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It looks nice. Less nice but very good in Germany is DWD Warn Weather:

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/dwd-warnwetter/id986420993?l=e...

Yes. We pay for it with taxes! And again with our money in the App Store. But the app success is build upon the lawsuit from WetterOnline which is a private company.

https://www.bundesgerichtshof.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...

The lawsuit backfired and made the state funded app well known. WetterOnline attacked the DWD because the state funded app is superior :)

I think in Italy they have some similar app. Would be nice if the EU helps us to unify the app. And add offline capabilities, bad or no internet happens. The weather radar is offline of less use but the forecast still helps.

They release videos for dangerous weather on YouTube. We’ll know for regular people, in regular cloths, speaking like regular Germans. Everyone loves it :)

I like it when important services are provided by the state and private companies. Save foundation! In worst case the state is always better. In best case they compete and public benefits. In this case the private company just sucks. But they made a good job in advertising for DWD ^^

PS: If someone would implement a nice weather for Linux (best Gtk) based upon DWD public data? DO IT!


No. Every man page is better, concise, easy to access.

GNU Info should be like a browser but it makes something simple into something complicated.


I’m rather sure *Airbus* will prefer a programmer which reads and writes reliable code.

The programmer which delivers useful products is probably hired by Microsoft? Or worse, Boeing. Or Toyota. Some NTSB people or Michael Barr are happy to tell you details about the number of dead people they created.

    Restart braking to brake because our code failed.
Or.

    One single sensor delivers wrong data. Let us put the trim down. DOWN! DOWN!
After that they blame the user. It wasn’t a pilot error, because the didn’t trained the pilots to immediately turn off MCAS. And it wasn’t a driver error, because they didn’t trained driver to lift the feet and start braking again.

    But I’m only programming a text viewer.
Which is used in a power plant to read the emergency manual, after an earthquake. You are responsible.

For Airbus, Boeing, and others the cost of failure is disproportionately high. Just look at how you consider Boeing despite that 99.99...% of their software and hardware work flawlessly. They will be known for the 737 Max failure for decades.

When OpenAI tells someone that suicide isn't that bad, some bs supplement could be the best thing to treat their cancer, or does anything else that has a negative outcome, the consequences are basically zero. That is even though any single failure like that probably kills alot more people per year than Boeing.

It seems there is knowledge of this and the lack of responsibility placed on these companies so they act accordingly.


But realistically, I just had 2 flights last month, checking what model of aircraft I was on didn't even cross my mind. I survived both flights btw.

Me to until the 737 Max crashes. Now, I will go out of my way(inconvenience) to avoid the Max line. I guess it gives me the illusion of control.

My point was only that you may not have checked but you know about the 737 Max. Do you know about software failures from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc. killing someone? They certainly have but it doesn't get the same press.

There are only so many safety-first companies and products. The vast majority of the economy isn't optimizing for safety

Could it be that the only large safety-first companies are the ones forced by law (either proactively, or due to reliable legal accountability if things go wrong) to be safety-first?

> There are only so many safety-first companies and products

There are only so many companies that think of themselves as safety-first. In practice, basically all companies work on things that should be safety-first.

Does your software store user data? Congrats, you are now on the hook for GDPR and a bunch of similar data handling regulations.

Does your software include a messaging component? You are now responsible for moderating abusive actors in your chat.

Does your software allow users to upload images? Now you are a potential distribution vector for CSAM.

And so on... safety isn't just for things which can cause immediate death and dismemberment


There’s a difference between "safety matters" and “safety is the primary constraint". Most companies manage risk to an acceptable level while optimizing for speed and cost. Aerospace companies optimize for minimizing catastrophic failure, even at extreme expense. Treating a potential GDPR fine as equivalent to a flight-control failure ignores that society, regulators, and markets treat those risks very differently. The inconvenience and economic cost of your Discord messages leaking is not the same category of harm as your pacemaker controller failing. And because the majority of economic activity sits in that lower-criticality category, it would not be surprising if highly specialized, safety-critical human software engineering becomes more of a niche, while much of routine software development becomes increasingly automated or commoditized.

