hliyan (u/hliyan) - Readit News

hliyan commented on Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009) landartgenerator.org/blag... · Posted by u/robtherobber

chongli · 5 days ago

Markets allocate resources based on supply and demand. Individuals don’t demand solutions to diffuse problems. It’s tragedy of the commons every time.

hliyan · 5 days ago

I think you have misunderstood the term "tragedy of the commons", which is a phenomenon distinct from a market failure. Also, "markets allocate resources based on supply and demand" is, I believe an oversimplification one should not carry beyond Economics 101. If that were sufficient to explain the totality of market behavior, especially at large scale, then the remainder of the discipline of economics need not exist.

hliyan commented on Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009) landartgenerator.org/blag... · Posted by u/robtherobber

hliyan · 5 days ago

I felt this was telling:

> The typical golf course covers about a square kilometer. We have 40,000 of them around the world being meticulously maintained. If the same could be said for solar farms we would be almost 10% of the way there.

To me, it's one of many ways in which markets fail to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.

hliyan commented on The C-Shaped Hole in Package Management nesbitt.io/2026/01/27/the... · Posted by u/tanganik

rwmj · 17 days ago

Please don't. C packaging in distros is working fine and doesn't need to turn into crap like the other language-specific package managers. If you don't know how to use pkgconf then that's your problem.

hliyan · 17 days ago

When I used to work with C many years ago, it was basically: download the headers and the binary file for your platform from the official website, place them in the header/lib paths, update the linker step in the Makefile, #include where it's needed, then use the library functions. It was a little bit more work than typing "npm install", but not so much as to cause headaches.

hliyan commented on Repatriate the gold': German economists advise withdrawal from US vaults theguardian.com/world/202... · Posted by u/vinni2

causalscience · 20 days ago

Wait, I've watched this episode before. The US owed France large amount of gold (the legal mechanism for this was called "the dollar"). France asked to redeem their dollars for gold, and the US said "nah, we're keeping it, enjoy your dollars".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#American_policy_re...

hliyan · 20 days ago

That was the end of the US dollar convertibility to gold. This, unless I'm mistaken is actual French property held in US vaults.

hliyan commented on Design Thinking Books (2024) designorate.com/design-th... · Posted by u/rrm1977

bsoles · 22 days ago

Design Thinking is the Data Science of UX: an attempt to gain influence in fields that you don't have expertise in.

Even though there might be universal design principle that can be applied in many fields, the Design Thinking people think that they can just come in and design user interfaces, etc. without really having an expertise in the particular field.

Design Thinking works for selling consulting and not much else. Nobody wants another Agile(TM) process imposed on software developers (in my particular case) that attempts to turn developers into factory line workers.

hliyan · 22 days ago

Isn't design thinking just... thinking? There may be different design methodologies you apply in different domains (e.g. civil, aeronautics, automotive, electronics, software), but once you abstract that away, what you get is thinking. I once attended a design thinking workshop many years ago, and no one there was able to adequately explain what design thinking was, except by means of jargon, metaphor, or example. My understanding of the subject has not advanced much further in the intervening years.

hliyan commented on I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0 blog.silennai.com/claude-... · Posted by u/SilenN

sailorganymede · 24 days ago

Meanwhile here’s me still just using the ChatGPT web chat asking it for code snippets.

hliyan · 24 days ago

I've been doing this forever, but just a few days ago I tried connecting VS Code to Github Copilot. The experience wasn't entirely unpleasant. I'm still on a familiar IDE and fall back to traditional development patterns whenever I want, while relying on Copilot to make targeted changes that I would find too simple and tedious to manually do.

hliyan commented on Porsche sold more electrified cars in Europe in 2025 than pure gas-powered cars newsroom.porsche.com/en/2... · Posted by u/m463

maldev · 24 days ago

Have you ever ridden in a BYD? It's super loud, horrible suspension, seats are extremely uncomfy, everything is cheap with a fancy looking facade. If you need a car to go from point A - B and can't afford any luxury, it's fine. But it's a bare minimum vehicle with looks to appeal to status.

hliyan · 24 days ago

I have ridden in a BYD and it was the opposite experience: excellent suspension, unusually smooth ride, great seats. A few things on the dashboard did look a bit tacky. But overall, massive difference from where Chinese cars were even 5 years ago.

hliyan commented on If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like someone getting good at design mastodon.social/@heliogra... · Posted by u/lateforwork

anonymous908213 · a month ago

> identification increasingly depends on colour and shape.

If only they would stop there. These design terrorists won't even let us have that much; Google's Android apps all use the same 4-color-rainbow scheme. Not only did they get rid of the ability to visually identify the icons by color, but you can't even really identify them by shape because applying four highly constrasting colors to a simple shape breaks up its silhouette into something that is not quickly recognisable at a glance. It's as though they're intentionally trying to make the icons have as little functional utility as they possibly can.

hliyan · a month ago

The worst part is, when computer screens were monochrome or had only 16 colors, (and perhaps 16 pixels a side) to work with, designers managed to create more distinct icons or pictograms. Perhaps they may not have looked as elegant as a set of items on a collector's display case, but they helped the end user quickly zero in on the part of the screen they were interested in.

hliyan commented on Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you? · Posted by u/amadeuswoo

hliyan · a month ago

I may have written about this before on HN, but once I wrote a simple Perl script that could run the daily trade reconciliation for an entire US primary exchange. It could run on my laptop and complete the process in under 20 minutes. Ten years later, I watched a team spending days setting up a Spark cluster to handle a comparable amount of data in a somewhat simpler business domain.

hliyan commented on 25 Years of Wikipedia wikipedia25.org... · Posted by u/easton

jader201 · a month ago

Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising.

There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.

hliyan · a month ago

On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.