Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | petcat's commentslogin

Never use any new technology!

You see how ridiculous that sounds


The start menu just.... doesn't open sometimes these days.

Another way to look at it: Microsoft APIs have fallen from grace. Even their own devs don't dogfood anymore. They download something that Facebook made instead and reimplement the Holy Start Menu using that.

Let me introduce you to a new concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

The more sensible take is “don’t use new technology where it doesn’t make sense.” The start menu should need a web browser engine and a heavy JS framework because…?

It's a laggy resource hog. It's slow to open. You can spam the windows key and watch CPU usage increase.

Putting words in someone's mouth to defend that dreck sounds ridiculous, yes.


Well I don't use Windows so I can't comment on the quality. And I actually don't even really care about it. I was just commenting on the curmudgeonly perspective that young people can't do things right.

That new technology could be Zig or Rust, if that's the spiel.

Or it could be Ada, old and boring but generally safe.

New for the sake of new is vanity.


it's more like just giving the employees that are nearing retirement an option to retire early if they want to.

I'm guessing the point was that the data was already high quality and reliable until these legalized prediction markets introduced perverse incentives to manipulate it.

> I don't want it to continue pivoting towards pushing agent management deeper and deeper into the experience.

AI and agent tooling is the only way this VC-backed company is going to make any money. Nobody is going to pay for a text editor, so they've had no choice but to enshitify it by chasing AI features for the last year+.


> If you don't want end-to-end messages made available to others, set your notifications to only show that you have a message, not what it contains or who its from.

We have no idea if this actually works or even what it does, because we can't see the source code. We just have to take Apple and Google's word for it. Which is not exactly a smart thing to do.


In my experience, Codex is better than Claude Code in every way and GPT-5.4 is on par or better than Opus 4.6 at every coding task I ask of it.

You're really not going to miss CC. And OpenAI actually had some foresight to invest massively in compute so they don't run into usage and rate limits like Anthropic does constantly. I couldn't even use CC for more than a couple complex tasks before I was out of extra usage or session usage. It was a maddening productivity killer and I just switched to Codex full time.


And Nystrom's book

Yeah, I really enjoyed Crafting Interpreters, wholeheartedly recommend!

From another comment:

> Kontext holds secrets server-side and mints short-lived tokens per session.

That probably makes this thing DOA for most people (certainly for me and everyone I know).


Thanks. Yes, I would have to put myself in that category. Typical play here is to offer the self-hosted option. Not sure if that is in the pipeline for the creators of this. Then you are into that trust/operational overhead tradeoff conversation.


[flagged]


What do you anticipate to be the hardest part of supporting a self-hosted solution? I've worked a fair bit on converting SAAS -> self-hosted and always interested to hear others' pain points.

I imagine a lot of the organizations that would find this most valuable, and would be willing to pay a lot, would be the same ones that would require something like this.


[flagged]


Currently we can use Bitwarden either hosted or self-hosted, which solves most of these problems (plus my own extra rig I built to generate OAuth tokens, for people which support that).

Could you elaborate on what challenges you face that can't be solved by the Bitwarden approach?


It looks like it's a fork of Django that just kinda changed a bunch of stuff arbitrarily?

From the readme: Plain is a fork of Django, driven by ongoing development at PullApprove — with the freedom to reimagine it for the agentic era.

I'm not very good at counting lines of code, but it seems like it's slightly less than Django. From a cursory glance the main difference I saw was that only postgres is supported, not necessarily a bad thing.

> the main difference I saw was that only postgres is supported, not necessarily a bad thing.

Then why not just delete the other files that you don't want? Why also completely change Django's API?


Very likely its being changed by an AI model, driven by human prompts.

That would be good if the changes are to slim it down by 80%.

Same thoughts as soon as I saw the code in the readme

> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions

Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?


There's a "European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles", signed by the member states, and I believe the right to access internet freely, without companies being permitted to mandate entire IP addresses blocks being forbidden from routing and within 30 minutes from the request surely would fit within that one, or others, in some way or another. No company should hold that power and it's a serious precedent others states in the union would want to leverage for their own reasons too. Reading this recent TorrentFreak article, the regulations should probably align with the following thinktank's analysis, at the very least:

>The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.

https://torrentfreak.com/eu-pirate-site-blocking-is-broken-r...


if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.

for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.

among other things this also means that if there is any country in the EU where these sports broadcasts are accessible legally, then spain would not be allowed to block them either.


