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LPG isn't a good metric of a "weird" fuel, there are countries such as Italy where it's immensely popular

This. The comparison between compilers and LLMs is so utterly incorrect, and yet I've heard it multiple times already in the span of a few weeks. The people suggesting this are probably unaware of the fact that Turing complete languages follow mathematical properties not just vibes. You can trust the output of your compiler because it was thoroughly tested to ensure it acts as a Turing machine that converts one Turing complete language (C, C++, whatever) into another Turing complete language (ASM) and there's a theorem that guarantees you that such a conversion is always possible. LLMs are probabilistic machines and it's grossly inappropriate to put them in the same category as compilers - it would be like saying that car tires and pizzas are similar because they're both round and have edges.

There's a big difference between running native ARM software on ARM and emulating x86 to run Windows. If this Mac was x86, it could have probably run Windows much faster thanks to virtualization

On Apple silicon, Parallels can’t run x64 windows, it is using the ARM version of Windows. The x64 emulation is provided by Windows. Of course this is inefficient, but not everything is automatically 2x slower: any OS code you invoke is not running as x64 emulation, and IO and memory access is not penalized by the emulation (but certainly somewhat from virtualization). I was pleasantly surprised how fast you can run x64 windows apps.

Yeah I wasn't aware that Microsoft allowed that nowadays. Still, it's not ideal anyway, because in my experience Windows apps that are compatible with ARM are 90% either FOSS or portable on other platforms anyway. You use Windows to use x86 apps; if you don't need x86 apps you are generally better not using Windows at all, and if you need them they'll probably run poorly on ARM due to multiple layers of emulation. Wine is still an option, though. They support Rosetta on Mac and FEX/Box64 on Linux, so they may lead to better performance than Parallels

> I was pleasantly surprised how fast you can run x64 windows apps

In general as long as you have a fast enough machine emulation isn't that bad. Apple was doing that already for 68k with PPC and most people didn't noticed due to how massively faster their first PPC computers were. Still, the issue is that here we're not really talking about a high-end CPU aren't we


It's a paramount imperative for Europe to wean itself from fossil fuels, regardless of environmental arguments (which are extremely relevant still). Getting a safe, unfettered provider of fossil fuels is getting a basically unsolvable problem. China is trying to build as much solar and nuclear capacity as humanly possible; we should do the same too. We've been having these energy shocks since the Yom Kippur war basically, it's like a broken cycle of instability and crisis we can't leave behind. There's no shale to be found in Europe, we just have wind, sun and nuclear to save our backs. And maybe geothermal pretty soon?

I don't understand leadership thinking. Surely spending €250B on a continental scale renewable energy project would have a relatively short payoff time (on country scale) given the instability of relying on foreign energy sources. I mean how long does oil have to sit above $100/barrel before it costs everyone that much anyway?

The recent "Offshore Wind Investment Pact" announcement was aiming for 1 Trillion euro of investment into North Sea wind by 2040.

Plus there's lots of other stuff happening. Also lots of pushback from those clinging to fossil fuels.


> spending €250B on a continental scale renewable energy project

Let me stop you there: the EU budget for 2026 was €193B. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/budget/www/index-en.htm

Basically Europe doesn't have political leadership, nor does the EU itself have a budget larger than the member states like the US Federal budget. In return, the EU, primarily Germany, has imposed "fiscal discipline" which prevents running a short term large deficit in order to make this kind of capital investment.

Also, two hundred billion Euro is a lot of money for anyone who isn't an AI startup.


What is the value of the EU if's it not coordinating multi-national scale efforts?

This would need to be a joint venture as some places are really good for wind, and some places are really good for solar, but not every country on their own has access to those locations. The budget for the EU doesn't matter, because this project would be a separate line item with it's own funding.

Energy independence is extremely valuable. Way way way more valuable then $250B or even $500 or $750B for that matter. Society runs on energy, and if it's not fully yours, you are always a rug pull away from social collapse.

If 2022 was a cold winter, and America had a cold leader, this project probably would have breezed through the bureaucracy in a week.


> What is the value of the EU if's it not coordinating multi-national scale efforts?

Remember the EU is just a fancy self-updating free trade agreement, not a nation.

The coordination that the member states have thus far allowed the EU to take responsibility for is ~ "make all our rules be equivalent so everyone's degrees are accepted everywhere, everyone's food is accepted everywhere, we all agree what counts as a safe consumer product, limited range for tax shenanigans, etc."

