> I know blaming everything on LLMs is in vogue right now; but this is much more to do with Microsoft very publically firing the QA department.
Yes, yes, "agile" everything...
I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.
That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows, but never were a problem on a mac.
Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up. Better to wait for everything to settle down, otherwise apps will constantly snatch away focus and your typing will go into random applications.
I work on a desktop Windows/Mac application that takes forever and a day to launch (CAD package), and pops up a million pop-ups during the process. I try to get minor admin tasks done while it is compiling/launching, but it steals focus every 10 seconds!
Windows 11 also broke the active window from focusing when waking from sleep. Whenever I wake my PC, no window is active. I'll still have a fullscreen Chrome or whatever, but if I try to do Ctrl+T to open a tab nothing happens because nothing is in focus. I have to Alt+Tab once to bring it into focus.
Change the ForegroundLockTimeout registry setting to increase the timeout, or you can set it to the max integer value to never let the app steal the focus.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
I recently built a windows PC again for gaming. Haven't used one for years. Everything's fresh, loads of room on hard drives etc and still sometimes it'll just be weird and needs a reset. But it doesn't surprise me, it's sad we've come to tolerate that from the world's most popular OS.
As an aside, unless you are playing games that need NT kernel anticheat or are using a store other than steam, odds are the overall experience and performance is better on linux at this point.
And even Mac is doing well with games, most of my library runs natively. Baldurs Gate 3 runs better on the newer Apple chips than my somewhat aging gaming PC.
Yeah it's just the kernel anti-cheat now which is keeping me on windows. I'm fully ready to swap to linux but unfortunately I do like to play games that need it.
I have a Windows 11, macOS and Ubuntu Desktop VM that I alternate across throughout the week, I find I need to reset all three periodically to sort out random weirdness. It has more to do with which machine I've used most in the last few weeks not which OS is in-use in my experience.
I have the same setup, just Arch instead of ubuntu on my laptop and I very rarely have any issues (like maybe once per month) that require me to reboot.
Familiarity might be the biggest differentiator. I switch between windows on my work computer and fedora gnome on my personal computer (and only interact with Debian server over ssh) so I am more at ease on Windows than I am with something like cachy OS and KDE.
I have Win10, mac and Ubuntu, in 3 different machines I'm using constantly. None of them is perfect, but windows is just infuriating, macos in the middle, and I can more or less live with ubuntu...
Wikipedia claims that Android "has the largest installed base of any operating system in the world", if you're going to measure popularity that way.
(Of course it's hard to know how to define an OS. Is Android a kind of Linux? Are the various things called "Windows" or "MacOS" to be regarded as different versions of the same OS just because marketing people decided to use the same name? If not, how much similarity in code or design is required?)
Can you even consider Android a singular OS? I personally don't in the same way I don't consider Fedora and Ubuntu the same OS, and there's far more differences between something like HyperOS and AOSP/PixelUI as there is between Ubuntu and Fedora.
Did the same just end of last year, NVME drive, gobs of RAM, and yet... sometimes the whole UI freezes solid for multiple seconds at a time when I close one out of my 30-40 Chrome tabs. I know it's not a cheap app to run, but this doesn't happen on MacOS.
Check/change your ForegroundLockTimeout registry value.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
I've been beefing about this for decades; X Window didn't do this by default and you could adjust window manager behavior however you liked to prevent windows stealing focus in X, even for newly realized windows. Microsoft Windows decided for some reason the newest window gets focus, which is annoying as heck. I really don't want my attention involuntarily switched because my window manager things it knows better than I do where I should be looking.
You want to change the
ForegroundLockTimeout registry key or set it via power shell.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
Windows has a ton of little settings you can tweak like this if it's not working quite how you like it.
I personally tweak it the other way to allow a window to pop up and still focus sooner .
If you set up via PowerShell you can do it more dynamically and if you're doing it via the API there's behavior in there too force a lock
I remember using the NT5 betas (that became Win2k) and being so pleased that the focus (not) stealing was working much better. They "fixed" that for the final release
Macs have largely been the same.
