprise systems have failed for 60 years"

ilikerashers — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:28:30 +0000

Understood that this is a pitch for his own platform (which is fair enough), there is a mixture of a few things here which are common tech tropes.

- Enterprise buyers are risk averse and buy the wrong thing - Language X is better because the people that use it are smarter - New tech is difficult for established players

Not really a fresh take but at least it's well written.

New comment by ilikerashers in "Clawbolt: AI assistant for contractors, not knowledge workers"

ilikerashers — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:44:22 +0000

I am building something similar in the UK. As a contractor, I have to manage tax, invoices, reconciliation, payroll, accountant emails.

I think software in the future will be general portals which roughly self manages via plugins and automation. Services like QuickBooks will eventually just be an MCP server and you can tailor the software as you wish.

Will follow!

New comment by ilikerashers in "MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security"

ilikerashers — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:13:34 +0000

GDS went from an internal distruptor, breaking the consultancy oligopoly to being another entry gate.

The companies who capitalised on this (Kainos/Equal Experts/ScrumConnect) are now their own oligopoly.

It's just big guys charging arms/legs for average work again.

New comment by ilikerashers in "If AI has a bright future, why does AI think it doesn't?"

ilikerashers — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:23:04 +0000

LLM's are like accountants looking at the past.

The numbers are bad therefore it will collapse.

New comment by ilikerashers in "Bet on German Train Delays"

ilikerashers — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 13:26:47 +0000

How about NFC? App with a QR code displayed?

Could be a force of habit for UK but that's mostly how we do tickets. Printing is usually still an option.

New comment by ilikerashers in "Bet on German Train Delays"

ilikerashers — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:57:00 +0000

Maybe i booked through a shadow site. The ticket office printed out something else.

The ticket office did have impressive throughput and lines building up.

New comment by ilikerashers in "Bet on German Train Delays"

ilikerashers — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:36:08 +0000

German trains are absolute chaos. Tickets are sent via PDF for trains running 3 hours late. I was in Frankfurt last year getting to Cologne and back a few times.

Coming from someone who has to commute via South Western railway into London everyday.

Sad state of affairs for Germany.

New comment by ilikerashers in "Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)"

ilikerashers — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 07:41:27 +0000

Yeap. I worked in the UK public sector and I watched the UK gov briefly back their own cloud company (Skyscape) then ditch them when they had some minor issues.

Completely captured by US tech

New comment by ilikerashers in "Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)"

ilikerashers — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:49:58 +0000

Europe has just been catastrophically slow in developing anything related to it's own tech infrastructure. Its doesn't back itself.

Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working groups.

New comment by ilikerashers in "GitHub is down again"

ilikerashers — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:20:45 +0000

Yeap, getting this for the last 20 minutes. Everything green on their status pages.

New comment by ilikerashers in "America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints"

ilikerashers — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 10:34:54 +0000

I've started buying clothes from China. Quality and style is starting to really improve.

Makes you wonder how much we've been ripped off for years.

New comment by ilikerashers in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025)"

ilikerashers — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 09:23:38 +0000

Coachcube | https://coachcube.ai | Mid to Senior ML Engineer and CV Engineer | Onsite London

Coachcube is new gym product providing a virtual PT service. We have an experienced senior leadership team and are building a hardware/software product using digital motors, camera vision and ML to design a next-generation weight-lifting product. If you like fitness and ML, reach out for a chat!

The ideal candidate:

  - Can ship quickly

  - Highly inquisitive but also motivated to deliver

  - Comfortable moving across domains

  - Understands fitness/weight lifting

  - Up for a challenge

Tech Stack: Go, AWS, Unity, Python, Claude Code

email: hello@coachcube.ai

New comment by ilikerashers in "US Intel"

ilikerashers — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 15:50:47 +0000

The EU outsourced manufacturing without any Mag 7.

I'm sure it'll work out well for us...

New comment by ilikerashers in "US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU"

ilikerashers — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 09:56:54 +0000

Tech giants have no competition in Europe and no capital to do so. In some ways, what Trump is doing is a call to arms for the EU to kick their economies into shape. We've been stuck in 0 growth for years, the UK is in a 0 growth trap since the GFC.

New comment by ilikerashers in "Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?"

ilikerashers — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:50:41 +0000

While I agree we're not all implementing physics engines, there is a spectrum of complexity that is both business and technical between a todo app and a banking system.

Developer brains are still much more efficient at holding the different layers of context involved to build systems.

New comment by ilikerashers in "Why is everyone trying to replace Software Engineers?"

ilikerashers — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:19:42 +0000

My view is that Ai companies saw there was a huge volume of code online and decided coding was a text generation problem and easy to replace.

I don't buy it. I also don't think it'll replace writers or artists. Just the low brow, chum bucket stuff which in programming terms is a todo app or web form.

New comment by ilikerashers in "The average age of U.S. homebuyers jumps to 56"

ilikerashers — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 10:04:51 +0000

We need very big changes to capitalism at its core.

There are warning signs flashing across all economies without any coherent solutions.

New comment by ilikerashers in "Programmer in Berlin: Culture"

ilikerashers — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 08:05:17 +0000

Germany is in serious trouble. The US and China are in protectionist markets. EU is starting to realise their labour and manufacturing are expensive and not unique anymore. The business model is broken.

New comment by ilikerashers in "City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle"

ilikerashers — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 09:01:06 +0000

Too much to build. UK government has shown it can build styling templates, payment and notification wrappers well. These are useful and achievable services.

Full on ERP would be a disaster.