Hacker News: tsss

New comment by tsss in "Common drug tests lead to tens of thousands wrongful arrests a year"

tsss — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:01:41 +0000

This is already happening in Germany.

New comment by tsss in "Update on the eBay Scam"

tsss — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:43:10 +0000

Man, I'd like to get a magnetron for free.

New comment by tsss in "French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?"

tsss — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:10:15 +0000

French is such a shitty language. I've been learning Polish lately and every word is spoken exactly as you write it. A real breath of fresh air.

New comment by tsss in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

tsss — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:05:40 +0000

But it's not capitalism, it's market function. The same would happen in a socialist market economy.

New comment by tsss in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

tsss — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:31:41 +0000

> Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.

Yes, and you correctly point out: On the average restaurant visit, nothing stands out. A good restaurant only needs to provide not-terrible food and not-terrible service to be almost indistinguishable from all others. Quality of a restaurant visit is hard to measure and compare. Price is easy to measure. Thus, the rational consumer will prefer the cheaper option (and even at the same price, a restaurant with lower costs will be more profitable, thus expand more easily).

The same thing happens on Amazon and other market places: When it is difficult to compare quality, price always wins out. Some products are interchangeable with well defined specs, like a 16GB RAM stick is obviously twice as good as 8GB RAM and so it can be twice as expensive and still sell. But when I'm looking for a new light for my bicycle there are no standardized specs to compare. All the product descriptions and pictures are exaggerated. I have no reliable information to tell if the lamp that is twice as expensive is really twice as good (and from personal experience: they never are), so I'm buying the cheapest one cause I expect all of the products to be equally crappy no matter the price.

It's not Amazon's fault. This happens everywhere.

New comment by tsss in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

tsss — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:41:43 +0000

This is about markets. It has nothing to do with capitalism. And in fact, it is usually _because_ of healthy competition that this type of enshittification happens everywhere because quality is hard to compare for the buyers and so the sellers are forced to compete on cost.

New comment by tsss in "Windows native app development is a mess"

tsss — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:47:17 +0000

Honestly, your GUIs are too simple to be part of this conversation. Try writing something like Spotify in WinAPI and that's not even a complicated GUI either.

New comment by tsss in "Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline"

tsss — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:31:34 +0000

I was expecting the game from my childhood and was disappointed.

New comment by tsss in "Philosoph Jürgen Habermas Gestorben"

tsss — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 18:58:36 +0000

Maybe he was critical, but he was also a part of them.

New comment by tsss in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

tsss — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:25:34 +0000

You could get high quality medical advice 20 years ago on the internet, or 40 years ago in the library. Doctors aren't there to give you advice, they are mostly gate keepers. Every person who's chronically ill knows that doctors are totally useless for anything beyond the 10 most common diseases and primarily exist to approve or reject your pleas for lab work. They won't go away, neither will psychotherapists and all the middle managers that can be easily automated, because their real purpose is not the practical work that they do.

New comment by tsss in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

tsss — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:37:48 +0000

If anything, _more_ individualism and personal responsibility would help, not less.

New comment by tsss in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

tsss — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:25:28 +0000

They would just smother whatever is left of the Chinese company with their overbearing management.

New comment by tsss in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

tsss — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:20:08 +0000

Germany is a country that never moved past 1918, both in technology and society. All the successful industry is from that time and the mindset is too. They may have gotten rid of the Emperor but the top-down government and Prussian subservience are strong as ever. It's no coincidence that the GDR was even more controlling than the Soviet Union and crashed even harder. The German federal republic, too, is turning more and more into a paralyzed command economy. The entire public sector, health care, and all large corporation certainly work that way and it is the reason for their unfathomable inefficiency.

Ignoring EVs is a symptom and not a cause of the problems. It is impossible for these corporations to pivot or innovate, no matter in which direction.

New comment by tsss in "First in-utero stem cell therapy for fetal spina bifida repair is safe: study"

tsss — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:52:53 +0000

They should spend the money instead of taking the risk of burdening someone with a disability their whole lives. This treatment is not a sure thing. And yes, I am disabled myself.

New comment by tsss in "Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?"

tsss — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:33:32 +0000

They're already very cheap, almost free when you buy used. I got one for $50 that makes pretty good prints. For $300 you can buy an Elegoo Centauri Carbon that is a really high end consumer printer. Don't forget that we're talking about CNC machine tools with precision movements here. An entry level manual milling machine from Precision Matthews in Taiwan will cost you $250 shipping alone. Even good linear rails by themselves are more than $300 on ebay. A lot of innovation has been happening in the 3D printer space to make all these machine components cheaper which has also benefited other applications like hobbyist milling.

Nowadays, we are so used to all the injection molded plastic crap, and also so much poorer, that we can't understand why precisely manufactured products made from solid metal or wood are so expensive.

New comment by tsss in "Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?"

tsss — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:13:33 +0000

It's not awesome, not for us. 30% productivity gain would be enormous. Just imagine 30% of developers losing their jobs, in addition to outsourcing and all the new graduates flooding out of colleges after CS has been hyped so much in the recent years.

New comment by tsss in "Claude Sonnet 4.6"

tsss — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:37:42 +0000

Good. One thing we definitely don't need any more of is governments and corporations deciding for us what is moral to do and what isn't.

New comment by tsss in "Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?"

tsss — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:36:08 +0000

The fact that you got a syntax error at all is pretty telling. Are you not using agent mode? Or maybe that's just the experience with inferior non-statically typed languages where such errors only appear when the application is run. In any case, the key is to have a feedback mechanism. Claude should read the syntax errors, adjust and iterate until the error is fixed. Similarly, you should ask Claude to write a test for your landscape/portrait mode bug and have it make changes until the test passes.

New comment by tsss in "I'm not worried about AI job loss"

tsss — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:00:03 +0000

The burger cook job has already been displaced and continues to be. Pre-1940s those burger restaurants relied on skilled cooks that got their meat from a butcher and cut fresh lettuce every day. Post-1940s the cooking process has increasingly become assembly-lined and cooks have been replaced by unskilled labor. Much of the cooking process _is_ now done by robots in factories at a massive scale and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up. In the past 10 years, automation has further increased and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English. In conclusion, both the required skill-level and amount of labor needed for restaurants has been reduced drastically by automation and in fact many higher skilled trade jobs have been hit even harder: cabinetmakers, coachbuilders and such have been almost eradicated by mass production.

It will happen to you.

New comment by tsss in "GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark"

tsss — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:11:46 +0000

Does anyone want this? Speed has never been the problem for me, in fact, higher latency means less work for me as a replaceable corporate employee. What I need is the most intelligence possible; I don't care if I have to wait a day for an answer if the answer is perfect. Small code edits, like they are presented as the use case here, I can do much better myself than trying to explain to some AI what exactly I want done.