Hacker News: jhh

New comment by jhh in "AWS Acquires DuckLabs"

jhh — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:05:31 +0000

they did fairly well with Java

New comment by jhh in "Walmart is migrating the remaining F# code into Java"

jhh — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 17:42:08 +0000

Does anyone have examples of people migrating from Go to Java? I suspect this has more to do with moving away from functional and/or reactive programming.

New comment by jhh in "Inside .git"

jhh — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 14:29:44 +0000

Awesome content, and Julia is very good at recognizing what people need to know to understand the whole thing

New comment by jhh in "Tens of thousands protest in Germany against the rise of the far right"

jhh — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 08:38:06 +0000

I've never seen such a big protest. The transit system in Hamburg was completely overloaded. People standing around Alster lake, you couldn't even get close to the actual point where the protest was scheduled to happen. Those protests possibly may be ineffectual and what not - they certainly weren't small.

Hamburg: https://image.stern.de/34382826/t/ud/v2/w960/r1.7778/-/19-ha...

Both Hamburg and Munich protests needed to be canceled in the middle of the thing because the huge crowds were considered dangerous (I think rightly so).

New comment by jhh in "OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns"

jhh — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 14:51:06 +0000

Reasoning based on cui bono is a hallmark of conspiracy theories.

New comment by jhh in "Write code like you just learned how to program (2010)"

jhh — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 07:24:52 +0000

Why skulls though?

New comment by jhh in "Tell HN: DNS record "hn.algolia.com" was gone"

jhh — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 16:16:08 +0000

Everybody has to save money

New comment by jhh in "Ways to capture changes in Postgres"

jhh — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 12:58:08 +0000

All of those are kind of bad, polling being the most practical, imho.

Would be great if Postgres innovated in this area.

New comment by jhh in "John Warnock has died"

jhh — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 18:26:40 +0000

Just to clarify, not trying to correct anyone here, the third attendee was Bob Sproull, author of "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics"?

New comment by jhh in "Germany’s solar power generation hit record high at weekend"

jhh — Tue, 30 May 2023 15:42:31 +0000

The article says that 40 GW power was reached. And you are talking about MwH (i.e. energy), so that is a misconception I think.

Renewables share for the whole last week in Germany was 77.4%.

https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...

You can get a feel for how the production is composed over the day here https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&...

New comment by jhh in "Sam Zeloof and Jim Keller start a new semiconductor fab"

jhh — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 08:20:31 +0000

Makes a lot of sense to me. Intel's production cannot keep up and so it's only TSMC and Samsung with a big gap. I think some people will be surprised when TSMC starts taking more and more of the profit from the value chain in the next few years.

New comment by jhh in "What I wish someone would have told me about using RabbitMQ (2020)"

jhh — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 05:45:35 +0000

I was also surprised by that but there may be some slightly unusual background reason for that that simply doesn't get mentioned. Superficially it sounds like the author should just... do the HTTP request? Since they're waiting for the response anyway

New comment by jhh in "Down the Golang Nil Rabbit Hole"

jhh — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 12:46:40 +0000

Playground link for convenience https://play.golang.org/p/mEVfizXY_Mf

New comment by jhh in "AstraZeneca vaccine doesn't prevent B1351 Covid in early trial"

jhh — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 07:40:39 +0000

They don't target the exact same protein and they use a different vector.

New comment by jhh in "Bit (1.0) – a modern Git CLI in Go"

jhh — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 13:07:08 +0000

I think this can enable experimentation. Enthsiasts may use this and the things that work best can be brought upstream.

New comment by jhh in "Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history (2018)"

jhh — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 14:13:59 +0000

So I think it is certainly _very_ unsure that Bitcoin will become the dominant crypto asset. I think there's some reason why it might.

Kind of subtle and hand-wavy, but I think it's dysfunctionality in terms of leadership and "emergent nature" may be features rather than bugs.

For example a crypto asset sanctioned by a government is based on that government's legitimacy. This kind of means that the government could decide to "turn it off". And with Bitcoin, it's not clear at all who could do this.

But yeah, that's very unsure, I guess.

New comment by jhh in "Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history (2018)"

jhh — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 13:14:45 +0000

So I feel the "Bitcoin is undesirable as a store of value because it's so volatile" point is not too fair.

Firstly, fiat money can often experience instability which is quite extreme. Moderate instability, mostly in form of inflation, is even normal in large parts of the developing world. And just because the Dollar has been reasonable stable for a hundred years or so, people assume that this is the natural state of affairs.

Secondly, is it a reasonable expectation, that a new store of value would be stable from the start? For example, platinum has become more common as a store of value in the last 30ish years, and its value has sprung up and fluctuated quite heavily (see here for example https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Pt_price...). A similar argument can be made regarding storehouses being less trustworthy than traditional banks. This sort of thing would be expected with a new type of value.

New comment by jhh in "Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine approved for use in UK"

jhh — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 10:40:40 +0000

It's so odd that he would make these statements in an interview without the data or a press release published. I mean this should be information subject to mandatory publication with regards to their shareholders. Astra has been by far the least trustworthy of the major companies so far. I just hope their jab works anyway.

New comment by jhh in "There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology (2019)"

jhh — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 23:38:41 +0000

The use case I mention in the first sentence of my comment: Long term store of value.

New comment by jhh in "There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology (2019)"

jhh — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 23:19:38 +0000

I think about Bitcoin (and similar systems) primarily as a long term store of value.

I think they are a pretty fundamental innovation in that space.

What are good alternatives? Gold, cash, or ETFs have substantial drawbacks - especially in situations where property rights are insecure and inflation runs wild (or just eats up savings at a somewhat moderate pace, as is the case in many developing countries).

Of course Bitcoin is also a human system, eventually, but what you are trusting is an emergent, non-hierarchical order which should be more resilient than hierarchical systems. The technology facilitates the emergence of such a system.

I actually think the flawlessness of the technology is not a necessary condition of Bitcoin's success. If bugs are found then consensus in the social system can emerge which can minimise damages

All of that being said I think the use case for blockchain is probably quite narrow.