It is just a matter of buzy compute and letting all the accumulated tasks complete.
When you buy powerfull computers, this problem basically doesn't exist, both on Windows or macOS.
Since Macs have historically been more expensive and premium, even the cheaper model was powerfull enough to finish the boot sequence fast enough that the desktop would feel snappy almost instantly.
On the other hand, cheap PCs struggle to accomplish every task in a timely manner.
I am amazed about how stupid and ignorant is the average Mac fanboy. I have been a Mac user first and foremost, but you guys are just full of shit.
LLMs sometimes remind me of american car salesmen. Was the hopeful "anything is possible" mentality of the american dream accidentally baked into the larger models?
I once had an idea of buying the domain "freeofcharge.org", where people could put useful services that fit into RAM onto subdomains, meaning services that cost them only ~10$ per month, which they pay out of their own pockets.
Obviously all of what dang said, but I want to add that I think timing is an additional factor.
If you post when silicon valley wakes up on a weekday, you might get “initial” points faster, which leads to your submission being ranked higher up for a while and being more discoverable.
That (\/) (;,,;) (\/) I’m helping! feeling upon discovering a mod has bumped one of your 04:00 UTC “oh, this is interesting” posts that nobody else saw.
It is mostly within budget, estimated in 2005 were 5.5 billion €, total cost as of today are 5.9 billion €, the difference being largely attributed to the pandemic and later addition of sections.
Sure, I'm just pointing out that this article doesn't follow the HN Guidelines, so I was confused at not seeing any mention of the budget within the article:
> "Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."
> "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize"
Considering the original title is just the name of the railway, and I do not think “within budget” is editorializing, I think the commenter is being overly pedantic
I opened the article expecting to see news about the budget and how they stayed within it, since that SEEMS like the biggest surprising news in a project like this. How is that overly pedantic?
I understand your expectation. That said, I think it's ok to add detail in commentary when the article doesn't mention it explicitly. So continuing to go upon the point that the article didn't mention the budget makes you seem as pedantic.
Does the site mention the budget and completion time/cost at all? I can't find it from a quick browse/search of the site. It's taking editorializing to a whole new level to add details that are not in the linked article or site at all.
The right thing to do in this case is find the best source for this information (about the budget, schedule and completion time/cost) and make that the URL of the submission. Please email us the best links you know of about this (hn@ycombinator.com) and we'll consider updating the URL.
The site doesn‘t mention it, I got that information from various german announcements. I fear there probably won‘t be an English announcement regarding the budget, though there will be many regarding the tunnel.
€5.5 billion in 2005 is €8 billion in 2025, so it can be either over or under budget depending on how you amortize the costs over the construction period.
To contrast, HS2 here in the UK has cost £40 billion (€45 billion) to date with a further £25 billion (€28 billion) allocated, for a largely superterranean route of 230km.
As badly as HS2 has been run, apart from the tunnel length (where HS2 has not too much more than this project) these projects are night and day different. Not just that HS2 Phase 1a/1b is almost double the length and significantly higher design speed (360km/h vs 250km/h), but they are in a different league in terms of civil engineering from the info I can see - this seems to have less than 80 structures (overpasses, bridges, underpasses etc.) whereas HS2 has 175 bridges and 52 viaducts, and some of those are massive (including the longest railway viaduct in the UK).
HS2 also includes major stations - a 6 platform one almost entirely underground in west london, a multi-platform extension in central london, a new station in central birmingham, a new 4 platform outside of Birmingham
Not necessarily because no one lives underground and there are probably no existing things like property, gas lines, electricity lines, sewers, pipelines, roads, etc to avoid or reroute. And very little in the way of habitat.
The longest road tunnel in the world only cost about 100 million in the 90s for 25km so tunneling isn't always a gigantic Big Dig style clusterfuck.
