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Since when does homework feature on the front page of HN? I find this very odd...

Probably more complex project than projects 99% of what software developers with a real job do daily.

The fact that literally the Creator behind Redis has to go and point this out straight up proves this.

Also Antirez, I am in high school and I can literally write it in writing that there's literally no school with such homework assignments imo. I have written a comment about seeing the curriculum of one of my other friends and my anecdotal evidence talking to friends.

There's literally zero doubt in my mind that there's no such homework assignment.


What high school CS class (or even college class) is assigning a project to implement a minimal web renderer?

This is super impressive.


I am in High school & in my school for some reason CS isn't taught but I still taught one of my friends CS from my tuition you can say.

I looked at his book and wanted to teach him python. You can say its senior high school and what I taught him was what keywords mean in python and operators mean in python etc.

A lot of it was just semantic. Could be the fact that it was first chapter and he came to me when his exam was just some few days later.

I swear but the hardest thing I observed in that book was probably some SQL from what I heard or maybe some minor Java or the fact that it had file access within python or atleast that's what I observed.

The OP's comments are clearly weird and feel like something which should be ignored.

This project is really really cool imo. (Heck I was trying out literally the same thing too but over golang out of curiosity but really didn't land anywhere and the fact that the creator of this was able to still is pretty impressive even if they used LLM or not!, on which I haven't felt any clarification but I just wanted to point how both are really really cool!)


Nowhere in the post does OP say this is a homework assignment. All they said was that they are a high school senior.

Name one college/university program with homework as impressive as this. This is a serious request

To combine with the "but did he build a cpu" thread, back-in-the-day the term project for MIT 6.004 was "build a CPU with TTL", with a very open-ended "performance race" extra credit project at the end. (At least one of the highest scorers went on build a network performance hardware company and sold it to Broadcom :-)

(If the "build a CPU" part doesn't impress, it was common to build an entire compiler toolchain to go with it; also it was long enough ago that a web browser really was a weekend project :-)


Also the way QE works is that the rich companies and individuals are the ones who can take out large loans against their previous economic assets as collateral and leverage that money in the market such as the AI bubble. They also are the first to spend the new money so the inflationary effects only kick in after they've taken out then loans.

The wage earners feel the inflation in their wallets.


This is an anomaly and left over from the time when middle class was growing after the 2nd world war. We (Western countries) are dismantling all the back stops and the process will reverse and move all the wealth to the few rich people in the capital class. When this process is complete the poverty levels in the west will equal those of the countries you mentioned, Afghanistan etc.

The USA and UK are leading the process since they started to pursue this goal aggressively during the 80s with Reaganism and Thatcherism.


and you’re claiming the process still isn’t complete more than 40 years later? shouldn't the wealth gap between the poor in the US vs the poor in Afghanistan be starting to get smaller if your argument is correct?

Communism has never been tried at a large scale. Soviet Union didn't have it. China doesn't have it.

Just because someone has "communism" on paper doesn't mean the society actually functions according to the communist idea.

Social democracy has been tried in many places and it has produced things such as the Nordic Model and the Nordic states that have been very successful.

After the 2nd World War USA was very close to socialism. High wealth taxes, workers unions etc. As a result your average worker had a lot of purchasing power which of course fuels economic strength.

In fact many if the world's best performing companies are a kind of exercise in socialism since the RSU programs share ownership and results of the company to the workers (even if it's a small share)


In a healthy economy flow of money is like the flow of blood in the arteries. It is what stimulates the economic activity. You can't earn a dollar without someone spending that dollar. Spending = earning = economic activity.

People are always defending rich people (capital owners) that they invest their wealth. But actually if someone has a billion in the bank the fact that they have that billion is a proof that they didn't invest it. (If they did spend it or invest it the would not have it, now would they?)

A billion that circulates in the economy is much better than a billion that sits in someones bank account. Someone who spends 100% of their income is much better economic citizen than someone who doesn't.


Banks don't just keep your money in a vault when you store it in a bank account - that would be stupid both of both the bank and of you. Money looses value over time due to inflation, so banks reinvest 90% of your stored balance into loans, stocks, bonds, etc. This means that a theoretical 1B account, would allow someone else to take a 100M loan to fund a new venture. This is how banks make money, and they pay you a small portion of their profits as interest on your money (since they're profiting off it).

This is still not a good idea for you, as the interest doesn't make up for inflation. Most people keep a small portion of their wealth in the bank, as easy access for emergencies (this is called dry powder[0]). The rest is typically invested into private equity, which allows new ventures to be created.

It's very rare for anyone to have more than $50m in the bank. The money is usually out in the market doing it's work.

