What a shitshow. All because of a tiny country with enormous influence over the US government via AIPAC or large donors like Sheldon Adelson‘s widow who donated over 100mil USD to Trump. MAGA is now MIGA.
Edit: All to silence ANY criticism of that country and its laughter in Palestine. With their leaders being wanted war criminals. Where‘s freedom of speech now? When Marco Rubio complained before the election „You are one click away from being jailed.“, now you are one click away from being deported under his administration.
This has nothing to do with Israel or even antisemitism. The administration just doesn't like Harvard and they'll use whatever justification they think has the best chance of of holding up in court
There are definitely people in the admin who are full-throated supporters of the current Israeli government and its war, and I find it hard to believe that it didn't enter into the equation.
It doesn't have to be either-or. There's both generic anti-intellectualism, and specifically revenge for the protests.
That has nothing to do with it. They made the same demands of Colombia, who agreed to their demands; the result was just more demands. This is about exercising power and establishing dominance, not about Israel.
You get what you pay for.
Capitalism 1.0 -- just unveiled being like it ever was.
That's what happens when a (pseudo-) democracy never gets fixed, because everyone in the upper class thinks to get away best _with_ all the loopholes.
A president reigning at will, no court being able to really stop the shit show and undoing former president's pardons while using pardons as a tool to side-track courts.
The whole construct didn't -- and doesn't -- make sense, if you still aim for anything not being despotism.
Let’s be real. This has nothing to do with Qatar. It’s just the Trump administration retaliating against any institution that doesn’t fall in line. That’s the only thing these people care about: loyalty and control, plain and simple.
I was commenting to OP blaming the situation on AIPAC, which is not even in the top 10 list of donors, and has much less impact than most people believe.
It basically made criticising Israel automatically "anti-Semitic".
While someone who has previously said that the Jews are importing immigrants to intentionally undermine the USA who gave multiple Seig Heils was an ambiguous situation that they didn't want to rush to judgement on.
They basically destroyed all their credibility by becoming an advocate for Israel not for Jewish people.
They consider being anti-zionist to be antisemitic. This one section alone. The remainder is fine but I believe this shows they can't disconnect Israel from Jewishness
"Examples of when such critiques cross into antisemitism include when they ostracize and vilify Zionists and Zionism"
Cursor Agent Tools is a Python-based AI agent that replicates Cursor's coding assistant capabilities, enabling function calling, code generation, and intelligent coding assistance with Claude, OpenAI, and locally hosted Ollama models.
Wow, so much negativity. The Cursor team has built a wonderful product — and they made a mistake. Now haters are trying to rip it apart because of one mistake. Yeah, I also paid for the yearly plan. Yeah, I was also annoyed to get locked out on another device. Was it annoying? Yes. But will I abandon the product? No, not because of this. Chill, folks. Get a life.
Sorry but this screams copium. Its right in your face why cursor is bad, and your response is "but the product is good". Is it? What did they do better than e.g. aider, claude code and zed? What makes them stand out?
I honestly don't get it, but if you want to support such a lazy team then have at it, no one's stopping you
You are aggressive and rude. They didn’t sell you a house. It’s a product that costs 20 usd a month. I know all other products and prefer Claude Code. But it is expensive. I burn 20-40 USD in a single session. And I find Cursor pretty good. Better than the alternatives, minus Claude Code.
I created something like that for my spouse and myself. An app that creates an archive.ph url, extracts full text and generates summaries via an llm. I‘d open source it, but as I also extract paid articles via archive.ph, I think it wouldn’t be ethical to publish it.
the difference is, that archive.ph snapshots something in headless. omnom snapshots the exact same state that your browser is displaying you. so if there is js interactions that change the dom, those will be snapshotted, unlike with archive.ph.
also lets not forget that archive.ph wraps everything in their own frame and has their own way of mangling the result. not in a bad way, it's just not the original as it would have been rendered in your browser.
omnom is for snapshotting, not for circumventing paywalls. i'm merely comparing the snapshot feature of the two projects. circumventing paywalls is out of scope.
btw it is perfectly fine to circumvent a paywall with archive.ph and then to snapshot it with omnon so your bookmark never linkrots away. also when i say "js manipulation" i also mean stuff like captchas, or dynamic documents that you change by interacting with it, or even private services like e.g. rocket chat hidden behind some barrier like http auth, or private vpn. archive.ph will never have access to what your browser might have access to.