> Treating a potential GDPR fine as equivalent to a flight-control failure ignores that society, regulators, and markets treat those risks very differently

Agreed, though I think that if GDPR fines were actually being levied at the recommended 4% of global revenue, we'd start treating them more similarly to a 737 crash.

> The inconvenience and economic cost of your Discord messages leaking is not the same category of harm as your pacemaker controller failing

Sort of depends who they leak to. Your teen classmates who bully you to suicide? Your abusive ex who is trying to track you down to kill you? The 3-letter agency who is trying to rendition your family to an internment camp?

There are a lot of seemingly benign failure modes that become extremely lethal given the right circumstances. And because we acknowledge the potential lethality of something like a pacemaker failure, we have massive infrastructure dedicated to their mitigation (EMT teams, emergency external pacemakers, surgical teams who can rapidly place new leads, etc). For things society judges less important, mitigations are often few and far between


OT: it's not the first time I see this grammatical mistake: "didn’t trained". Is it some accepted regional variation?

I think he is a non-native speaker, like me. I also do this mistake very often and 'didn't train' is a bit counter-intuitive - at least for me.

I think that happens when as a German you're used to using the Plusquamperfekt which is a somewhat unique tense that's allowed to be used in all past tenses.

It allows you to not having to define the point in time and neither the frame of the timespan's points in time.

Some languages allow to use that type of tense and it's somewhat a language gap I suppose. I have no idea what other languages or proto languages allow that tense though, but I've seen some Slavic and maybe Finnish(?) natives use that tense in English, too.

Maybe someone more elaborate in these matters has better examples?

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plusquamperfekt


English has present perfect, and past perfect. E.g. "I have walked" and "I had walked", both tenses are participated (ie "walked" instead of "walk"). These two are similar to the German Perfekt and Plusquamperfekt which are also participated.

The problem here is that the simple past "He went" uses an auxiliary verb for negations "He didn't go". In this case, "go" is not participated.


id think its germanic, dutch have it too

Thank you! I assume “didn’t train” is correct. Probably my favorite mistake! I like it when people point out mistakes, give me corrections, and explain why. The reason is crucial.

Maybe “hadn’t trained” is even better. Makes sense when ordering times. But I don’t trust LLMs an inch. It makes up options for git[1] and both GCC and CLANG are often immediately telling me that the LLM is lying.

Cookieengineer and illichosky are right.

[1] Considering that man pages exist, it shows how useless their harmful crawlers are.


We're not talking about Airbus or centuries old commodified industrial companies. Airbus sells airplanes, not AI software tools.

But if you did build a core innovation in aerospace that went viral I'm sure Airbus would be interested in hiring you.

The salary would be 3K per month. And lunch coupons to buy a ham baguette.


Airbus pays like shit probably. Just going off the stuff I've read about Boeing.

I can confirm, they do.

It's the interesting work tax, I guess. Though this doesn't look terrible: https://www.levels.fyi/de-de/companies/airbus/salaries/softw...

Ah, you were thinking of the German branch, I was talking about the French one, in Toulouse (I have a few friends working there).

There, a team lead is doing ~$4000 net per month. So not poverty, but not great either.


76k gross per year in Germany is basically the same as that. 100k gross comes out to about 5.5k net per month. The big question is how much is already covered once you're down to the net pay.

I'm not sure of the situation for software engineers but ones on the aerospace and mechanical side working in aerospace in Europe are paid something on the order of 50% less than ones in the US. I always assumed it's just a supply demand problem but I haven't run the numbers.

Did you factor in the highest cost of life (including housing, healthcare, retirement, etc.) in the US in your 50% ?

No, that's just on a salary basis.

If you want to go further into bringing other stuff in I would say, on average, the European folks are only slightly worse off money wise (owning a house there does seem harder overall) but with more security, time off, etc.

