Hacker News: tedggh

New comment by tedggh in "France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech"

tedggh — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:38:53 +0000

I think this has been attempted many times before by other nations including Brazil without success. It’s one thing to replace a few hundred workstations in a non critical governmental office, another to replace the entire infrastructure of a government which also collaborates with the private sector. Usually these projects start with a lot of passion then die off when can’t justify the investment.

New comment by tedggh in "IronGlass Brings Legendary Soviet Cinema Lenses to Mirrorless Cameras"

tedggh — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:38:29 +0000

Meyer Optik Görlitz is another company bringing back vintage lenses. They carry what in my opinion is the best of all vintage lenses, the Jena Biotar 1.5/75

New comment by tedggh in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."

tedggh — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:47:14 +0000

If a comment sucks it gets downvoted anyway. If it’s thoughtful, the drafting tool and process is kind of beside the point.

Plenty of people already use search engines, editors, translators, etc. when writing. An LLM is just another tool in that box.

The practical approach is the one HN has always used: judge the content.

Btw, this was co written with ChatGPT. Does that make any difference to anyone?

J/K, actually it was not co written by ChatGPT.

Or maybe it was…

New comment by tedggh in "US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]"

tedggh — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:50:24 +0000

As an avid reader and outdoors enthusiast, I feel there’s a lot of value on “wasting” time with a movie or limited series.

Absolutely, there are so many better things to do and experience than watching TV, but no one should be stressing out about maximizing their time doing them.

In fact, going against that mindset once in a while, and allowing yourself to not do the thing you think you should be doing, is an experience by itself.

Also, it doesn’t need to be a complete waste of time. If you like history or art, there’s a lot of content both as fiction and non fiction that you would find intellectually stimulating (I highly recommend Criterion for this)

One cold November night my wife picked a movie called Babette's Feast. I absolutely loved the photography. I did some research and found it was inspired by Danish painter Hammershoi, which I never heard of. For Christmas, my wife gave me a beautifully printed, limited edition of his work by the Jacquemart museum in Paris.

Later this year we plan to make a stop in Copenhagen on our way to Sweden to visit friends, so we can see Hammershoi work at the museums.

New comment by tedggh in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

tedggh — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:34:55 +0000

Yours was a clever answer to a stupid question. Tech interviewers need to leave college behind and start treating candidates as professionals. Puzzles, white boarding and riddles are unique to software engineering roles, you would never see a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, or engineers in other disciplines going through any of this nonsense. These methods are proven to be a poor predictor of job performance. In my last role as lead engineer we would chat with the candidate over lunch about random topics. We first wanted to see if they would fit our team. Then in the afternoon let them work in a little project that was actually part of active development. This way we discovered that most candidates who went through the screening process could actually be pretty good team members. Our issue was having to decide who to give the offer to, while other companies keep rejecting candidates over bubble sort. Our attrition was also pretty low. So it happens that software engineers will surprise you when you treat them as grown ass adults. Who would have guessed?

New comment by tedggh in "GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment"

tedggh — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 02:16:44 +0000

When I see this type of titles, before reading I first stop by the comments to see if someone found any BS. Most times someone did, so I skip. Thank you, BS checkers.

New comment by tedggh in "Rice Theory: Why Eastern Cultures Are More Cooperative (2014)"

tedggh — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:45:22 +0000

I spent some time in China working in manufacturing. I remember talking to some of the guys there. As it was explained to me, everything they had, their home, kids school, wife’s job was owned by the employer. Meaning if you lose your job you lose everything. I remember how incredibly difficult was to get things done there, no one wanted to make decisions. That was many years ago, maybe things have changed.

New comment by tedggh in "British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years"

tedggh — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:28:14 +0000

The worst age group behind the wheel is by far 16-25. The middle age group is the safest and the gap is actually moderate compared to 70-75.

New comment by tedggh in "I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor"

tedggh — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 12:50:52 +0000

A close friend is considered one of the best neurosurgeons at one of the best hospitals in the country. Brain tumors are his specialty. I remember him once saying he was growing exhausted about his job and thinking of retirement, even when he’s still young. The reason being, most of the other doctors in his team were not very competent and he had to constantly review and correct their work. He’s not an arrogant guy but all the contrary, very down to earth. For him to say something like that is because the mistakes he sees have to be bad. Every time he tried to quit, the hospital threw so much money at him that he could not refuse it.

New comment by tedggh in "A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content"

tedggh — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:28:27 +0000

Probably worse than that. I can totally see it being weaponized. A media company critic o a particular group or individual being scrutinized and fined. I haven’t looked at any of these laws, but I bet their language gives plenty of room for interpretation and enforcement, perhaps even if you are not generating any content with AI.

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

tedggh — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:09:06 +0000

Are there real documented cases of a company replacing their SaS with a vibe-coded version?

Like I can see how a very small company could replace a portion of an overkill and underutilized SaS platform.

I don’t see how a larger more complex business could replace their SAP or ADP with a vibecoded version.

These stories are all very similar in where the author knows some CEO of an obscure company who told them they had an engineer reverse engineer and vibecode some obscure SaS solution and saved them $50K.