(And for this, they get denounced as "complex" and "bureaucratic").

Actual direct investments do also exist, I just missed out on one for startups 20 years back apparently due to a rules change, but it's peanuts compared to what member state governments do directly.


>> Energy independence is extremely valuable.

Not if your top politicians are on putin's payrol like Orban and Merkel.


The EU is not funding projects directly, it's setting the rules. Individual governments pay the bill

Is this perhaps changing with Macron indicating Europe will keep the €300B Europe has been investing in the US annually in Europe?

Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594 - January 2026 (207 comments)

Europe can go fast when it wants to.

How Europe Ditched Russian Fossil Fuels With Spectacular Speed - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/ukraine-n... | https://archive.today/yxGp2 - February 21st, 2023

> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel.

> Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.


This is not entirely correct. The EU actually does both — it sets regulatory frameworks and funds projects directly through several mechanisms.

It's a mix between decades of brainwashing, fossil-lobby having the bigger paychecks, unstable times, and all leaders fear to invest in something new and uncertain. In every industry/organization there is the old saying that nobody ever gets fired for supporting/using the established solutions. This is the same situation, there is more motivation for staying with the known paths, especially after there is strong propaganda against the new paths.

The problem is that 30-50% of voters would just look at that and say:

Why are you spending €250B on corporate subsidies instead of giving us €250B?!


I think the lesson of the UK winter fuel subsidy payment is that while it feels great in year one, it doesn't actually solve any of the problems, and then the voters get incredibly mad if you try to take it away again.

everything of importance ever done in EU was in response to a major crisis, in no small part because these exact voter emotions are dampened in such times.

This can be viewed as a feature not a bug. The defining feature of a republic is stability. Orderly and lawful transfers of power. Not rocking the boat. Deliberative processes. If the people are enjoying prosperity and peace why make drastic changes? So yes when the situation is extreme that's when big shifts in policy happen.

"Never let a good crisis go to waste."

>The problem is that 30-50% of voters would just look at that and say: Why are you spending €250B on corporate subsidies instead of giving us €250B?!

Why is it a "problem" for voters (aka the taxpayers) to ask such questions to their leaders to justify on how their tax money is being spent? To me this feels like basic transparency that keeps democracy in check.

To me it's the problem if politicians don't have or don't want to answer those questions because then, either they're grifting or they're incompetent.

It's not like we don't have a laundry list of mismanagement, couch corruption cough, of governments spending money on bullshit with nothing to show for, while stuff healthcare keeps being underfunded.

So yeah, if you spend my money, you better have an answer.


Wind, sun and geothermal we have. Albeit technology to harvest them seldom come from the Europe. But getting a safe, unfettered provider of nuclear fuel risk to be just another unsolvable problem.

[flagged]


You've been told multiple times that this is a lie by omission. Why do you persist with it?

Honest question: why would anyone use Vim and not NeoVim nowadays? I've switched what, 12 years ago? And I've never had to look back. Just curious, to be honest. Especially since neovim is full of new features, while the Vim9 scripting language kind of tanked

I'll field this one as someone who has used regular ol' Vim for ~18 years and never switched. Why switch if your tool is working fine? I use vim literally every day all day long and it does everything I need it to do. Switching has a cost and there's no reason to pay it if it's working fine.

I originally switched because neovim was more polished, had better plugins and Lua config files. I then never had a reason to go back

I think I first switched because neovim supported the XDG config location, I could have ~/.config/nvim/init.vim instead of ~/.vimrc.

I ended up switching for plugin support. Other than that, unless you want to use Lua for your config files, I don't see a reason to switch either.

Because I don't choose what tools are available on every server at work, and it's guaranteed that at the very least old-school vi is installed on every linux server, and often vim. Maintaining that muscle memory is useful.

I used to think this too, but I routinely switch back and forth between neovim and vim now for close to a decade, and I've never noticed. In fact I often don't even notice which one I'm using unless I explicitly check. Once you add neovim-only plugins that can change of course, but if you can't choose what tools are available on the server then I would imagine you're not installing plugins anyway.

One reason might be how off-putting the Neovim community is, hijacking Vim discussions to denigrate an all-time-great, beloved work of technology and its creator (who did decades of work for free, gave it to the world, and gave any money to actual orphans) all for Neovim users'/devs' own egos, promotion, and obsession. Almost all of Neovim was made by Moolenaar, from concept to execution, and I don't know that I've ever seen any gratitude.

