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> Why is it an apocalypse if people don't have jobs anymore?

because i need to pay rent? eat? not die naked in ditch when i'm old?


come back home Delphi 7, all is forgiven

It seems that peak native Windows dev tools were Delphi 7 and VB6. It's a tragedy that something at least as good as VB6 is not still developed and supported by Microsoft.

There's nothing as good as VB6 that's developed and supported by *anyone*. It's not a Microsoft only phenomena.

I think programmers started wanting "real" languages (notice the quotes), and henceforth got more complexity and things take longer, although with GenAI, we may be back to the "draw as screen and do this" that we were with VB6. Just now the source generated should be considered the object code, and the prompt is the new source (at least for those types of apps)


I'm not sure how you define "native" here. If you mean native widgets then WinForms does what you want, is still fully supported, works on modern .NET versions, and Visual Studio still has all the GUI designers etc. WinForms is very obviously a calque of VCL, as well, so it can do everything Delphi did, but better.

If you mean native code then VB6 doesn't belong in this category (even if you compiled it to a standalone .exe it was still effectively bytecode).


I think WinForms with C# or VB is as good, if perhaps not as fun or approachable.

Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf

what wonderful surprises, i thought these amazing books were forgotten and lost


UK showed how to deal with civil disobedience (fast tracked judicial process). Hardware attestation will deal with the hacker spirit.

Above all, the LLM panopticon will watch us all.

Technology will not save us. Nothing will save us but ourselves and we're busy making rent and doomscrolling.


We won't save ourselves. We might slow the process, but the information environment is permanently altered and we can't put it back.

The information asymmetry between individuals and the powerful is permanently reversed.

Thinking about it in terms of the monopoly of violence being the root of power negotiations; typically a resistance movement has more information about the state/colonizer than vice versa, because power has to be visible - guerilla warfare thrives on this.

That's gone. The powerful will have complete detailed information and automatic analysis.

The medium is the message.


There will always be some form of underground.

What's different is that, for a while, the early Internet age (and a little bit earlier - Usenet etc) made that underground very accessible. Now we're reverting back to the original situation where it was very much shunned and criminalized.


> UK showed how to deal with civil disobedience (fast tracked judicial process)

What is it you mean by this?

I see so many offhand comments about the dystopian UK here but AFAICT there’s a lot of noise and very little meat. The only thing I can think you mean is the UK is currently debating a bill to limit jury trials to more serious offences. While I do find that pretty offensive, there’s nothing fast track about any of its justice system at the moment.

On the contrary, people are waiting years for trial, which is bad for the accused because they have it hanging over them, and bad for victims who get no swift resolution.


I meant the way it deal with the southport rioters (no judgement value on the riot itself or its reasons, just noticing how the uk gov dealt with the it)

For example:

>Courts will sit for 24 hours to fast-track sentencing under government plans to crack down on far-Right riots that swept Britain on Saturday.[1]

[1]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/03/courts-open-24-h...

There is also this:

>Only Australia arrested climate and environmental protesters at a higher rate than UK police. One in five Australian eco-protests led to arrests, compared with about 17% in the UK. The global average rate is 6.7%.

>The UK’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2021 and the Public Order Act 2022 transformed the relationship between protesters and the state, handing police extensive new powers to curtail protests and criminalising a range of protest activities. [2]

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/11/britain-...

Boot, face, forever, etc


Honestly, so long as there is adequate time for everyone to prepare and adequate oversight, fast tracking like seems to me far preferable to waiting for 2-3 years!

And given the Southport riots were, well riots, it’s unsurprising they were dealt with harshly.

That said, I agree that what’s happening with protest in both the UK and Australia is deeply wrong. New South Wales in particular seems to be awful on this front.

It’s a shame that guardian article doesn’t link to the actual study.

It’s not especially surprising that there is a high rate of arrests in the subcategory of protests they picked - environmental (not climate) protests often involve things like blockading mine sites and blocking roads here in Aus. In some of the countries mentioned in the article you may just be physically moved, beaten or even shot for that behaviour. Which is not to say that the higher arrests aren’t concerning, but the picture isn’t exactly clear after reading the article, particularly as it mentions over 2000 environmental protestors were killed during that period, I’d hope none in the UK or Aus, which to me that even though the arrests aren’t rates are higher in these countries, to imply that they are the worst in their treatment of protest is probably wrong.


>And given the Southport riots were, well riots, it’s unsurprising they were dealt with harshly.

you didn't read or care to understand my argument at all, which is not about the target of the process, but the existence of the process and the process itself. Looks like I have to spell it out: next time won't be race rioters, next time will be protesters protesting the farage gov crackdown on immigrants and minorities.

