Hacker News: thorin

New comment by thorin in "Is surveillance risk chilling your online speech?"

thorin — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:36:27 +0000

Not really, at least in the UK ( where "apparently" everyone is being jailed for free speech violations). I've moved to the position where I wouldn't post anything online that I wouldn't say in person, and I very rarely post anything work related.

New comment by thorin in "Ask HN: My father died and I need to find my path"

thorin — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:32:26 +0000

My father worked in signals, first in the armed forces and then railway signals and telephone lines for his whole life. When I was young I was interested in Electronics, but not too great with them. I did study a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering but preferred the computer parts of the course and have since then been working in IT for nearly 30 years. I can understand how your fathers advice is important, but you also need to do something you can enjoy and succeed at.

I would say with your background don't worry too much about which technologies to learn. Things are changing fast so try and instead develop an engineering mindset, which will serve you well whatever you do.

He will guide you, but you also need to make your own path. Good luck in your journey.

New comment by thorin in "Have you restarted your computer this week?"

thorin — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:25:05 +0000

Tell him you'll make sure to turn it off at exactly 5pm (or whenever you're supposed to finish). And that you'll turn it on at 9am and can't join any meetings till it's started.

New comment by thorin in "Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year"

thorin — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 08:35:14 +0000

I know they were pushing cloud very hard, and it was nice to see they were offering a lot of free tier to developers. What has been a surprise to me this year is working in the UK with certain enormous clients that they are still choosing Oracle products for new implementations which I was not expecting.

New comment by thorin in "Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year"

thorin — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:29:33 +0000

Oracle is still mostly generating income from an old school model, a bit like IBM and SAP used to. They have huge contracts with mega-corps bringing in millions per year for a license. The have been pivoting to other things like consulting, cloud, AI for years but I still feel most of the income comes from these original db and product licenses. As someone who worked with Oracle since 1998 I'm kind of amazed they've kept at it for so long major Healthcare, Utilities, Banks still locked in and in some cases buying new contracts.

Callback – Less Scroll. More Soul

thorin — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:49:40 +0000

Article URL: https://commodore.net/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48628007

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by thorin in "U.S. science is in chaos"

thorin — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:06:13 +0000

Spain is a pretty big country in terms of space. It's been full of British expats for years a lot of whom had to leave due to Brexit so can probably stand to have a few more influencers move over.

New comment by thorin in "Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles"

thorin — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:11:32 +0000

I seem to remember some pirate copies of art packages (maybe Photon paint) on the Amiga coming with a similar set of images that would be of interest to some teenagers...

New comment by thorin in "Ask HN: Burned out on AI and want to go part time"

thorin — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:25:38 +0000

It's a lot easier to go part time in a job you already have than find a new part time job. If you are already successful in your job start by asking to move to having every Friday off or even every second Friday. This is very popular in UK/Europe. If this is working maybe you can drop another day after some time.

Alternatively a lot of companies let you take as much unpaid leave as you want (as long as you don't miss anything critical). This amounts to the same thing but gives you a lot of flexibility.

New comment by thorin in "Ask HN: What game have you replayed more times than any other?"

thorin — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:26:32 +0000

Probably Manic Miner!

New comment by thorin in "Ask HN: How to get started in electronic music"

thorin — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:45:36 +0000

I used to use Soundtrackers a lot on Amiga in the 90s. I'm also pretty ok with using Reaper as a DAW playing all the instruments. I would have no idea how to get into remixing though. How would you suggest starting that? Do you tend to start with isolated tracks or just the whole mp3 and take sections and move around and add parts>

New comment by thorin in "Ask HN: What will you be doing for the next 10 years?"

thorin — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:08:00 +0000

Curious how you've treated your adhd, do you mean medication?

For me the next 10 years will be consolidating my kids development as they'll both be working or at finishing uni by then.

New comment by thorin in "Would you choose the Microsoft stack today if starting greenfield?"

thorin — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:25:17 +0000

What are the "best of breed" tools in your opinion?

In the enterprise world, dotnet with c# is one of the best choices, although recently I've been doing a lot of logic just with python running on serverless functions.

New comment by thorin in "Ask HN: What (other) jobs do you think of doing?"

thorin — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 08:26:47 +0000

I'm not sure if you've done much of an investigation into these but:

1. Parcel deliveries - unless you work for the main carrier e.g. Royal Mail in the UK I don't think you can expect to make more than minimum wage and will effectively be on a zero hours contract with no benefits. I don't think this is going to be better that software.

2. Train driver (or bus driver, lorry driver), this might be ok and once you are in does pay well in the UK (but probably half what you get paid as a developer). It's definitely going to be a candidate for automation in the next 5-10 years though.

3. Electrician / plumber - you could add to this painter, builder, plasterer etc . This is decent if you have the skills, work hard and are physically up to doing it for an extended number of years. You'll likely have to manage your own work load though. May pay the same as software if you really work on it.

4. Mechanic - I don't think the pay will be amazing, what you say about cars not being repairable really isn't true especially for none EV. You still have brakes, oil change, servicing, tyre changes and alignments and lots of other things that people pay for throughout the lifespan of the car. Garages near me are always busy (as are cycle repair shops).

New comment by thorin in "I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure"

thorin — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:59:49 +0000

Can you expand on the Scaleway comment? Would be interested in the details.

Also aren't their data centres all in the Paris area? Do they have any geo-redundancy?

New comment by thorin in "How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe"

thorin — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:41:23 +0000

It's the German / European version of unions. For instance when I joined an ex-public company 25 years ago unions were very active in the UK still, but they are even more active in Germany etc.

New comment by thorin in "Ask HN: How much PTO do you get?"

thorin — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:46:35 +0000

Interested, in the US if you want to go on holiday will companies be ok with you taking unpaid time off? For instance in the UK I get 25 days paid, then the bank holidays we have (8 days I think) but when I asked they were ok for me to take some unpaid leave if required as well. The biggest problem I have is that if you don't take the paid days you tend to lose them at the end of the year.

Ask HN: Cloud Agnostic Business Systems

thorin — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 12:21:37 +0000

As a follow-up on other related threads I had my first interaction where a major European company stated that they want to go down a route where they can switch cloud provider easily if required. After the last few years of building on serverless systems on Azure/AWS this seemed to be a big U-turn for me. We'll look to go back to deploying our systems on Kubernates containers. Note the majority of the work I'm doing is integrations between different internal and external systems for enterprises.

I was surprised to hear them call out explicitly that this was due to lack of trust and stability in US providers. Normally when you hear something like this it's not an isolated incident but a trend. Of course we hear about this in the news, but it's the first time I experienced it directly.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46944459

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thorin in "Ask HN: Where is all the protest music?"

thorin — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:19:12 +0000

There are quite a few protest bands but they don't have the level of popularity as Rage against the machine, Bob Dylan or Public Enemy. Pop music is more of a commodity now.

I see Billy Bragg had something to share on FB about recent events as do many older artists.

Maybe you saw what happened at Glastonbury this year with Kneecap and Bob Vylan.

Personally I enjoy Idles, I went to see them last year and they had good energy and try to be politically active while spreading "the love".

One of my all time favourite bands New Model Army are still going and releasing music. I don't think they ever made it big after effectively being cancelled before it was popular releasing the single 51st State of America.

New comment by thorin in "Eat Real Food"

thorin — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:13:11 +0000

Cows and sheep in the UK (and I guess much of Europe) wander round outside all year round and I guess are eating almost entirely grass. You can't go for a walk in the countryside without coming across them constantly. Most of the beef you buy in the shops (not talking about processed foods) is produced in the UK.