I love Cursor, with Claude 3.7 and Gemini. But Claude Code is an absolut biest and blows them out the water. It is expensive, but it acts like a senior developer. It fixes bugs where Cursor (no matter which model) fails to do so, no matter which model.
I tried Roo with OpenRouter, selected DeepSeek R1, as that was supposed to have the largest output token. Asked Roo to create a documentation for a project I worked on. It created a page of markdown with a few mermaid diagrams. Next I asked Claude Code to do the same. With the same prompt. It created several markdown files with half a dozen mermaid diagrams describing the tech stack, the architecture, the data model and so much more. Another level.
If you are greedy (or cautious about how you spend, because literally RooCode can code 0.5 to 1 USD per request), you can enable slow-mode in Cursor, and just ride the wave with Sonnet-3.7 for free.
(or create a new free account and enjoy 500 fast requests)
In theory, you could use RooCode with the GitHub Copilot API too, but in practice there are limits that makes it unusable.
Many German companies want „Digitalisierung“, workflow automation, process improvements, they want to use AI, LLMs, but when it comes to implementing all of that, they are drowning in bureaucracy.
What Germans can do is create layers of bureaucracy.
Nobody's stopping a local mid-market manufacturer from automating workflows. Or hindering a utility company from offering a better service process.
The problem is corporate leadership.
German companies tend to be run by people who are inflexible, uninspired, and cheap. Maybe it's in the culture. Compare this to Austria, where there's a cultural flair for the dramatic (and therefore an eagerness to stand out, even if it's weird) or Switzerland where enterprises, public or private, are not afraid to place big bets.
It absolutely is. Try to open a company in Germany. Then try to do your tax. Then try to close your company.
After that, let's talk again about bureaucracy.
Oh, and the new government just announced plans that non-employeed people (freelancers, business owners, ...) are now forced to pay into national pension (with few exceptions). And don't get me started on that one. Just as an example, national pension charges based on your income. But they have a different way to calculate income than the tax office.
Let me say it in other words if it's not clear yet: If someone is practically unable to do all the above without an accountant then the bureaucracy is absolutely out of hands.
> Hire a tax advisor and accountant through a payroll
And this is exactly how you kill off lots of innovation by adding unnecessary hurdles. Tax advisors are Hella expensive and hard to contract even. I'm speaking from experience.
No offense but if that's what kills your entrepreneurial spirit it doesn't sound like it would've carried you very far. It's really not that hard if you want it. You'll need it sooner or later anyway if you want to be more than a one man show.
Like I said, you'll be facing a lot of substantially greater challenges.
The world isn't black and white like that. Some people even want to do those things on the side. And some become more than a one man show after some time and without having planned that. Not every one has (or has to have) the kind of extreme passion that you are referring to.
Sure, but if that's your reason to do that you're not being reasonable.
The point is that relative to everything else you need to get right to build a successful company in any country, taxes, payroll and accounting in Germany frankly don't even register.
Like I said, it's 1-2 days out of a year for me.
If that seems like a big hurdle, it wasn't the reason you didn't build a business.
There are challenges with building a business that are specific to Germany that actually matter.
By contrast, the concerns about bureaucracy are a tired stereotype. There's a grain of truth to them, but if they really pose a challenge to you, you didn't want to do this in the first place.
Have you also done these things in the US? I have heard this sentiment that the German system is far and above the more bureaucratic before, but for all I know, Americans could just be relatively complacent in comparison to Germans and our systems function nearly identically. I’d like to hear from someone if they have been through both processes first hand who could answer this question.
Americans constantly complain about the tax system and, like them or not in practice, a lot of US citizens on both sides of the aisle believe in one of the stated goals of DOGE (previously named the US Digital Service).
No, and in the context of the thread I care little about the US. This thread is about Germany and is specifically about "they [the companies] are drowning in bureaucracy" and "The problem is not the bureaucracy". And my post was a response to that. The US might be worse (I doubt it) but it has basically no relevance imo.
