Re: What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big di...

It seems like it's the same story everywhere I look. Housing is the main driver of inequality and there is little change happening. We have the same problem here in Germany.

I am currently living in Munich to finish my CS Master's at TUM and build a startup, and it is absolutely impossible to find anything remotely affordable. I am supported by two startup scholarships and make enough to get by, but no landlord even gives me the chance in the first place after they see my income and plans. Right now I am paying 940€ for ~20sqm, and only because my mom co-signed my contract - which is incredibly humiliating as a 24 year old guy.

And even with high-paying jobs it's impossible to get anything remotely affordable. My girlfriend just finished her degree and makes 75k straight out of college and still gets rejected either for her financial situation or because the rental contract is already set to increase 8% each year - which we simply cannot afford. And it's not just Munich. Every city in Germany has this problem.

How the hell are we ever supposed to build up some savings, settle down and have a comfortable life? It really feels like being born 15 years too late for this.

Germany paid a lot for our education but offers us little reason to stay. We are already looking to move to other places and created a university-wide google sheet where we compare different countries and cities around the world for those kinds of categories.

Sorry for the rant.

watrami, 1 day ago

Re: Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limit...

Having a limit of 5 million files is perfectly reasonable. Failing to document that such a limit exists and refusing to publicly confirm it (which apparently is STILL the case) is extraordinarily poor customer service/communication.

Google KEEPS setting new records for poor customer communication, to the point where I (and much of the HN crowd) now expect it. Android developer banned from the app store? There is no meaningful way to appeal but you'll probably never be able to find out why. Your best hope is to post on HN and hope someone with power at Google notices.

Leadership at Google ought to recognize this; they ought to make an effort to improve the channels by which "customers" can communicate with Google. But I see no signs that they are even aware of the issue; I see no effort to change anything.

I would try to tell them but... there's no communication channel. Maybe I should post about it on HN.

mcherm, 1 day ago

Re: Ryuichi Sakamoto has died

"The industrial revolution made the production of an instrument like [the piano] possible. Several planks of wood - six I think in this case - are overlaid and pressed into shape by tremendous force for six months. Nature is molded into shape. Many tons of force and pressure are applied, making the strings what they are. Matter taken from nature is molded by human industry, by the sum strength of civilization. Nature is forced into shape. Interestingly, the piano requires re-tuning. We humans say, 'It falls out of tune', but that's not exactly accurate - matter is struggling to return to a natural state. The tsunami, in one moment, became a force of restoration. The [tsunami-damaged] piano re-tuned by nature actually sounds good to me now. In short, the piano is tuned by force to please our ears or ideals; it's a condition that feels natural to us humans. But from nature's perspective, it's very unnatural. I think deep inside me somewhere, I have a strong aversion to that."

- Ryuichi Sakamoto

jjulius, 16 hours ago

Re: XUL Layout is gone

This was basically Electron before there was Electron.

It was hoped that other people would follow the Mozilla Suite's (before Firefox, Mozilla's standard distro was an application suite containing a browser, email reader, chat client, and HTML editor) example and use JavaScript, XUL, and XPCOM to build cross-platform desktop applications. The last of those, XPCOM (Xross Platform COM), was Mozilla's take on Microsoft's Component Object Model, where you would write lower-level components in C or C++ (using the NSPR, Netscape Portable Runtime) that were callable from JavaScript

Unfortunately, virtually no one outside of Mozilla adopted the XUL/JS/XPCOM stack. One of the few I remember was ActiveState's Komodo IDE.

I still regard it as a huge missed opportunity for Mozilla.

876978095789789, 1 day ago

Re: XUL Layout is gone

I tried to adopt it, but it was (a) undocumented with no simple examples, (b) ever-changing, and (c) required you to use the Mozilla build system, even IIRC requiring you to basically build your code as part of the browser tree (I don't recall the exact details on this last point, but it was extremely difficult to use).

We ditched it quickly and just wrote a Gtk application instead.

A great case for why having a simple "hello world" application with simple instructions for building it goes a long way.

rwmj, 1 day ago

Re: The day Windows died

I just bought a Lenovo Ideapad from Costco for about $500. The last time I bought a computer preloaded with Windows was about a decade ago. My experience so far:

I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course.

Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concatenated together, for services I might or might not even want. I don't know how long it is, but I began to suspect it might be tied with the Old Testament. Which you're theoretically supposed to read in a tiny box and agree to, but if anyone were to actually attempt to read every word they'd better clear their calendar for maybe the next couple weeks.

Next Windows wanted me to sign up for a Microsoft account. There's no obvious way around it, but fortunately a bit of googling directed me to a workaround that lets you create just a local account by disabling the network interface at the right time.

When I finally boot the machine up, the default wallpaper is a Red Bull ad.

I've had similar experiences buying a Roku (sorry, we won't let you use this device or access an account you already pay for separately unless you provide your credit card and tell us, for some reason, whether or not you have a penis) and a Samsung tablet (to use this device, you must agree that you have no privacy whatsoever). The people running these companies seem incapable of feeling shame.

I guess I'll crawl back into my cave and keep using Linux for the foreseeable future.

elihu, 5 hours ago

Сегодня я узнал, что MS Outlook на 30 году существования не умеет создавать инвайт-линки для митингов, которые можно было б послать не то что за пределы организации - но и даже в MS Teams же родном! Только .ical аттачем, только хардкор!

Каменный век, прости Господи!!