I've never seen Vim users do that. If I had to choose, I'd use Vim.


Just want to say that although I don't use either Vim/Neovim, I feel grateful for what Vim has done. Vim keybindings can be used by a multitude of editors and you can even have the keybinding concept into browsers and other software's.

Its truly revolutionary when one thinks about it how much impact Vim has on terminal users.

(Neovim's plugin system is nice but I agree with ya that I also feel like some aspects of community often don't appreciate Bram because of the Vim vs Neovim thing from my observation) It's best if instead of treating it as Vim vs Neovim, we use the tools that we prefer and appreciate the tools other are using too and the contribution of one in another. Appreciating Vim doesn't make your appreciation for Neovim lesser, appreciating both can be great. Something which is hard within Editor space in general.

Rest in peace Bram.


Can't say I really interact with the "community", I installed the program and I use it a lot. I am grateful for the existence of vi and vim. I now use neovim where I can. vim or vi as needed.

I use both gvim on linux and macvim on mac for a lot of things--not 'real' coding, typically, but opening and editing scripts and config files, writing in markdown, etc; I'm usually opening these from dolphin or finder. In the terminal, working on real code bases and not scripts, I use neovim. My configs for these have diverged a bit over the years but since the use cases are different, it doesn't bother me.

I didn't switch because there was no reason to. And there is still none.

Have you ever called neovim inside a venv? Didn't work for me (or maybe I'm too lazy to jump hoops, if vim is working out of the box).

muscle memory mainly, I guess?

Sure, switching might not be that troublesome, but I can tell you the first 48 hours or so will be painful, you'll insert stray ":" and "i" characters everywhere :)


I barely use vim these days, and I still do that in every text editor.

gvim?

Isn't this like telling the world you ate a full meal by eating samples at Costco? Meta is ranking in billions as we speak, they ensure the FOSS projects they rely on are properly funded instead of shovelling cash to bullshit datacentre developments. Otherwise we're basically guaranteed to end up with another XZ fiasco once again when some tired unpaid FOSS maintainer ends up trusting a random Jia Tan in their desperation

This post is all about how they upstreamed their improvements!

If you get mad when a company makes good use of open source and contributes to a project’s betterment, you do not understand the point of open source, you’re just fumbling for a pitchfork.


I'd say this post reads more like them beating their chest about how great their improvements are.

>Isn't this like telling the world you ate a full meal by eating samples at Costco?

The analogy fails because free samples cost costco (or whatever the vendor is) money. Raking Meta over the coals for using ffmpeg instead of paying for some proprietary makes as much sense as raking every tech company over the coals for using Linux. Or maybe you'd do that too, I can't tell.


Meta is the sole reason PHP is still alive. Also a big reason we're not in MVC hell.

They bet on open source and they open source a lot of technology.

It's one of the best companies when it comes to open source.

I don't know how much total they donate, but I've seen tons of grants given to projects from them.


I think that WordPress is still big enough to keep PHP alive. Furthermore, the sheer number of developer that started coding web apps with PHP in year 2000 plus minus 5 years is large enough to give PHP a critical mass for the next 20 years.

Is Automattic contributing back to PHP? I think that WordPress benefits because PHP is available, but does not significantly contribute to PHP development.

WordPress is keeping PHP alive now

But PHP wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for Meta and it's support.


WordPress is from 2003 and has been very successful since the beginning. FaceBook is from 2004. Both were PHP apps because the late 90s and early 2000s were the years of PHP CMSes and ecommerce platforms. Even if FaceBook did not happen PHP would have been one of the top 5 languages of that age. PHP was popular because of web hostings and the simplicity of apache + mod PHP. It was not big in hype because it was a really bad language until about version 7 and few people would admit to like it.

Actually, FaceBook worked against WordPress and the adoption of PHP because a number of people that could have used a WP instance to blog or to market a product started using a FB page instead. Ecommerce went from self hosted (Magento, Woocommerce, Prestashop) to hosted or to Amazon and also FB.


FB actually made PHP faster (HHVM) and contributed to it upstream with bug fixes (like they are doing with ffmpeg here)

Wordpress did nothing to help further PHP other than adoption (which is still important, but not as important)


> Meta is the sole reason PHP is still alive.

