Wow, I just read all the comments which are currently here (at my time of reading), and the level is worse than on Reddit. Not the HN I remember...
Talking about the actual news, as usual with this kinds of programs, a lot of the money won't bring results, but that's also true for most investments from VCs. If just a few good ventures come out of it, that's already a great result. Trump is showing that the EU simply can't outsource most of its IT to the US, it's just too risky.
You do understand the difference between VC money and government money right?
As a citizen of the EU I care greatly when governments spend money that for one they do not have, therefore saddling me and everyone else with more debt,and two when that money is spent not in the most efficient manner but given to the established players who can fill forms the proper way as highlighted in the numerous comments above yours.
If a VC like Softbank blows 100B on a bad investment It doesn't affect me but when its my hard earned tax money that could have been spent on other things, then it matters very greatly.
> The results would be indistinguishable from a massive cyber attack and would take decades to recover from.
It would be painful, yes, but it wouldn't "take decades to recover from", not even years. These services, technically, aren't so difficult to recreate, if you have a big enough market.
Very naive. The services are potentially replaceable, the data is not.
That's not even considering the political backlash. How do you explain to your population that their digital lives have been permanently deleted because of a trans-national legal spat they don't care about?
That would make sense at first glance, but I was talking to my HVAC contractor and they warned me not to make that assumption. It's not easy to compare gas furnace BTUs to heat pump BTUs for both physics and issues specific to my home (and probably most homes not made in the last decade or so).
It gets to -10F most winters here, but heat pumps struggle as it dips below freezing, while a gas furnace doesn't. What does that mean for heat in the colder parts of the year? Will I struggle to maintain 68F even if the BTUs are the same? This ties into my home design as well: Can I even substantially change my home's r-value the way it's built?
I couldn't afford a new home when I bought my house, so I live in older housing stock - 1949, made heavily of cinder blocks with plaster and stucco around them. It didn't have ducting when built, and that was partially retrofitted in using a central furnace with limited air ducts to push heat clumsily from the center of the house into a few primary rooms using a California plenum to pull air from the foundation, connected to certain rooms through floor registers. There's no good way to fix any of these compromises short of ripping half the home apart, or just building a new one, so the least bad compromise is usually an over-specced central forced air solution.
Do I get a central heat pump and air handler system with 100k peak BTUs? Do I get several mini-split units, each adding up to 100k BTUs? Do I overbuild on BTUs if I go mini-splits or multi-head? How will multiple smaller heat pumps work in winter as it freezes?
Will insulating change that? I can't insulate my foundation more than the earth already does. I guess I could rip out all my plaster walls and put in drywall and high r-value insulation behind them, but at that point, maybe a new house would be more worth the effort.
I think these kind of problems are endemic to the older housing stock and they're devilishly expensive to fix. Keep in mind - I have heat now. While my furnace will eventually depreciate to the point it needs replacement, to do all of this for no added functionality would be to take a new car's worth of value and gamble I might save a little on energy costs over the next 15 years. It's a dead-weight loss for me - I'm not going to recoup that on a house sale. It's not my 'forever' home, so I'm probably not going to stay more than 5 more years. (US national tenure seems to be 10-13 years.)
It's true that heat pumps have different performance characteristics from furnaces, but they weren't touching that issue, just insulation.
Will insulation reduce your needs? Yes. If you get into a situation where your foundation is responsible for most of your heat loss in -10F weather, you're in a great situation!
If improving the insulation on your walls is too hard, well that's disappointing, but that's a different topic from what happens when you do have good insulation.
Unfortunately, it's not just apt install insulation (wouldn't that be nice?), its a multifaceted problem involving energy sources (especially if you're shutting one down), heating infrastructure, housing stock retrofits, money, and more money.
The whole story about my house was just to try illustrating the difficulty of reducing a problem to "add insulation" and the downsides of ripping out otherwise-working infrastructure.
Adding insulation has complications, but not as many as you're making it out to have. You're making it sound like adding insulation requires replacing your heating system, and it definitely doesn't.
Making it just "add insulation" doesn't reduce the problem to trivial levels, but it does reduce the problem significantly.
If that's possible for you, installing the heat pump so that it exchanges heat underground should improve performance a lot when the air is very cold (or very hot).
I agree that this perception about modern leftism in the West is a very big issue. Through no personal fault of Harris, I think that a lot of non-white men and white women voted for Trump because they feel like progressives don't care about (or even hate) men, whatever their color, and don't care about (or even hate) white people, whatever their gender.
My impression is that it's not about what Kamala Harris (or most Democrats) said, but the fact that the Republicans were able to create the perception that there are strong movements which hate "whites" and which hate "men" (in various combinations), and that voting Democrats would help those movements. Apparently, they were able to convince enough non-white men and white women that Trump will be better for them.
I subscribe to the concept of the "pyramid of tests" - lots of simpler unit tests, fewer integration tests, and very few end-to-end tests. I find that using LLMs to write unit tests is very useful. If I just wrote code which has good naming both for the classes, methods and variables, useful comments where necessary and if I already have other tests which the LLMs can use as examples for how I test things, I usually just need to read the created tests and sometimes add some test cases, just writing the "it should 'this and that'" part for cases which weren't covered.
An added bonus is that if the tests aren't what you expect, often it helps you understand that the code isn't as clear as it should be.
I also subscribe to a testing pyramid but I think it's commonly upside down IMO.
You should have a few very granular unit tests for where they make the most sense (Known dangerous areas, or where they are very easy to write eg. analysis)
More library/service tests. I read in an old config file and it has the values I expect.
Integration/system tests should be the most common, I spin up the entire app in a container and use the public API to test the application as a whole.
Then most importantly automated UI tests, I do the standard normal customer workflows and either it works or it doesn't.
The nice thing is that when you strongly rely on UI and public API tests you can have very strong confidence that your core features actually work. And when there are bugs they are far more niche. And this doesn't require many tests at all.
(We've all been in the situation where the 50,000 unit tests pass and the application is critically broken)
Until recently I was only using Copilot as an advanced autocomplete and to help writing tests, for which it's pretty useful.
A couple weeks ago I had to create some classes (typescript) implementing a quite big spec for a file format to transfer quizzes between applications. I decided to try some more advanced tool, ending up with Cursor and continue.dev. I copied the spec (which are public on the web) into a text file and used them as context, together with a skeleton start for the main class I needed, and experimented with different engines and different prompts.
The end result is that I got a very good starting point for my code, saving me many hours. Surprisingly, for this task, the best result was generated by Gemini 1.5 pro.
Since then I've been trying to integrate these tools more into my day to day programming, with varying results, but I'm now convinced that, even with the limits of the current LLMs, this technology can have a much higher impact on programming with better harnessing, eg integrating it with compiler/code analysis tools output and automated testing.
You're implying that there is an absolute Truth and that people only need to do [what?] to check if something is True. But that's not True. We only have models of how reality works, and every model is wrong - but some are useful.
When dealing with almost everything you do day by day, you have to rely on the credibility of the source of the information you have. Otherwise how could you know that the can of tuna you're going to eat is actually tuna and not some venomous fish? How do you know that you should do what your doctor told you? Etc. etc.
> You're implying that there is an absolute Truth and that people only need to do [what?] to check if something is True. But that's not True. We only have models of how reality works, and every model is wrong - but some are useful.
I am not sure I am following - you don't know if there is anything that is really true, but you presume there isn't and that model of "the only truth is the absence of truth" is useful to you because it allows you to ... what exactly?
reply