> if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.

As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.

> for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.

Definitely not. You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one. There are some categories where you have to, but that explicitly excludes video streaming.

There is another regulation for subscribers temporarily traveling to a different EU country not losing access to a service they subscribed to in their home country, but that’s also something else.


You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one.

according to my understanding yes, you are:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/geoblockin...

i don't see mention of any exception for streaming there either. (maybe one exists, if you have a reference, i'd love to take a look)


They call it "audio-visual". From the page you linked:

> [...] services in sectors currently fully excluded such as transport and audio-visual


good catch, thank you.

if you look at the actual report summary however it shows that they want to change that:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-pub...

so even if not a reality in all sectors, removing geoblocking is in the interest of the EU.

going back to the original question:

Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?

they do care, and they should, and yes, they have the authority.

personally, when i read the report, seeing how young people are more interested in viewing content from other countries, what first came to my mind is the increased integration of EU countries and cultures that comes from that. that's the why.


> As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.

Aren't you being disadvantaged though? A customer in Spain can buy from an EU internet retailer (let's say ~10% of those retailers are in Spain using the population ratio of Spain to the EU), or from a brick and mortar retailer in their location 100% of which are in Spain.

They're blocking the thing where ~90% of the retailers are outside of Spain but not the thing where all of them are in Spain, is that not a disadvantage?


Surely EU members should care if Spain blocks the access to government services offered by EU members. In Finland various government services (like Police's website) do use Cloudflare.

And Spain is not blocking access to Spain's citizens, it's blocking access people in Spain. These could be citizens of other EU members who need to access their government's website for reason or another (e.g. renewing passport) while they visit Spain or reside in Spain.


Yes, it has the authority. There are plenty of EU regulations that states must obey, from fundamental rights to taxation.

The question is about the authority to pass laws that only some countries need to obey. To my knowledge, the EU does not have the authority to do that.

They don't have to do anything like that. Just create a law that says no country in the EU is allowed to block sites.

The EU doesn't work like that. It's a union of sovereign states, not a central government.

Banning the member states from legislating something would require changes to the Treaties of the European Union. And that in turn would require unanimous consent from the member states.

The EU could legislate the matter on its own, which would override national laws. But it's not in the habit of doing narrow single-purpose laws, because that's not in the culture of the people who run the union. Instead, there would probably be a comprehensive law on internet blocking and censorship, which would be a very bad idea.


Basically EU should step in whenever country level government doesn't do a good enough job for its citizens.

It's not strong enough to do that yet but a lot of people with cheap governments wish it was.


That would be an absolute disaster and basically destroy European democracy.

The way this works best is that you have a federal system that sets out what the member states can't do (e.g. block internet, censor speech, ex post facto laws, trade barriers) and then the central government exists only to enforce those constraints on the member states, who choose whether and how to do any of the things they are allowed to do.

If Spaniards think their goverment is doing a bad job, why don't they vote them out? They are still a democracy, aren't they?

The opposition is also pleasing to LALIGA, that wouldn't change anything. And LALIGA managed to secure a legal ruling by a corrupt judge.

So Spanish people are too stupid to vote for their own policy preferences?

How do you know the EU is guaranteed to do a better job than national governments representing the desires of that nation’s citizens?


Ask Hungarians at any point of the last 16 years. The problem is that 30% vote in a conman. 29% of people try to prevent that. Then 100% of people suffer for years.

It happened in Poland and in Hungary.

And even if that scenario doesn't play out exactly like that it always works this way to some degree.

People need enlightened remote central power to protect them from local petty tyrants.

It's the same thing as HOAs. If there aren't enough laws (with enforcement) in place, people tend to be exploited by "voluntarily" chosen local tyrants. At the level of home owners associacion, or at the level of national government.


It doesn't work like that. The EU is established by the states and only has the authority to do what is delegated by the member states to the EU.

Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: