If you look at it that way, nobody is good at anything. True perhaps but not a very useful stance.
Millions of people have built meaningful software with C++ over the past several decades. It is everywhere and it mostly works OK.
Of course, C++ is not necessarily the best choice for everything or anything. But it is a mostly reasonable choice for lots of things in 2025, just like it was in 1995.
There are different levels of confidence in junior programmers code in different languages. For C++ it is one of the lowest possible.
If thousands of HN readers suddenly decide that they need to start their 10+ years learning of C++ with immediate contribution to the Ladybird project it would be not really helpful, right?
It would be a weird kind of bad situation, if literally thousands of juniors with little to no experience/understanding of programming simultaneously start learn-as-you-go contributing C++ code for Ladybird.
In the perhaps more plausible situation that two or three people with a reasonable foundation in CS and/or a bit of professional programming experience decide to learn C++ in order to help Ladybird, I think it would work out quite fine.
I had to think carefully if I would ever agree with 'plausible situation' at any point of my career. And the answer is no. If they really needed 2-3 ppl they would have adjusted their sponsorships/donations plan and picked up those ppl full time. There are costs of bigger teams and wider contributor networks that are rarely advertised.
But ofc what can I know about browsers, I am just a gamedev. From my PoV (studio tech director) in custom game engines juniors mostly do acts of wanton destruction in the name of curiosity. And then leave for better compensated industries anyway.
In my opinion folks inciting random contributions from webdev crowd unfamiliar with C++ are not helping. And those who are familiar should know better than to do random drive-by features.
Why would employees in front of a counter be more deserving than employees behind a counter?
Or perhaps I should put it like: Why would a business need to pay a predictable market rate salary for employees behind the counter, but not for employees in front of the counter (because you step in and provide it instead)?
Because the person serving a beer at a bar simply poured me a beer. I walked up to the bar where I ordered from the menu. The level of interaction with staff = 1. Effort from staff = 1.
The the waiter/waitress had to come to my table, discuss the menu, provide feedback on questions, submitted order to kitchen, delivered order, checked back on us to see if we need anything else, etc. Level of interaction with staff > 1, level of effort from staff > 1. Tip appropriately if level of effort > 1 for helpfulness, politeness, attentiveness, etc. Stop making this so hard.
So how many hours is the walking waiter working in a day, and how many hours is the standing waiter working?
If anything it seems to me that it would be more logical to tip the person doing the more boring and repetitive work.
(My personal opinion is that tipping in general is a blight on a modern society and something that belong in primitive third-world economies. The way to fix this is via legislation: we simply make all forms of both receiving and giving tips illegal. It probably won't take much enforcement to quickly shift the social norms and economic practices once the wheels get rolling).
The official map of your property will not be exactly the same as the one on Lantmäteriet.se.
In more densely populated areas, there will be a local coordinate system, where each property is defined in terms of the neighbouring ones. This also applies to newly formed properties in old areas.
The property borders on digital maps are machine approximations of the mapping from the local coordinate system onto an absolute global coordinate system. This mapping can never be perfect, and it is often much less perfect than it could have been.
When the physical markers are missing or suspected of having moved from their original location (happens all the time for all sorts of reasons), Lantmäteriet will review the original documents of your and any number of neighbouring properties and deduce where the markers ought to be.
Regarding your fence, 20 years is very far from enough to establish "urminnes hävd". I suggest you wait another 100 years before you start assuming that they could act as facts on the ground in a property disputes! :-) And even then I wouldn't bet on it, unless the national archives are all destroyed...
I had to go back and check regarding "Urminnes hävd" (ancient custom). The creation of new instances of this for property rights was blocked back in 1970.
You can still use it, but then you must prove that the property right was an established ancient custom already before 1970. Anything that started after that will never qualify, no matter how much time passes.
My understanding of that type of "hävd", is that you need to have an official but incorrect deed of some sort, that remains uncontested by a true owner for 10 or 20 years.
Simply making uncontested use of the land is not enough.
I guess it is something that can happen quite easily in rural settings with very old property lines. Farmer 1 and 2 agree to some deal and a while later farmer 3 turns up and says "hey that's my land".
Tesla seems to be doing pretty OK on the manufacturing side. These days quality of the physical product is decent enough and the price of their different models are highly competitive in their respective segments.