This could not be more wrong. Meta is still using PHP AFAIK but I'm not sure it's modern. They created the Hack programming language ~10 years ago but it doesn't look like it's been updated in several years. Most of the improvements they touted were included in PHP 7 years ago.


I never said they were still using it (they are in some cases)

But when the backend world was either Java or ASP, FB chose PHP and helped us other small companies out.

They eventually went Hack, the rest went Node for the most part.

But during those PHP years they gave us HHVM and many PHP improvements to get us through.


HHVM was not a contribution to PHP. It resulted in PHP 7 being sped up and releasing with a bunch of long awaited features. But afaik , very little of HHVM made it back to PHP core.

It made PHP 5-7 usable in production, otherwise it would have died before we got to modern PHP.

Of course it wasn't merged in, it was a separate compiler, it certainly inspired future optimizations though.

But the point is, it was a very useful stop-gap solution for the community.

Also would like to highlight that they have contributed a lot to PHP upstream in addition to that.


Yeah we’re in React SPA hell instead. I’d rather be in MVC hell.

> Yeah we’re in React SPA hell instead. I’d rather be in MVC hell.

I am guessing the world moved to React because the developer community in general does not feel the same way.


No they moved to Reactjs because it was evangelized as the only framework available. There are plenty of people who hate reactjs, don’t worry.

As a react hater, I share DHH's opinion that React was driven by ZIRP. So many giant, slow, react apps out there that are super slow to develop with. IMO HTMX is a 10x dev time reducer over React.

That's a common take here but I'd take React any day.

Been doing this for 20 years. React/JSX is the easiest (for me)


Yeah, same. Not sure if everyone is as traumatized as us when it comes to dealing with 100K LOC large Backbone.js codebases though, or before that where we kept state in the DOM itself and tried to wrangle it all with jQuery.

React and JSX really did help a lot compared to how it used to be, which was pretty unmanageable already.


>It's one of the best companies when it comes to open source.

If you, for some inexplicable reason, judge companies "the best" only based on their open source software and totally ignore everything else they do to society, while totally ignoring all the other companies who support open source software so much better, without doing all the evil shit that Facebook does (like React).

The rest of us don't bend over backwards so far and blindfold ourselves to harsh reality just to lick Zuckerberg's boots.


I said "one of" when it comes to "open source". Nothing more. (you know the topic at hand)

Not defending the company in any other regard nor do I even like social media platforms, would rather have forums only again as a society.

Feel free to continue to follow me around and perform bad takes, it's funny.


I mean, they contributed their fixes upstream. Thats the most important thing they could do here.

> What would native containers bring over Linux ones?

What would a Phillips screwdriver bring over a flathead screwdriver? Sometimes you don't want/need the flathead screwdriver, simple as that. There are macOS-specific jobs you need to run in macOS, such as xcode toolchains etc. You can try cross compiling, but it's a pain and ridiculous given that 100% of every other OS supports containers natively (including windows). It's clear to me that Apple is trying to make the ratio jobs/#MacMinis as small as possible


> gws doesn't ship a static list of commands. It reads Google's own Discovery Service at runtime and builds its entire command surface dynamically

You're not exactly describing rocket science. This is basically how websites work, there's never been anything stopping anyone from doing dynamic UI in TUIs except the fact that TUI frameworks were dog poop until a few years ago (and there was no Windows Terminal, so no Windows support). Try doing that in ncurses instead of Rataui or whatever, it's horrendous


> all CPU/RAM capacity is being sold to LLM companies, and as a result we can't get the hardware needed for good local LLMs.

yeah... Ironic I guess. It's as if they've realised that it's only a matter of time until we get a "good enough" FOSS model that runs on consumer hardware. The fact that such a thing would demolish their entire business of getting VC hyped while giving out their service for a loss surely got lost to them. Surely they and Nvidia have not realised that the only thing that could stop this is to make good hardware unreachable for anything smaller than a massive corp

Mark my words: in less than one year, we'll probably get something akin to Opus 4.6 FOSS. China is putting as much money into that as they can because they know this would crash the US economy, which is in the green only thanks to big tech pumping up AI. China wants Trump either gone or neutered as soon as possible, which they know they can do by making Republicans as unelectable as possible - something that will probably do if the economy crashes and a recession happens


In Italy I pay 9.99 for 250GB, unlimited calls and SMS (never sent one in 10+ years but it's nice to have I guess), which for me is basically akin to infinite traffic given that unless I start downloading torrents from 5G I'll never ever run out of traffic ever


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