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Re:Fable Took My Job on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @04:03AM (#50068280)
My point is: "maybe it was better when internet access was essentially opt-in, because you had to be very motivated to get there - at the same time, deciding not to get there was not something that would make your life almost impossible".

Which (IMHO) is a bit more on topic than being able to fly in a Concorde.

Re:Fable Took My Job on Monday October 12, 2026 @06:02AM (#50054020)
peak western society ended back then maybe around the time the first Concorde airplane flew for the first time.

This seems a bit arbitrary to me. Why 1969, exactly? Personally I'd go for the "democratization of Internet" as the start of the slope. So perhaps 1989 ("1989: Quantum Computer Services and Apple end their partnership. Quantum Computer Services renames itself America Online. Two years later, America Online for DOS is released, and a year after that, America Online for Windows.")? Or arguably even a bit later...

Can you name a few? Not doubting your claim, just curious because I am maybe not following the same niches you do.
Re:The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @02:49PM (#48821917)
Half-dozens of them, apparently.

Ask HN: Temporal Awareness in LLM?

I have just sent a sort of "feature request" to ChatGPT (but my question is generally applicable to most LLMs).Here is the text, written by ChatGPT itself:Feature request: Optional temporal awareness per conversation/project. Allow the model to receive relative elapsed time between messages (e.g. +5 min, +4 h, +2 days). This is particularly useful for long-running narrative, journaling,...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:Mythical Man Month on Saturday May 09, 2026 @04:37AM (#48073197)
90% of my my experience has always been dealing with large-ish corporate systems. I am in Europe, so YMMV even when talking about corporate instead of smaller scale projects.

In my experience stuff like RAILS had negligible impact in my field because companies would always require solid backup from some big name vendor (MS, Oracle, IBM, Sun - back in the day, or even SAP).

So most if not all the smaller silver bullets did not even make a blimp on the radar... and stuff like Java or .NET, while definitely better than C or COBOL... did not really deliver in terms of productivity boost (in part because, as noted in the message I am answering to, expectations kept growing at the same pace)

Ask HN: Linguistics/Computing Overview for the Layperson

Recently someone was surprised that I had some minor interest in foreign languages and I tried to explain that linguistics and computing are far from orthogonal.I'd like to give this person a more general overview of contacts between these two fields, but I do not want to just carpet bombing them with links. Ideally something like a blog post or a average length magazine article would be ideal,...

( Read More... | 1 comment | 2 points | on HN )
I had similar experiences with an unpopular but not "esoteric" language (Progress ABL) and so did some other developers in my team.
Well... the actual problem is, imho, that it looks like the LLMs seem to have reached (or are close to reaching) a plateau. You might be right about the "three months ago it could not produce a working implementation of a DBMS... but what if in 3 months (or 3 years) it stays stuck at the 20K slower threshold?
Re:Meta acquires Moltbook on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @06:02AM (#47333660)
So basically like Excel since the 80s?
Not sure I understand your point about

Everybody already has local regional tickets anyway. And most people can't be in more then one place at the time anyway. And most people stay in the same region most of the time anyway.

I live in Rostock. So if I want to go to Berlin or Hamburg (you know, where stuff like actual airports are) I am crossing "regional borders" even if it is a 200-250 km trip to each city

Re:Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line on Friday November 07, 2025 @04:37PM (#45851408)
About non-replaceable batteries: from what I understand, if a battery can be replaced by any random device owner you must design it with a robust cell to avoid risk of it being punctured, breaking, being crushed.

And therefore you have more shell, less actual battery and therefore it lasts less.

This does not mean that I believe this was done exclusively for altruistic reasons. More like: this will result in a slightly better experience for the user... and more revenue for Apple. So let's do it.

Re:We're in the Wrong Moment on Monday October 27, 2025 @12:38AM (#45717449)
I think that what erased "programmer vs computer illiterate" dichotomy was BASIC in the 80s.

I've met lots of "digital natives" and they seem to use technology as a black box and click/touch stuff at random until it sorta works but they do not very good at creating at mental model of why something is behaving in a way which is not what was expected and verify their own hypothesis (i.e. "debugging").

Re:Microcomputers – The Second Wave: Toward a Mass Market on Sunday October 05, 2025 @06:20AM (#45480434)
I am from that era, so I might add something that perhaps is not obvious at all nowadays.

The microcomputer explosion gave birth to an large number of actual paper magazines and at least 50% of their content were... actual source listing you had to manually retype. Basic was already fragmented in a billion different flavors and dialects (especially if your program had any kind of graphics) so the more ambitious user could also try their hand at translating a listing from - say - TSR-80 to Apple Basic.

In any case you were directly exposed to the actual source code, and tweaking or experimenting with it felt very natural.

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