It has relevance in establishing the amount of bureaucracy relative to the largest government in the West.
I quit my last job because of bureaucracy and I’m considering moving to Germany, so as individual, it is very important to me. Thanks for explaining to me that my life and major factors in my decision are irrelevant. Very helpful.
Both can be true, and what you described is, in my opinion, one of the primary causes of insane bureaucracy in Germany. This inflexible mindset is what causes the relentless enforcement of bureaucracy and procedures in Germany, there is very little leeway here in terms of bending the rules, making exceptions, turning a blind eye. This cultural inflexibility, traditionalism and risk-aversion all ties together into a paperwork and red-tape nigthmare.
This couldn't be more incorrect. I document German bureaucracy for a living. The hardest part of my job is that every state, city, office and case worker applies the rules differently, making it really hard to predict a specific outcome. In most cases it plays in people's favour, unless the case worker is particularly grumpy and you happen to hit one of their pet peeves. I struggle to document the variance for Berlin alone.
The biggest issue with German bureaucracy is that it's largely paper-based and has little to no automation. In many cases, digitalisation when it happens just means sending documents digitally instead of delivering them during an in-person appointment. This leads to very long processing times that are constrained by available labour.
I’m familiar with your site and appreciate it a lot, and I don’t dispute anything you said, but that does not contradict anything in my comment. Those people you mention who apply the rules differently everywhere are inflexible and unwilling to give leeway or look further then their own way. This is a cultural issue in my opinion and can explain most of excessive bureaucracy here. You’re also talking specifically about the ausländerbehörde, which is one manifestation of bureaucracy here, there are many other forms.
My experience was a bit different. For example, the immigration office accepts almost all applications in the end (over 95% according to their stats). They make all sorts of exceptions in the applicants' favour. The Bürgeramt, the Ordnungsamt and the Arbeitsagentur are the same. They huff and puff and make an exception "just this time", every time. The inflexibility is an act, unless you're being difficult (from their point of view). Then you get the least charitable interpretation of their directives.
Against all expectations, German bureaucracy is very "vibes-based", specifically because it's full of humans. It's predictably unpredictable. You rarely get the downside of digitalisation where "computer says no", because a human is deciding your fate and can be convinced to give you leeway.
The bigger issue at least for me is speed. The uncertainty of human decisions is magnified by the weeks-long delays. A missing document is a big issue when bureaucracy has a 4-8 week ping. That is of course if the case worker doesn't shrug and give you what you want anyway.
I think that German bureaucrats choose the path of least resistance. Most of the time it means giving you what you ask for.
When you get the short end of the stick, a letter from your lawyer can make it abundantly clear that giving you what you want (and faster) is the path of least resistance.
This inflexible mindset is what causes the relentless enforcement of bureaucracy and procedures in Germany, there is very little leeway here in terms of bending the rules, making exceptions
This. I have worked in a Germany university and in all the supporting administration, nobody wants to make choices or take responsibility. E.g. I had some blatant cases of plagiarism and when going to the examination office (where it should be reported), they would do nothing. And when I asked whether there shouldn't be any repercussions, their answer was "there ought to be repercussions", the subtext being: but I'm not going to be the one enforcing them, because if I do and the student files a complaint, I'm going to have to defend my choice.
Or sometimes we had to order GPU servers for the department. We requested quotes from multiple companies (since we knew what we need) and would then send them to the financial administration with our preference (good price + service options). Rather than saying: LGTM, seems you did your work, they would spend four (!) weeks asking new quotes and processing them. And then they would happily come and say, "we found a cheaper option" and the cheaper option would be saving 100 Euro on a machine that cost something like 25,000 and was most likely just the natural reduction in prices in four weeks. At any rate, it is this weird mix of needing to assert themselves, following whatever rules to the letter, and not wanting to make 'bold' choices etc. Meanwhile a whole research group is under compute capacity for a month and the work of the financial department certainly cost more than 100 Euro in hourly wages.
Also, every process uses paper. Heck, once I got my tax number, to my surprise the person from the administration pulled my personnel file out of a filing cabinet!