New comment by tedggh in "France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US"

tedggh — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 22:56:54 +0000

I have used at least Skype, Meet/Chat, Slack, Teams and Discord, plus some other niche apps I can’t remember. In Discord, I like the ability to share user screens concurrently and the way you can just jump on a channel and have an impromptu meeting without much ceremony. But I have seen only one case of Discord in a corporate environment. My use cases are simple, video calls, screen sharing, file sharing and chat with mentions and code snippets, once in a while a survey to pick a place for lunch. I have been using Teams daily since last October. No issues. If it was consistently bad, it would have been replaced already. People I work with value their time. Also last week I was in a 2K+ people presentation with Q&A. I haven’t experienced most of the issues you mentioned, and don’t have the use case for some, like search or mobile. I use my email as my source of truth for communications, if it’s not in my inbox it didn’t happen. We are very diligent in keeping meeting minutes and transcripts which are shared my email at the end of the each call.

New comment by tedggh in "France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US"

tedggh — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:29:11 +0000

What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.

New comment by tedggh in "The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal"

tedggh — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:28:04 +0000

It seems to me it is more of a penalty to encourage people to get Real ID while still allowing them to fly. I would imagine most air travelers have some kind of real id, passport, actual real id DL or global entry card. Very few people cannot get real id due to name inconsistency issues, but most are just lazy. Allowing them to fly for $45 seems reasonable to me, particularly if they cause delays at security.

New comment by tedggh in "EU must become a 'genuine federation' to avoid deindustrialisation and decline"

tedggh — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:39:13 +0000

The population of Africa is estimated to be 5-6 times the population of Europe by 2060. For context, in 1990 Africa had slightly less people than Europe. Today more than double.

New comment by tedggh in "My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)"

tedggh — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:41:13 +0000

My experience with doctors in the US is that they often not only give you contradictory advice but just bad plain advice with complete lack of common sense. It feels like they are regurgitating medical school textbooks without a context window. I truly believe doctors, most specialists and definitely all general practitioners, are easily replaceable with the tech we have today. The only obstacle is regulations, insurance and not being able to sue a LLM. But it is not a technical issue anymore. Doctors would only be necessary to perform more complicated procedures such as surgery, and that’s until we can fully automate it with robots. Most of the complicated medical issues I have had, some related to the immune system, were solved by myself by seeing them as engineering problems, by debugging my own body. Meanwhile doctors seeing me had no clue. And this was before having the tools we have today. It’s like doctors often cannot think beyond the box and focus only in treating symptoms. My sister is a doctor by the way and she suffers from the same one-size-fits-all approach to medicine.

New comment by tedggh in "ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions"

tedggh — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:56:12 +0000

Former Siemens employee here. There was a point in time my engineering team was 5 people and we had 3 project managers. No joke. If you have watched Office Space that’s pretty much how it was. They would stroll (very slowly) around with a mug asking how was going and timesheets. The thing is at many of these organizations there’s really no way to increase your hourly rate and bonuses unless you get into management. My team put a lot of overtime that was not always compensated. We often made more take-home money than PMs but worked disproportionately more too, so at an hourly rate we were much lower. There’s also a stigma about being in engineering by 40, so you see many experienced engineers in their 30s getting their PMPs and pushing in their performance review for management positions. Leadership in engineering once you reach principal is director, and there’s usually one director per BU. Principal vs Senior doesn’t have a life changing salary difference either, about 20-30% and you stay there until you retire or die. There are exceptions like Microsoft that offers partnerships, which are incredibly difficult to reach, but at least the possibility is there if you want to stay in the tech side and make a lot of money.

New comment by tedggh in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

tedggh — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:55:28 +0000

I spent a month in Spain driving a BYD daily and it was fine. I just don’t like the tackiness of the interior and not in love with the exterior either. The handling is also ok, nothing exciting. There’s something still very Chinese about these cars. Not saying that matters if you just want an affordable and reliable EV that takes you from point A to B. BYD can do that perfectly fine. I personally like the design of the Model Y (own one) very much, it also feels much more “alive” particularly the dual motor. There’s no comparison with the BYD I drove. Also never had any issues with build quality other than the charging port malfunctioning, and it was fixed outside my house, all I had to do was touch a button in the app to call service. FSD is pretty damn amazing. The tech is great and the updates do make the car better in many ways. I hope Tesla finds its way because apart from all the controversy they can make good cars.

New comment by tedggh in "Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds"

tedggh — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 02:22:29 +0000

On Spain’s conventional and high-speed rail network, inspection frequency is defined by ADIF rules and EU railway safety standards.

High-speed lines (AVE): Visual and geometry inspections are performed daily to weekly using inspection trains and onboard measurement systems. Ultrasonic rail flaw detection is typically done every 1 to 3 months, depending on traffic and tonnage.

Source: ADIF high-speed maintenance programs and EU interoperability maintenance requirements.

New comment by tedggh in "Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee"

tedggh — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:12:57 +0000

Fair enough, but is still a Subaru. So it doesn’t make sense to compare its value to a Tesla just because of auto steer. If it comes to that, there’s a lot of value in a Tesla for which you don’t pay a dime either, like constant and actually useful system upgrades, a reliable charging network and great customer service. It’s also a good looking car with a great user interface that gets better and better with free updates. Now if you are a person dropping 50K on a Tesla, you can likely afford FSD if that’s something important to you. FSD is not comparable to any auto steer I have tried on any car, and I drive a bunch of different rental cars because I travel a lot by road for business. I like the new flexibility of being able to pay for FSD when you are going to use it only, like during a long trip. There’s no point to be on FSD (or autopilot) to run errands in the city.