>It’s not especially surprising that there is a high rate of arrests in the subcategory of protests they picked

the article mentions the rate of arrests is high COMPARED with other countries. And again you're getting lost in the details; this wasn't about what the protests were about, but the brutal swift crackdown AND the laws passed giving police more powers.

Yes, this time they hit your out-group, so all is well. fine. next time, (and this is the crux of my argument), _using the exact same tools_, it's your group, you, that will be targeted.


> the existence of the process

Yes, I know you think it’s bad that it exists. I don’t.

So long as it is carried out with proper oversight and people have time to prepare their cases, it actually appears preferable to endless delay which is the current hallmark of the British justice system. Do you disagree? Why?

Do you have a reason to think that justice served this way is less fair or rigorous?

Because frankly I’d rather get in the express lane at that point if I was on the receiving end, than have to live with the process over my head for 2-3 years.

> the article mentions the rate of arrests is high COMPARED with other countries.

Yes, and it also says some of those other countries are killing environmental protestors, so the picture is not as clear cut as you might like. It certainly suggests problems, but it also suggests that we may not be comparing apples to apples with these figures.

Seriously, maybe read it again if you think this is entirely un-nuanced. Personally I’d like to know more.

I agree with you that giving the police extra powers is bad. I agree the direction of travel is bad.

I disagree that faster justice is bad.

I disagree that a higher arrest rate than other countries on a subset of protests is as black and white as you think.


Presumably the 2011 riots: a college student with no criminal record was jailed for six months for stealing a £3.50 case of bottled water [0]

Or perhaps our current Home Sec in 2014 declaring "Rioters face years in prison as Home Secretary Yvette Cooper promises ‘swift justice’" [1]

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8695988/London...

[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/riots-prison-justice-l...

It's all part of making effective protesting illegal. You can justify each little step as you clutch your pearls (even me, to an extent if I don't think of the bigger picture), but then when you realise that the sum of all that is permitted is standing alone creating no disturbance for anyone, effecting no change, and you realise effective protesting is banned.


Those riots in 2011 were not protest in any meaningful way. I was in London at the time, it was a bunch of people stealing shit and setting fires because they thought they could. What was shocking was how hands-off the police were when they routinely kettle and arrest peaceful protestors. When confronted with people who were actually looting and burning stuff down, they were nowhere to be seen.

And the second article is about people setting fire to cars and buildings.

This is not “effective protest”, it’s criminal damage and arson and would be prosecuted as such in any western nation.

Are you seriously arguing you should be able to get away with setting fire to a community library because you reckon you’ve got a legit grievance?

Yeah nah, no thanks.


I neither argued that the 2011 riots were protest nor that setting fire to a community library is justified.

Are there any strawmen left or did you buy them all? Jesus

"Are you seriously arguing...?" style of discussion belongs to Reddit, not here.

Though it's clear that you are part of the pearl-clutching group that wants any protest banned and would support any law and any new law dreamt up by a Home Sec, so thanks for doing your bit. No doubt you believe "the law is the law" and any law is just.

edit: You're not British are you (based on your English – it's pretty good, but not quite good enough). Where were you born, out of interest? I always enjoy a foreigner lecturing me about my place of birth


LOL. Home-counties born and bred, attended a minor public school and a Russel group university. Grandad was a Desert Rat, one grandmother was brought up in colonial India. I’m so English I’m a fucking stereotype, though it’s true I no longer live there.

Perhaps my English is so superior to yours that you’re having trouble understanding?

> Though it's clear that you are part of the pearl-clutching group that wants any protest banned

What were you saying about straw men?

Perhaps you could enlighten me here. If you believe that promising swift justice for arsonists and other rioters is a way to suppress effective protest, are you not categorising arson as a form of protest? If not, what is your objection to said swift justice for people who commit acts of criminal damage, arson etc?

I support the right to protest. I believe the UK state is on a bad path and has been for a long time with restrictions on this right. But it gives me no pause when rioting and looting is treated harshly.


Sure, with those over-corrected "’" apostrophes. "I’m so English I’m a fucking stereotype" is such a contorted sentence.

"The UK has problems, but it's not very useful to throw all of these cases together to make a big number", "None of which is to say I think the UK has things right" – literally nobody native to the UK writes like that.

Again, nice try, but try harder.

I'm /actually/ from a home county ;)

edit: Home counties isn't hyphenated btw.


This has got to be the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had on here.

I have no reason to lie, nor do I have either a method or any particular desire to prove myself to you.