I wish that this was just the university, but from friends that went into industry, I hear that a lot of German corporations are pretty much the same.
I've seen it described as "Germans are not efficient, they're methodical". There is a lot of truth to it, but Germans are also making all sorts of exceptions either for convenience or expediency, making the method unpredictable.
I challenge this:
How do you measure processing time?
From first customer interaction? Or from all input data are present?
I assume in most situations they are not present upfront.
Therefore it’s a tedious back and forth. Sure, that compounds with the roundtrip time.
Digitisation is a trap because it doesn’t change the paradigm to full-kit upfront necessarily. Digitisation can be a nice entry-point to this, but unfortunately digitising data does not necessarily introduce the full-kit.
The system needs to be designed in a different way:
“We guarantee processing within x hours (weekdays) from the point you’ve provided us a full-kit.”
This, in turn, requires thinking backwards from the result through all steps, resulting in a definition of what a full-kit entails. Of course this requires a different (system) thinking which is contradicted by the rigid hierarchy (and no, doing away with the hierarchy isn’t a solution either).
Work force would not be busy 80% of their time = capacity to go back and forth to figure what’s missing and switch around cases. When starting with full-kit, 80% of their wasted time becomes processing time. In turn, their throughput was 20%, it goes up to 100%, or x5.
The main problem that I see in leadership is lack of understanding and respect for software - "I don't understand it so how hard can it be?". Seems to be especially prevalent at German car companies where, apparently, mechanical engineering is still boss. (I'd be fine with a car with very little software, but that is not what they are trying to build...)
As a German I would love to contradict this but I tend to agree. Bureaucracy isn't such a big deal in my experience - might be different depending what area you are working in - but the leadership culture regarding software is the cause of most of the misery I've seen and I've been involved with.
Cheap as in no investments in people or software quality. Salaries are also not competitive in a lot of places.
Disregard for the user and disregard for usability.
Unfortunately most software shops locked in their customers and the lack of any technical merit pays well and is disconnected from product quality.
Only lots of bankruptcies might help. I have nothing but disdain for these people in leadership.
I've surely not seen all but I've seen enough. It's that bad.
> Salaries are also not competitive in a lot of places.
This implies there are other companies in the same city/region that pay better. I doubt it. From what I have seen, most German software devs are paid horribly, come to HN complain about it, then proceed to do nothing. The solution is to move to a place that pays higher salaries, like Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, or another country. Or get a 100% remote job.
> Compare this to Austria, where there's a cultural flair for the dramatic (and therefore an eagerness to stand out, even if it's weird) or Switzerland where enterprises, public or private, are not afraid to place big bets.
Can you call out with some examples for those of us unfamiliar with those 'big bets'?
Switzerland sits between Germany, Italy, and France, and was getting choked by road traffic, so voters have approved the largest tunnels in the world to get goods around and through Switzerland without using roads.
Random German company: You open your intranet, manually search through hundreds of (pdf!) application-forms (because search is not implemented), downlod the right form, print it(!), fill the form, sign it, scan the paper, send it to the ticket system. That’s what they call „Digitalisierung“, because previously they had to send the printed paper-form to the helpdesk team.
I recently signed up for a simple prepaid phone plan in Germany (I have lived here for 2 years already, fully registered etc). I had to go through the full KYC process, after waiting over a week for a physical SIM card to be sent by post to me. After this, I wanted an eSIM (this was my original goal but this was not possible on initial signup).
I had to contact customer support to send me one... by post. They only activate and send eSIMs by mail. This will take another week.
How recently? Nowadays there are a bunch of "app eSIM" companies competing in Germany that offer to get you an eSIM by just installing an app, KYC and credit card in 5 min
A few days ago - I had some strict requirements of extremely low monthly cost (I only need it for sending and receiving SMS and for signing up for certain german services that require a German number) - so I want with O2 Prepaid. There are a lot of instant sign up eSIMs that are data only, which is not what I'm looking for.
I would be surprised if you're talking about an eSIM service that give you a phone number.
luckily I haven't been working with such companies, I have had enough of my dose of Digitalisierung by interacting with public offices. But at least I can communicate with the Finanzamt via email, after signing a document where I made clear I understand that emails are not a safe communication tool (while random non-certified letters are, apparently).
