Hacker News: malthaus

New comment by malthaus in "Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold"

malthaus — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:26:46 +0000

yorck unlimited made living in berlin 10x as exciting

but you could always be sure that the old lady loudly crunching on every.single.crisp. was there in the showing as well

New comment by malthaus in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

malthaus — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:28:50 +0000

i'm swiss and also own property in central berlin. while i was having insanely fast internet in all the places i lived in switzerland since the year 2000 (first cable, then fiber), german telekom has still not been able to connect my flat to fiber, even though the street facing building side is and i'm stuck with semi fast but fully overpriced dsl, which on top is spotty because someone decided to install cheap copper - while cable internet is not an option because 2 cable providers fight over who owns the access to the building.

whatever the roll-out in switzerland is, it's heaps better than in germany and most other places.

New comment by malthaus in "Delve removed from Y Combinator"

malthaus — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:39:28 +0000

"that gets you on", ie. the kind of personality that literally pays & hustles to be featured on such a list to fuel their own ego?

colour me surprised

people still seem to think that forbes scouts the world for the best talents instead of the lists being basically a paid ad

New comment by malthaus in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

malthaus — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:27:36 +0000

hackernews as a whole has the same issue software engineers have - overestimating one's wisdom and overapplying it with confidence to everything, resulting in horrible takes that might look like signals but are mostly noise

New comment by malthaus in "Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS"

malthaus — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:39:44 +0000

your trauma is my happy memory - being a lotus notes admin/dev consultant during my studies made me live a very comfortable life as a student!

New comment by malthaus in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

malthaus — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:46:02 +0000

very hard to feel sorry of you when countless professions experienced the same in the past - only that they were poor / working class and not overpaid software engineers at FAANG.

also very egocentric & pessimist way to look at things. humankind is much better off when anyone can produce software and skilled experts will always be needed, just maybe with a slightly different skillset.

New comment by malthaus in "I’m joining OpenAI"

malthaus — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:29:42 +0000

it's a tough pill to swallow for developers, but nobody cares about your ability to write code. people care about you shipping something people want.

i can easily hire 100 sweatshop coders to finetune your code once i have a product that works but the inverse will never happen

New comment by malthaus in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

malthaus — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:50:33 +0000

so something that is a horrible store of value, has monumental transaction fees, non-instant confirmation and is associated by laypersons mostly with speculation, fraud & illegal transactions will solve those?

New comment by malthaus in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

malthaus — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 07:35:00 +0000

... where they come with their own idiosyncratic mental/moral flaws

you gotta treat communities like newspapers - acknowledge their bias and diversify

New comment by malthaus in "Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out"

malthaus — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 07:59:13 +0000

going off my example - chatgpt knows everything about me including desires, goals and issues im struggling with.

combine this with the fact that i have disposable income.

i can't fathom how much advertisers are willing to pay to put themselves in front of my eyes vs a google search for "dining table"

New comment by malthaus in "The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership"

malthaus — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:47:44 +0000

... and it will turn into a "technically true" rat race between the main players on what the definition is exactly while you can ask any person on the street with no skin in the game who will tell you that this is nowhere near the intuitive understanding of what AGI is - as it it's not measured by scores but instead of how real and self-aware your counterpart "feels" to you.

New comment by malthaus in "Claude for Excel"

malthaus — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 17:01:18 +0000

from my experience in the corporate world, i'd trust an excel generated / checked by an LLM more than i would one that has been organically grown over years in a big corporation where nobody ever checks or even can check anything because its one big growing pile of technical debt people just accept as working

New comment by malthaus in "Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division"

malthaus — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 18:33:35 +0000

... until reality catches up with a software engineer's inability to see outside of the narrow engineering field of view, neglecting most things that the end-users will care about, millions if not billions are wasted and leadership sees that checks and balances for the engineering team might be warranted after all because while velocity was there, you now have an overengineered product nobody wants to pay for.

New comment by malthaus in "AMD signs AI chip-supply deal with OpenAI, gives it option to take a 10% stake"

malthaus — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:25:03 +0000

if only they could also anticipate what will happen once the tide is falling

New comment by malthaus in "Aphantasia and Psychedelics"

malthaus — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 17:35:27 +0000

i have aphantasia and extensive experience with psychedelics

for me, as long as my consciousness is still in control, i have no closed-eye visuals akin to what others see. the more i lose control/consciousness, the more visuals i get but only over a certain (high) threshold.

dmt is the only substance that consistently gives me visuals but only at close to breakthrough dosages where i effectively lose consiousness. and they are never "things", they are always the known patterns, ie just raw signals and nothing meaningful - but my mind interprets them in whatever it thinks sensible.

otherwise i hallucinate like i dream or think - in an abstract, non visual way, the only thing i "see" are white flashes in nothingness

New comment by malthaus in "Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol"

malthaus — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 09:28:22 +0000

leaving the use case aside (i don't think it's needed, sensible or succesful) - i have to say i'm admiring how stripe manages to be forward thinking and takes a smart strategic position on every new wave that appears.

never full on moving the tanker like zuckerberg or a16z but always ready to sell shovels to a (potantially) viable submarket that is aligned with their mission and becoming a strategic player in that angle.

very smart.

New comment by malthaus in "KDE is now my favorite desktop"

malthaus — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:37:54 +0000

sorry, but while it definitely looks better than it did in the 90s, it's neither a professional level design nor better than mac os. and you don't need to be a designer to see it.

those misleading hype statements are the reason why stuff like "this is the year of the linux desktop!" is a meme because anybody outside of your nerd/tech bubble will just look at you like you're insane.

New comment by malthaus in "Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML"

malthaus — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:31:17 +0000

maybe i'm too cynical but to me this looks more like an orchestrated "win" story for the eu ecosystem with some backroom dealing/incentives and some ex-post rationalisation sprinkled on rather than a strategic invest by asml.

New comment by malthaus in "95% of AI Pilots Fail"

malthaus — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 06:57:18 +0000

personal trauma & anecdata from working in corporate innovation for many years

New comment by malthaus in "95% of AI Pilots Fail"

malthaus — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:50:26 +0000

95% of any pilots at corporates fail, probably even more than that, you don't need ai for that