The flaws in Teslas cars are mostly design choices (plastic seats instead of cloth/leather, bad ergonomics due to focus on minimalist aesthetic, uncomfortable suspension setup etc, etc). Some of it is following trends, some of it is Elons stupid ideas.
Financially it seems like Teslas big problem is the AI-investments. Burning unfathomable amounts of cash on useless software, instead of putting that money towards developing their model lineup and improving quality on things that matter.
> These days quality of the physical product is decent enough and the price of their different models are highly competitive in their respective segments. [...] The flaws in Teslas cars are mostly design choices
These two parts don't really go together from my point of view. Tesla is often pricing a car with mid-range quality as a premium model.
Personally, I think they are not very competitive anymore in the segments they operate in. They used to have first mover advantage but now historic manufacturers have similar cars on offer. At the entry level, in as much as they have a vehicle there, they are not competitive at all compared to the Asian manufacturers.
I am more worried about the plummeting sales than the AI investments.
When I picked my Model Y the main competition was Kia EV6 and VW ID7. The monthly lease+insurance was $600 for Tesla, $850 for Kia and $1000 for VW.
To get down to Model Y-level costs, I would have had to settle for a barebones ID4 or an MG. In that comparison the Model Y is a wonder of pace, space and grace.
I don't like my Model Y, I sort of hate it, but if I had to make the choice again and the relative prices (and my car-needs) were the same, it would be a tight race. I'm pretty sure there will be better options next time, though.
Tesla learned how to do manufacturing from the Chinese. The first plant they built themselves was designed, built and run by the Chinese, and then basically copied to Germany. The Texas plant is an evolution of that.
That manufacturing edge is the reason Tesla is still profitable despite its massive drop in sales.
Tesla is a quite common EV brand. They do not allow configuring regen braking, except for the behaviour at stand-still.
(They also don't do blending between friction brakes and regen, so the cars behaviour when letting of the accelerator is highly inconsistent depending on temperature and charge level).
One of the reasons I long for the lease on my Model Y to end so I can replace it with a less stupid vehicle.
I have learned my lesson on regen. Lots of people online (and offline, for that matter) told me that you'll get used to the Tesla behaviour in no time and not to worry about it feeling weird during the test drive.
Many thousands kilometers later I hate it almost as much as at the start, so lack of regen configuration will be a dealbreaker next time I pick a new car.
1. It is inconsistent, especially during winter and when fully charged.
2. Crossings with shrubbery/objects that hides approaching pedestrians/cars/bikes and it is rare that there is anyone actually crossing. I encounter these several times per day.
My preferred way of approaching #2 is to reduce speed well ahead, start gliding and put my foot on the break pedal to be ready for a complete halt in the rare case (once in a 500 maybe) that I need to give way to someone. In the Tesla I must reduce speed to almost standstill and creep slooooowly, since it would take half a second to move the right foot to the break.
I understand it sounds like an extreme corner case, but for me it is all the time every day. Central Scandinavia.
Hmm, I don't really understand what you mean. If I want to reduce speed far ahead, I just ease up on the throttle pedal a little, and the car slows down a little. If I ease up a lot, it slows down a lot. I'm not sure what you mean...
I want to glide at roughly constant speed for some distance. Some mild breaking is fine. I cant glide if I let off the accelerator, then I come to a fairly firm stop.
I want my right foot on the break pedal, ready to brake hard and fast in the rare case that something comes across the road.
I don't want to reduce speed any further than is necessary to have a safe breaking distance at fully ready state.
With any other car (that I have driven) than the Tesla, I can approach a situation like this at between 20kmh and 40kmh, depending on the specifics. In the Tesla I need to go at between 5 and 10kmh.
regenerative braking can be uncomfortable for passengers as the car is constantly alternating between accelerating (or constant speed) and braking. It isn't even light braking, it is significant braking.
I generally turn off the auto regen braking because i find it uncomfortable.
Importantly, regenerative braking is a danger on icy roads. I disable it entirely in the winter in eastern Canada because it often causes the tires to lose grip.
I agree about the icy roads, but for the braking, that's easily remedied by just not completely releasing the accelerator. I just modulate how much I want to brake with the accelerator pedal.