> while random non-certified letters are, apparently
They kind of are. Somebody would have to go and steal the physical letter and then read/scan it to make any use of it. That excludes pretty much all attacks on the process --- at least such where criminals might hope to make a larger profit than most other criminal enterprises available to them.
Whether that makes the letters a good idea is a different discussion...
Yeah, I'm sure a thousand lovely Horizon 2040 funded research projects that result in throwaway academic solutions to hyper-specific industry issues where the first MVP is shown after 5 years will come out of this.
Not even throwaway. They will result in reports and keynote presentations, but nothing truly functional. The EU doesn't understand how to structure incentives to make things work and avoid rent-seekers and grifters. Source, I've been part of some large EU consortia. Never again.
Yeah, I was always surprised by how many organizations will actually jump at the opportunity to "participate" when some EU consortia was announcing a new program or funding round.
There's a saying for that in German involving "feeding trough" and "pigs".
Reminds me of a quote from "Yes minister" in which it says one commissioner pays a farmer a lot of money to produce and another to remove the surplus, plus a lot of paper pushing in the middle.
In the examples you mentioned bureaucracy is less of a problem. They could do it but this is hard work in a sense which the culture does not reward.
The problem with germans in general is that they are unwilling or badly trained in „thinking things to the end“. The will start a „Digitalisierungsministerium“ without a clear goal of what they want to achieve let alone how to get there. In the end they will waste a lot of money on ipads and businesses lock them into their ecosystems so the can‘t get out.
It all goes back to the culture and a rigid educational system where everyone is supposed to stay where they are.
> Lisp's dreaded Cambridge Polish notation is uniform and universal. I don't have to remember whether a form takes curly braces or square brackets or what the operator precedency is or some weird punctuated syntax that was invented for no good reason. It is (operator operands ...) for everything. Nothing to remember. I basically stopped noticing the parenthesis 40 years ago. I can indent how I please.
Well, that might be true for Scheme, but not for CL. There are endless forms for loops. I will never remember all of them. Or even a fraction of it. Going through Guy Steel’s CL book, I tend to think that I have a hard time remembering most of the forms, functions, and their signatures.
NYT/WSJ/FT are more propagandistic then we are aware of. Just observe the developments in the Middle East, watch the language used, the euphemisms, compare that to their language when it comes to Russian aggression. It is very clear that our western media is manufacturing more consent then writing in an objective neutral language.
I slowly start to believe that there are powers at play that want the world economy to tank. First seen during covid pandemic, halting all public life. Now with a US administration that does everything to tank world economy. Who these powers are, what their intentions are, I have no idea. But it is apparent that we can watch in slow motion how the desaster unfolds.
Sorry for the unsolicited advice, but that sounds like the seeds of conspiracy theory thinking, which is dangerous if you end up with confirmation bias and start finding clues that satisfy your theories, e.g.: https://archive.is/sS3W1 . "Satisfy" in the sense of "I knew it! I was right, I'm onto something!"
Of course it's possible your theory is right, at the moment my uneducated guess about what the Trump admin is doing is like some art critic seeing paint on canvas and asking "I wonder what this artist' motivation is..." when it's in fact just a monkey having smeared its droppings on the canvas.
Whereas the lockdowns around the world are probably governments being scared that they'll have too many deaths. If there was a conspiracy, with so many governments, what do you think the chances are of somebody leaking the plans are?
You’re giving them too much credit for being clueless. Especially the Trump administration. Look at the people on that team: evangelicals hoping for the end of the world so their Savior can return, self-made billionaires pushing personal agendas, crypto grifters treating policy like a pump-and-dump scheme… This wasn’t just random chaos — they knew exactly what they were doing.
But I agree with you: The Covid pandemic seems to genuinely have overwhelmed governments worldwide.
Edit: All to silence ANY criticism of that country and its laughter in Palestine. With their leaders being wanted war criminals. Where‘s freedom of speech now? When Marco Rubio complained before the election „You are one click away from being jailed.“, now you are one click away from being deported under his administration.
reply