In the US there is a much broader range of experiences in the sector, partly because of personal circumstances (student and auto loans being the biggest) and alot because of where you live, as pay tends not to scale with COL. So someone could live like a king in rural Iowa or a pauper in Los Angeles doing the same job.


I’ve learned about that website only four years ago. It is still helpful, teaches me how to install front derailleurs properly (as deep and far to the front as possible, better chain line with less trimming and better shifting).

The German Wikipedalia tries to safe some stuff.


Another layer (ouch) to abstract away Windows (ouch * ouch).

Use Linux or BSD and ignore that approach for Vendor Lock-in* into their “library OS”.


Tja.

Chuckles in German.


Two problems: Apple. And Google.


Or Microsoft.

Stay as far away from BigIT as you can. Linux or BSD are there for many good reasons. This is another one.


Other than Android, what viable Linux options exist for mobile devices?


What is your definition of viable in this context?


Can run the Android or iOS apps people need for banking, shopping, flights, payment, parking, etc

What we want is probably platform agnostic PWAs that will run on any device with a browser.

We will never have freedom as long as were forced to choose between Google and Apple walled gardens.


The whole purpose of these apps is to only run on certain specified devices, so PWA won't work.


Kill HDMI, a bad standard from entertainment industry (Sony).

Use DisplayPort (VESA), integrated into USB Type-C (USB-IF). Anyway better, a flawless with HiDPI and FreeSync.


True. Software and computers don’t even exist to save money. A lot of problems stem from the weird idea of MBAs that a computer, digitalization or even cloud are there to save money.

I hope Holstein prepared the switch well and kill off any Microsoft stuff as quick as possible. Nothing is worse than co-existence with something hostile which doesn’t want to be compatible.

   * No Dual-Booting
   * No VM
   * Especially no WINE (your ducked with every odd update)
   * And by the love of god, hit everyone with a bat which tries to ship incompatible files (MS-Office, ppt, xls, pst…) to you. Links to “Microsoft Teams”? Hit harder and show no mercy :)
What to do, minimal list:

    * Make plan.
    * Used standards wherever possible.
    * Switch file-formats and external platforms before. Use a standard distribution and DO NOT MAKE YOUR OWN DISTRIBUTION. If you have a big IT department with hundreds of employees, maybe an own repository with your custom software.
    * Enforce all suppliers hard to support Linux natively! If not? Drop them. Search a honest company which gives you also the source.
    * Avoid the usual mistake like “this a local support company” or “their offer is cheaper”
    * Don’t purchase shitty hardware. ThinkPads are a good start, but we speak about printers, NFC, label writers, scanners and so on.
If your answer doesn’t include either Debian, Red Hat, Canonical or Suse it is probably the wrong choice. You need support.

    The remaining 20 percent of workplaces are currently still dependent on Microsoft programs such as Word or Excel, as there is a technical dependency on these programs in certain specialized applications. According to Schrödter, however, the successive conversion of these remaining computers is the stated goal.
A red flag. Soft migrations work only, if both side cooperate. If not, hard migration. Short pain is better than long suffering.

PS: And don’t repeat Munich! Munich is “HOW NOT”. Three distinct IT-Departments. And the next major was “convinced ” with tax money and a Microsoft Headquarters. Result, it is worse than before.


>dependent on Microsoft programs such as Word or Excel

This kind of suggests that they have a bunch of VBA scripts in the tax department and the legal team are dependent on sharing 'track changes' in contracts. It will do the world a favour if the VBA is forced out. Don't know what they will do about 'track changes', it is ubiquitous in the contract world. Hopefully they will force government suppliers onto the libre alternative.


Yep. That’s a hell. A hell to maintain.

And searching the web for “Excel government failure…” is an adventure.

Excel is a shell script containing data. Minus well defined syntax and a proper change log. I see the nice point behind using Excel, it is a “visual” shell script containing data.


Apparently their tax administration has some extensive automation with Excel spreadsheets and VBA.


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