There must be some connection between traction control and regen braking in newer Teslas, because I didn't really have any problems with it during the past winter. A friend working in auto industry was involved with doing competitor analysis and was shocked back in 2014 or something like that, the Teslas they tested simply spun out of control when letting go of the accelerator in slippery conditions.
They didn't care much for convential wisdom and car building competence in the early days of Tesla.
Influenza is not necessarily that bad, though it can be.
Most of the time influenza is not worse than a normal cold. You will have plenty of partial immunity via previous infections and vaccinations that takes the edge of most infections.
Same as COVID. Most of the infections are not even noticed by the ones infected. But sometimes it is/was extremely bad, if you had no previous exposure/vaccination, a large amount of bad luck and/or pre existing condition.
Expensive cars usually have more power than cheap cars. You can enter a highway, safely overtake someone or climb a steep incline in a larger selection of gears. Also, fancy cars tend to have better automatic gearboxes that behave well in more situations, compounding the advantage.
Cheap fossil cars with shitty automatics can be quite stressful to drive. With a manual clutch and transmission you are in control, know how the car will behave and can relax. It might still be slow, but you know exactly how slow in every situation.
>Cheap fossil cars with shitty automatics can be quite stressful to drive
This is a self inflicted problem. They're programmed for fuel economy (we're talking a small fraction of an MPG here) at the expense of drivability. The might even get worse fuel economy in practice because drivers learn you gotta floor them to tell the compute "no I'm serious, give me the ponies".
> This is a self inflicted problem. They're programmed for fuel economy (we're talking a small fraction of an MPG here) at the expense of drivability.
I find it hard to believe that the Smart car I rented once shifted terribly for fuel economy reasons. It just sucked. I’ve never been so worried that I’d get rear ended leaving a stop sign (during the unbelievably slow shift from first to second), and putting the pedal to the metal didn’t make any difference.
Maybe it sucked too but fuel economy absolutely is a large part of why modern cars all drive like mush.
If you ever have a the opportunity to drive a Nissan from the "hurr durr Nissan CVT bad" era like 2008-12ish it'll feel like a sports car by comparison to just about any modern crossover. "Oh you want revs, let me give you revs"
The comparison to Trump seems very unfair. I'm not in the academy and didn't know the current standing of his work, but he was certainly a big name that popped up everywhere (as a theorists in the field, not as a general celebrity) when I took an introduction to linguistics 20+ years ago.
As this is Hacker News, it is worth mentioning that he developed the concept of context-free grammars. That is something many of us encounter on a regular basis.
No matter what personality flaws he might have and how misguided some of his political ideas might be, he is one of the big thinkers of the 20th century. Very much unlike Trump.
I was a young postal worker, temporarily flunked out of university, when I first read Bukowski. The Post Office of course. Aside from some postal technicalities it was less reflective of day to day in the postal world than Star Wars or Mission Impossible. I loved it and was hooked on his writing for life anyway.
Not in any parts of northern Europe where I drive. You are usually (exceptions exist) supposed to reduce speed very much below posted speed limit before passing the bump. For example, posted speed is 50kmh but speed bump is designed to be crossed at no more than 20kmh. If you drive a less comfort oriented car, make that 5kmh instead of 20kmh.
I drive mainly in Norway but hadn't noticed any difference in Sweden or Denmark. If you drive the posted speed here you can count that your wheels won't be knocked off. If you have to reduce speed (say around schools or near poor visibility crossing) then there is a sign for different speed, as simple as that.
You won't lose your wheels going at the posted limit, if it is a 30kmh road. For comfort you probably do want to reduce down to 15-20 in an average car.
If you encounter a warning sign for speedbumps on a 50kmh or 70kmh road you better start braking if you dont't fancy getting airborne.
There are some weird deadlocks in Swedish road regulations that make it unreasonable difficult to change the speed limit in some situations. They sometimes work around that by actively making it impossible to drive the posted limit.
OK, maybe that's a thing in Sweden after all, certainly not here. Just drove a whole bunch of speed bumps on the way to work today anywhere from 30km/h to 50. You'll never encounter a speed bump in a 70 km/h zone here.
Millions of people have built meaningful software with C++ over the past several decades. It is everywhere and it mostly works OK.
Of course, C++ is not necessarily the best choice for everything or anything. But it is a mostly reasonable choice for lots of things in 2025, just like it was in 1995.