[0] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/drypowder.asp


The point of the story really was that most rich people, those who don't work for a living but live off of capital assets are in a position of economic power where their wealth accumulates. When the real economy grows a few percent per year but the wealthy gain 10-20% every year their wealth comes at the expense of everyone else.

This is the trickle up economy where the few people at the top suction all the wealth to themselves. And the rate at which they acquire it exceeds the rate at which they spend it.


A billion in the bank is invested - that's how fractional-reserve banking works. And people that wealthy don't really just put their money "in the bank". They usually invest it in riskier things.

I would hesitate to call consumption "better" than investment.


There are literally two economies - the one most people live in, and the asset owning economy which deals exclusively in land, property, resources, and shares.

The health of an economy is defined by the permeability of the border between those two classes, and the direction of flow.

If the flow is mostly one way, you're getting wealth extraction, not investment.

But assets are not easy to move. So if you tax assets and not income, it doesn't matter where the owners are. It only matters where the assets are.


Sort of, with at least two caveats.

1) velocity of money matters, some spending creates more economic activity than others due to re-spending.

2) Investment is not the same as having your money sitting idle. Investment makes certain activities possible because of scale, payment made with the expectation of future value, financing capital goods or R&D, etc.


Most wealthy people aren’t sitting with their money in the bank but in investment assets like real estate and stocks.

Short term greed. Maximize immediate profits at the the cost of future profits.

Corporate users are the only users they even pretend they care about and they know they have pretty good lock in with Windows and office.

Also obviously this is someone else's problem some other quarter.. so.. like who cares?


It's definitely on a very long fuse, but if they lose control of the windows codebase to the point where bugs are regularly getting shipped to production that cause issues for corporate IT departments, and an increasing number of employees use MacOS or Linux at home and need training at work to learn how to use windows, it could change.

Short term no but long term these rotations do happen, otherwise we'd all still be using IBM


Oh trust me, it's not like their server offerings are any better at being bug-free. I can't go into the specifics, but here's how Microsoft truly makes their money:

I'm currently stuck in some sort of an infinite loop where a bug in Microsoft's server offerings causes us to waste some money each month, my management is pushing me towards re-creating the same ticket with Microsoft's support in hopes of getting rid of those extra costs, and Microsoft's support partners waste my time by telling me to check the same 5 things I've already checked before they close the ticket due to "inactivity" once (heaven-forbid) some other task on my plate deserves my attention and I fail to re-check those same 5 things fast enough.


So they treat their corporate customers the same way they treat devs or consumers on their forums? Lmao. Shifting responsibility is real. "Actually it is YOUR problem that we broke something*

Of course.

It's like Dell telling you that CPU voltage/RAID controller alert and server reboot is your fault that will get fixed if you just install EXACTLY the same firmware version you have, or this another firmware update to completely different component. Yes, it's market "optional", but you must have it installed before they actually consider it a hardware problem next time it happens.


I don't disagree with you and in fact I hope there were quicker ramifications. Any company that forgets their customers and assumes such arrogant self serving stance should get a proverbial slap in face rather sooner than later. Unfortunately our mechanism for serving that said slap in the face are rather limited and as a single consumer (or even as a single enterprise) serving that slap only serves to slap ourselves in the face in the process by inconveniencing ourselves given the lack of viable/drop in alternatives. This is why we need regulation to get the corporate greed in check.

You're also right that incentives are misaligned - Satya might well be fully aware that he's running the company into the ground but he doesn't care.

He'll be gone in a few years with all his bonuses and RSUs intact and there'll be absolutely no consequences for him if his actions cause MS to fall apart in 2035


In summary because:

  - They're beholden to Wall Street and stock price is the only relevant metric.
  - They've been laying off staff even up to senior/principal engineering levels. 
  - Shifting towards vibe coding instead of engineering.
Gonna get a lot worse still and things will continue to deteriorate until Wall Street picks up on the issues and thinks it'll start hurting their next quarter results. (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)

> (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)

Azure will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Their stock price has depended on it since Cloud and AI got restructured into a single department (it was Nadella's baby before he became CEO), and Azure was already pretty bad before vibe coding entered the picture.


Microsoft is an end stage software company that has exhausted natural growth in its desktop segment. When that happens to a company that is beholden to Wall Street the only ways are to start shitting on their "customers" and their employees. Cut costs and try engage in dark patterns and other shenanigans in order to keep getting the customer money and show growth. The relationship turns adverserial. I think this already happened way before but I speculate that the aggressive drive to slop and vibe coding while reducing head count is now coming around to start showing their effects in the software quality.

I further speculate that before they had some senior/principal engineers that were the backstop holding things together but they've been let go too now. So there's nothing to stop AI slop taking over.


Part of "freedom", yes?

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