romanoderoma (u/romanoderoma)

romanoderoma commented on Earnestness paulgraham.com/earnest.ht... · Posted by u/jger15

bonoboTP · 5 years ago

I meant they escaped the world wars and the rest of the turmoils of the 20th century. Largely because they didn't have deep historic conflicts with the rest of the big empires.

I mean, sure, not completely, they definitely had some of their population deported by Nazis, but it wasn't such a major impact as elsewhere in Europe.

romanoderoma · 5 years ago

They definitely did not escape any recent war.

The WWII in Scandinavia was particularly bad, including the occupation of Norway and Denmark.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Weserübung

They did escape the contemporary ones the same way any other country in Europe did anyway.

romanoderoma commented on Earnestness paulgraham.com/earnest.ht... · Posted by u/jger15

kabirgoel · 5 years ago

> The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is also the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita.

I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any evidence to back them up, many such statements in PG’s essays seem to be an expression of his prejudices. The very least he could do is to provide some criterion the reader can use to test “earnestness” at the population scale.

In this case, I imagine that he started from “Scandinavia is the region with the highest number of startups per capita” and inferred that this must mean that they are more earnest, rather than going the other way around.

romanoderoma · 5 years ago

> I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously.

They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises.

Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality.

I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia.

I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there.

If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.

romanoderoma commented on A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM blogs.windows.com/windows... · Posted by u/Tepix

romanoderoma · 5 years ago

Why is dang allowing this person to bully everyone?

Is this the new normal on HN?

romanoderoma commented on A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM blogs.windows.com/windows... · Posted by u/Tepix

romanoderoma · 5 years ago

Have you ever heard of anger management?

Can you disprove the data without spewing all that bile?

I'm honestly worried about your health.

Here's a WSJ article about the topic

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-iphone-isnt-the-cash-cow-it...

romanoderoma commented on A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM blogs.windows.com/windows... · Posted by u/Tepix

bserge · 5 years ago

Every time I see the selection of cheap laptops/tablets/phones I wonder "why even try to combat climate change?".

You've got these bottom of the barrel machines that fail very soon, and barely have enough performance as it is. It makes more sense to save up, buy something twice the price and use it for much longer.

It's like the boots theory of wealth. You buy cheap shit over and over again, instead of buying something good that will last many times longer. The sad thing it doesn't just affect you, it affects everything and everyone.

romanoderoma · 5 years ago

On the other hand, people using cheap devices usually don't rely on them so much, so the higher consumption is compensated by the lower overall usage, or have made the real environmental savy choice.

I've never encountered an iPhone owner that didn't bring a charger in their backpacks.

Do you see old people like my father charging their sub 100 € smartphones at Starbucks or young people with shiny high end smartphones?

My father use his smartphone so rarely that the battery lasts exactly as advertised: 2+ days on standby (I believe it's ~60 hours).

He uses no app, except WhatsApp twice a year and Maps, has no background service running, takes a few pictures of his niece and that's it. How much power can he consume? How much is he contributing to the climate change compared to me, his son, that starts the day at 9 am and at 18 is on 20% battery?

An I don't even use the smartphone that much, but hey, WFH, slack and teams are constantly checking for new messages, that friend sent you a message in IG, of course I'm gonna check my timeline. Look, a new notification, Amazon is delivering the package, let me check on the news if the streets are still closed today because they are shooting that Tom Cruise movie (it really happened few days ago!)

Etc. etc. How much of this could be saved?

On the opposite side, the construction workers who renewed my house all used old phones like Nokia 3330 because they need something though and durable that won't die on them after a few hours, in environments where electrical power is not granted, so they go for the thing with the longest battery life on the market which is also the cheapest option and, in the end, the most power efficient.

romanoderoma commented on A preview of x64 emulation on Windows for ARM blogs.windows.com/windows... · Posted by u/Tepix

beagle3 · 5 years ago

I expect them to have an iPad that can fill this niche for $400 when you include a keyboard. Perhaps they already do.

romanoderoma · 5 years ago

If that was even possible, you would have to wait at least 10 years.

At that point who knows if tablets as a form factor survived.

To be clear, I think that a tablet (not specifically iPads which are expensive in their segment as any other Apple device, there is no cheap option) could replace most PC nowadays, but to reiterate what's already been said: Apple is not present in too many places, for a reason.

To make an example: I work for a company in Italy with 14 thousands employees.

The laptops they give us software developers today are gonna be the accountants PCs of the future. Unless they break before. In that case they are replaced by the supplier with something with similar specs but new. Probably it will be a different brand, depending on what's available at the moment.

It's not imaginable that a company like this, which is relatively small if we look at the real giants of the World (including many in Italy as well), will replace every PC with tablets, not only for monetary reasons, but because they had to re-train thousands of employees. Being in Italy I'm sure that only talking about it would end up in a strike. No kidding.

But even assuming that it would happen, they would buy cheap Asus tablets.

But even assuming it would be iPads, does this software the company has been using for 15 years runs on it?

The answer is most certainly "no, it doesn't".

Battery life and power efficiency is not a factor in such environments, they prefer to plant trees, be part of a renewable energy consortium or power the offices with solar panels, that they can also spin in PR, than buy Apple devices because they have an incredibly power efficient CPU. It doesn't really matter to them.

And I tell you this knowing that I work there because I know that ethically speaking they are vastly better than the average. They really do care of many small things that many others don't, but Apple ARM CPUs aren't one of them.