In terms of legal complexity, it's fantastically easier than picking your way across and near thousands of individual plots of very expensive land owned by people with solicitors salivating at the potential fees, expensive private infrastructure, nature reserves and so on.
> The longest road tunnel in the world only cost about 100 million in the 90s for 25km so tunneling isn't always a gigantic Big Dig style clusterfuck.
Big Dig style clusterfuck is because the simplicity and cheapness you're talking about only apply to tunnels through mountains, less so to those underwater and definitely not to tunnels under big cities i.e. land that people live on, which comes with all the complexity.
Yes, and the Austrian route is mostly in that category under the Koralpe Massif rather then the very politically awkward Home Counties (NIMBY Central, and very rich NIMBYs at that).
Hence why tunneling does not necessarily mean a stunningly expensive project. We just hear about the HS2s and Big Digs because they reverberate for decades with all the legal battles.
The big dig is probably the last major success of American infrastructure. Referring to it as a clusterfuck is representative of why we'll never get another one.
Even if the end result ends up being a net positive, even by a wide margin, I think any project that goes over budget by 100% and lands 10 years late does reasonably merit the clusterfuck tag.
The Space Shuttle was one too and that was a marvel. A deathtrap politically-motivated pork-barrel hot-mess of a project, but also a shining black-and-white marvel of a glorious flying space Aga.
> The Space Shuttle was one too and that was a marvel. A deathtrap politically-motivated pork-barrel hot-mess of a project, but also a shining black-and-white marvel of a glorious flying space Aga.
The big dig directly benefits people producing value many, many, many times what the investment cost. Who gives a shit about the initial investment? Voters have proven time and time again that it's easier to lie to them than to get them to earnestly think.
IT is also correct - it costs way too much for what we got. It will be nice for future generations that don't have to pay for it, but it doesn't look like a good investment. Now if the costs were more reasonable it could be a great investment.
I don't see how you're justifying this. Yes the costs overran, but the investment would have been worth it at 4x the end cost. It made boston one of the nicest cities in the country, even if it still sucks ass to drive in.
The costs overran by a lot. Enough that my tiny city in the middle of nowhere would not benefit even though if the costs has been more reaonable we could get something. It might be worth it for Boston - I don't live there, but for a large number of places it makes such a large project something we will never do. The investment at a reasonable price would be wroth for more because it allows similar investments elsewhere and so the total pay off would be much higher.
I live way out in the bumfuck of nowhere, way west of western mass. It's still obvious the big dig was worth it at 4x the cost it actually ran. Yes, even though my taxpayer dollars haven't returned to me in any way I can straightforwardly estimate or point to.
Of course, the big dig is no excuse to not invest outside of the Boston metro area. But that's a completely different argument than saying the investment wasn't worth it.
> The investment at a reasonable price would be wroth for more because it allows similar investments elsewhere and so the total pay off would be much higher.
This is an insane way to reason about investments. No wonder this country is such a shithole. Obviously we should do similar big-dig style investments outside of Boston. Obviously investments like the big dig prompt investments nearby. But individualistic assholes like you force us all to commit suicide instead because you can't use your fucking brain to connect why investment now means we all eat good later.
Would be interesting to read how the Austrian project was contracted out? It seems in the UK the big construction companies have got very good in extracting a lot of money from customers, wonder if things were different in Austria with this project.
Interesting. In UK, I think the big construction companies would hire these bean-counters then use them to out-manoeuvre the ones that are hired to replace them. Quickly nobody knows what a reasonable price is, and the govmnt has to go with choice of one out of two overpriced bids. (I have no direct experience, this is just what it looks like from an observers perspective)
Obviously this does not give any indication of the complexity of each project. Tunnelling and building railway through a metropolis I would imagine is quite challenging.
Still seems insanely more expensive in the UK. I understand they have a higher cost to carry because their project is indeed more complex, but that's like a almost 13x more expensive variant, while not even being two times the length.