If you want to believe a foreigner is lecturing you on British society, you go ahead and live with that delusion I guess. :shrug:

> literally nobody native to the UK writes like that.

Have you hung around with many middle-aged ex public school types?


NOR any particular desire

I thought a 'public school type' would know that.

> Have you hung around with many middle-aged ex public school types?

Yes, I've been unfortunate enough to live in the heart of Surrey

You're trying to call me uneducated to distract from your poor attempt at passing off as a native. Nice try ;) (They tend not to write ":shrug:", I might add)

I hope it's not too cold in Russia! Have a great evening comrade.


> NOR any particular desire

“Nor” doesn’t fit there IMHO, “or” is part of the nested either-or clause, so I don’t believe it to be incorrect.

Regardless, I lay no claim to perfect grammar, decades on the internet seems to have atrophied that skill. I also acknowledge my overuse of commas.

> You're trying to call me uneducated to distract from your poor attempt at passing off as a native

Funny, because to me it looked a lot like you started to throw doubt on my nationality when you didn’t want to deal with the subject we were discussing any more.

> I hope it's not too cold in Russia!

I hope it’s fucking freezing and Vladimir Putin freezes his balls off, personally. It couldn’t happen to a nicer dictator.

The fact you’re hoping for milder weather in Russia reveals that you are in fact the Russian troll in this conversation. Confirmed by your signoff calling me comrade. Major cockup there eh? Your handler will not be pleased…


> The fact you’re hoping for milder weather in Russia reveals that you are in fact the Russian troll in this conversation.

It's so funny how badly you misunderstand English.

This is highly entertaining :)


Not for the first time, I was taking the piss out of you for how ridiculous this whole thread is. I guess you missed that though.

You don’t get sarcasm then Ivan?


[flagged]


Hey, could you please review the site guidelines and stick to them when posting here? We'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


so you either are well connected or you starve, got it

guess it's death and destitute for introverts

edit: please explain the downvotes, i'm curious why you think i'm wrong

if what op says it's true, that today only networking works, then it easily follows that if for some reasons you do not have a network then you don't get hired


fwiw this is how it's always been. You don't have to be some kind of extreme extrovert, but people who are good at what they do tend to enjoy working with other people who are good at what they do, and when they see someone they recognize as "I'd work with this guy again" they put in the minimal effort to stay in contact - a hello text every few months, a cup of coffee every few years, that type of thing. Thats all it takes. If you're not doing that, yeah, you're in for a world of hurt when you go job hunting.

>a hello text every few months, a cup of coffee every few years

sounds like hell to me


Selecting where to apply and who you contact for it is also very important.

I'm currently involved in the hiring process in our company, selecting engineers for my team. If someone applies who has the programming language we ask for in their CV, they get a first interview. If they can read code, and write VERY basic code, they will get through at least the first 2 rounds without any issues.

If people put down the AI, and actually learn how to write a `for` loop, they would be more hire-able than 50% of candidates.

> "Guess it's death [...] for introverts"

There is a meritocracy somewhere in our capitalist system. Not everyone participates, but it exists.


OP was saying the only way to get hired is through work connections

of course if the process doesn't involve networking then we don't have a problem, we agree on that


> OP was saying the only way to get hired is through work connections

That is not at all what I said. Please do not misrepresent.

I said they took a targeted approach *and* exercised their networks. Those are two separate things.


> One thing they all had in common was taking a very targeted approach with their search and leveraging their networks

Right, so they applied to a couple of jobs and it worked for them?

I'm sorry, do you understand how uncommon and rare that is? sure, if their domain was REALLY niche and the jobs weren't publicly advertised, then i could see how that would work. but the experience is VASTLY different outside such niche cases


They applied to a couple of jobs where they were certain the fit would be good, and didn't mindlessly spam their resume to some bot. They got in touch with the right people, and worked it out from there. Because they had done their homework, the path was easier for them.

yes, that's exactly what you said before. you're not engaging with what i'm saying at all.

Seems like that is the case, yes.

Bro I'm an introvert and I have work connections. It isn't hard.

> I have work connections.

> It isn't hard.

you're not an introvert then


Anyone who has been in the industry for several years or more should have people they can reach out to. That’s not being well connected.

This is really just a reversion to how things used to work, relying on human connections. People seemed to manage to get jobs 30 years ago just fine


What if you weren't in the industry for several years or more? New grads are completely walled off from the industry because very few employers are willing to give them a shot anymore, even at minimum wage and no other demands from this most desperate worker segment. The few connections I scraped together weren't helpful because barely anyone is hiring juniors anymore. Having one of the resumes on top of someone's pile is only helpful if they ever get to using it. If you're at the lower end of the market, you have to be very exceptional or very lucky. Otherwise, you're done for.

tbf, less flagged posts hitting /active lately

either they kill them early (delete them) or hn policy quietly changed


do the following:

sample content from users on this page: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

and ask the LLM to rephrase it in their voice


I'm actually working on a browser extension to do just this with adversarial stylometry techniques

funnily enough, if everyone did this (at least make a new account often), it would prove more destructive to what HN (purposefully) wants to do than deleting the occasional account data

is the legal page a placeholder, do words have no meaning?

https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/

Mods, enforce your license terms, you're playing fast and loose with the law (GDPR/CPRA)


Which terms are not being enforced? (not disagreeing I just don't feel like reading a large legal document)

> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies

The user content is supposed to be licensed only Y Combinator and (bleah) its affiliated companies (which are many, all the startups they fund, for example).


Curious why it should be on HackerNews to enforce restrictions on content they only license from you?

If it's owned by you and only licensed by HN shouldn't you be the one enforcing it?


Seems like they are trying to do that through the stated legal intermediary (YC)

If you carry on the quote two more words:

> ... a nonexclusive

I.e. this section is talking to additional rights to the content you post to ALSO go to YC, not that YC is guaranteeing it (+friends) will be the only one to hold these rights or will enforce who else should hold the rights to your publicly shared content for you.

There's a more intricate conversation to be had with GDPR and public data on forums in general but that's wholly unrelated to what YC's legal page says and still unlikely to end up in an alarming result.


I think that's incorrect. Exclusivity would be something you grant to YC. These terms need to make sense to be valid. Claiming exclusive rights would mean they are forbidding YOU from licensing YOUR rights to anyone else.

Imagine Facebook claiming that by uploading images you are granting them exclusive usage rights to that image. It would mean you couldn't upload it to any other site with similar terms anymore.


Yes, this is what I mean in the above - the rights are non-exclusive so YC is also granted rights but not in a way that any of those other things listed after are true.

That agreement is largely about "Personal Information", not the posts and comments.

That said, there are "no scraping" and "commercial use restricted" carve-outs for the content on HN. Which honestly is bullshit.


None that I could see:

Your submissions to, and comments you make on, the Hacker News site are not Personal Information and are not "HN Information" as defined in this Privacy Policy.

Other Users: certain actions you take may be visible to other users of the Services.


I mean, just because they say the comments are not PI doesn't make it so.

That’s a good point. I’m only referring to the terms they used in the privacy policy.

Eh, fuck that agreement. I'm kind of old school in that I believe if you put it on the internet without an auth-wall, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it. The AI companies seem to agree.

Then again, I'm not the guy that is going to get sued...


Legal theory about public data is fun right up until someone with money decides their ToS mean something and files suit, because courts are usually a lot less impressed by "I could access it in my browser" once you pulled millions of records with a scraper. Scrape if you want, just assume you're buying legal risk.

> I believe if you put it on the internet without an auth-wall, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it.

I agree. It's the owners of the sites that have to follow rules, not us.


"I'm kind of old school in that I believe if you put grass on the ground without a fence, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it. The noblemen with a thousand cows seem to agree."

And that, my friends, is how you kill the commons - by ignoring the social context surrounding its maintenance and insisting upon the most punitive ways of avoiding abuse.


Signal and information are not grass.

Grass and property require upkeep. Radio waves and electromagnetic radiation do not.

I don't want your dog to piss on my lawn and kill my grass. But what harm does it cause me if you take a picture of my lawn? Or if I take a picture of your dog?

If I spend $100M making a Hollywood movie - pay employees, vendors, taxes - contribute to the economic growth of the country - and then that product gets stolen and given away completely for free without being able to see upside, that's a little bit different.

But my Hacker News comment? It's not money.

I think there are plausible ways to draw lines that protect genuine work, effort, and economics while allowing society and innovation to benefit from the commons.


Context is important, but isn’t HN’s social context, in particular, that the site is entirely public, easily crawled through its API (which apparently has next to no rate limits) and/or Algolial, and has been archived and mirrored in numerous places for years already?

How is is he breaking gdpr here?

They already refuse to comply with CPRA, instead electing to replace your username with a random 6(?) character string, prefixed with `_`, if I remember correctly.

I know, because I've been here since maybe 2015 or so, but this account was created in 2019.

So any PII you have mentioned in your comments is permanent on Hacker News.

I would appreciate it if they gave users the ability to remove all of their personal data, but in correspondence and in writing here on Hacker News itself, Dan has suggested that they value the posterity of conversations over the law.


email dang and find out!

because there's literally no other way your question will be answered


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