> It is mostly within budget, estimated in 2005 were 5.5 billion €, total cost as of today are 5.9 billion €
That’s incredible! The project managers and contractors should collaborate on a book about how they did it. Heh staying on budget should be the norm and not the exception but irl a 20 year large infra project coming in that close is something to celebrate and learn from.
Started in 1998, apparently without a budget, which came 7 years later, and was completed within…mostly…budget, but not really since it was 7% over budget.
Which also begs the question; why is a railway project page on HN at all, regardless of anything else?
"Willison’s insight was that this isn’t just a filtering problem; it’s architectural. There is no privilege separation, and there is no separation between the data and control paths. The very mechanism that makes modern AI powerful - treating all inputs uniformly - is what makes it vulnerable. The security challenges we face today are structural consequences of using AI for everything."
Attributing that to Simon when people have been writing articles about that for the last year and a half doesn't seem fair. Simon gave that view visibility, because he's got a pulpit.
Longer, surely? (Though I don't have any evidence I can point to).
It's in-band signalling. Same problem DTMF, SS5, etc. had. I would have expected the issue to be intuitvely obvious to anyone who's heard of a blue box?
(LLMs are unreliable oracles. They don't need to be fixed, they need their outputs tested against reality. Call it "don't trust, verify").
One interesting thing that most non-systems programmers don’t know is that memory and cpu performance have improved at completely different rates. That’s a large part of why we have x times faster CPUs but software is still slow.
The systems people worry more about memory usage for this reason, and prefer manual memory management.
> ... memory and cpu performance have improved at completely different rates.
This is overly simplified. To a first approximation, bandwidth has kept track with CPU performance, and main memory latency is basically unchanged. My 1985 Amiga had 125ns main-memory latency, though the processor itself saw 250ns latency - current main memory latencies are in the 50-100ns range. Caches are what 'fix' this discrepancy.
You would need to clarify how manual memory management relates to this... (cache placement/control? copying GCs causing caching issues? something else?)
Moore's Law has been dead for a long time. The doubling rate of transistors is now drastically below Moore's prediction.
We're adding transistors at ~18%/year. That's waaaaay below the ~41% needed to sustain Moore's law.
Even the "soft" version of Moore's law (a description of silicon performance vs. literally counting transistors) hasn't held up. We are absolutely not doubling performance every 24 months at this point.
Moore's law has kind of ended already though, and maybe has done for a few years, and even if you can make a chip which is faster there's a basic thermodynamics problem running it at full tilt for any meaningful period of time. I would have expected that to have impacted software development, and I don't think it particularly has, and there's also no obvious gain in e.g. compilers or other optimization which would have countered the effect.
Probably architecture changes (x86 has a lot of historic baggage that difficults newer designs) and also more specialized hardware in the CPU, probably this might also be one of the reasons Apple went this way with the M Silicon
But the machines aren't really "faster" in clock speed— for a long time now the gains have been in better and more local caching + parallelism at both the core and instruction level.
Static type checking and Gleam can compile to JavaScript. Gleam and Elixir can be mixed in the same project too, so it’s easy to start adding Gleam to an elixir code base or use Elixir libraries in Gleam.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "not as integrated as in Gleam"?
Are you referring to Hologram being a framework/library rather than a language-level feature? Or is it more about the developer experience - like tooling, compilation workflow, or how seamlessly it fits into the Elixir ecosystem compared to Gleam's native JS transpilation?
I'd love to understand your perspective better so we can potentially improve that integration feel!
In german the usual saying in meetings is, literally translated „I can‘t say anything about that (optional: at the present moment)“.
That sentence is widely accepted as a substitute for „I don‘t know“, but at the same time doesn‘t hold the same conclusion, since there could be a myriad of reasons why you can‘t say anything about a topic.
Yes, yes, "agile" everything...
I remember clicking on a perfectly honest button in Azure Dev Ops (Production) and it told me that the button is completed but the actual functionality will be probably delivered in Sprint XY.
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