Live data from Hacker News

Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

horovits.medium.com

391–400 of 420 posts

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is EU has become an open air museum and all the good companies are now either American or Chinese. > Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus. What else to compare against this claim ? Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry. It is not just aerospace, even auto is still über competitive, Eu…

> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry First of all this is an empty statement that reeks of rhetoric. You don’t have the full grasp of the picture to quantify if a company is miles ahead of the competition. Nobody does. Ahead in terms of what? Even if we want to compare companies in more spec…

> Ahead in terms of what?

Passenger safety for starters, passing safety audits, units shipped or sold, not having a 60 year old airframe to iterate its product with [1].

> Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball.

It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers. Duopoly doesn’t mean it has to do nothing.

[1] MCAS was needed after all because Boeing decided to stick a big new engine on a low sitting 1960s 737 airframe, instead of developing a new airframe.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that a stronger central EU government, more like a federal state would be highly desirable and more efficient in many ways today. But you are ignoring a ton of stuff here, too. The EU comprises territories that are far more different than the territories of the US. The EU has 24 languages spoken, and its poorest member state has a GDP that is a factor of 9 lower than its richest (excluding Luxembourg). While…

These are all great points, and of course, I didn't mean to trivialize any of them. I can't say a federal state would actually work for the EU, precisely because of these issues. >Imagine a president who doesn't even speak the native language of the vast majority of people in the country. This actually reminds me of Spain. Their leaders, while they speak the native language of a majority, it's not a vast majority, wi…

Their leaders, while they speak the native language of a majority, it's not a vast majority,

It seems to be a pretty vast majority, actually. According to a 2019 Pew Research poll, we have the following breakdown of languages spoken at home:

  Spanish (81%), Catalan (8%), Valencian (4%), Galician (3%), Basque (1%)
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/01/06/speaking-...

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#393
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Africa will soon emerge as an important market as well, particularly Nigeria. Japan and Korea are, as you said, not only stagnating but deflating (in the case of Japan). I believe GDP actually declined in Europe recently so I think Europe will shrink as a market in the coming decades unless they can fix demographic pressures and improve entrepreneurship. The US faces similar demographic problems but we have unique so…

It's always humorous to see HN users praising the lifestyle of dense, walkable European cities. They don't realize how miserable it is to raise multiple children in the typical 2 bedroom / 1 bath flat that most locals can afford. It's not surprising that many couples have only one child.

Historically, homes in the US were very small, far smaller than what you see today. Americans have a huge misconception about this, because the historic homes they see today are the ones that survived, and the ones that rich people lived in 100+ years ago. The homes that regular people lived in have all been torn down, because they were small and unremarkable. But you can see some of this if you visit neighborhoods built in the 1950s: the houses there are much smaller than newer nearby homes.

However, despite a trend towards much larger homes in the US over the last 50+ years, Americans (at least the ones who can afford nicer homes) have been having far fewer children. So apparently Americans preferred having lots of kids back when they lived in homes with less than ~900 square feet.

As for Europe, Europeans have been living in dense, walkable areas with small homes for millennia, and didn't have any trouble raising lots of kids in that environment all that time.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#394
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always humorous to see HN users praising the lifestyle of dense, walkable European cities. They don't realize how miserable it is to raise multiple children in the typical 2 bedroom / 1 bath flat that most locals can afford. It's not surprising that many couples have only one child.

Historically, homes in the US were very small, far smaller than what you see today. Americans have a huge misconception about this, because the historic homes they see today are the ones that survived, and the ones that rich people lived in 100+ years ago. The homes that regular people lived in have all been torn down, because they were small and unremarkable. But you can see some of this if you visit neighborhoods b…

Yes, people's expectations around living space and privacy have inflated. What's your point? It's not as if Americans or Europeans are suddenly going to go back to tolerating having a bunch of kids in a cramped urban flat. And it was never "preferred". They mostly only ever did that in the first place due to religion and lack of birth control.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#395
post #271

Gaia-X is a disaster. The article misrepresents it. Gaia-X is not a framework for what a European cloud should look like. This would be useful. In beautiful EU bureaucratic style It's a framework for how to talk about how a European Cloud could look like. It's not about technical standards. It's about how we can talk about how we can think of maybe eventually deciding on how we can come up with standards that might o…

As others here have pointed out, Gaia-X successfully funnels money to EU cloud companies and maybe this is what it's supposed to do. The deal is: company agrees to write some bs on how it contributes to this project and they get the money. The point is to get local cloud tech sector to grow here in the EU and maybe it's too difficult politically or otherwise to just give money to the companies directly.

Yeah, I feel that a lot of EU projects work that way.

I've participated in a bunch of EU projects in the academic space. Most of them were catastrophic failures if you just looked at the direct outcomes (few of the lofty goals were actually achieved). But they did provide much needed funds to participating institutions, and I think they were an overall win.

They come with a lot of overheads (some had 10% or more of the funds go to a lawyer who managed the project). But they are a lot more effective than all the "unbureaucratic" Covid aid payments that mainly went to companies with close ties to political parties...

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry First of all this is an empty statement that reeks of rhetoric. You don’t have the full grasp of the picture to quantify if a company is miles ahead of the competition. Nobody does. Ahead in terms of what? Even if we want to compare companies in more spec…

> Ahead in terms of what? Passenger safety for starters, passing safety audits, units shipped or sold, not having a 60 year old airframe to iterate its product with [1]. > Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball. It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers. Duopoly doesn’t mean it has to do nothing. [1] MCAS was needed after all because Boeing decided to…

Again, this is what you said:

> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry

So now you don’t claim Airbus is “miles ahead” of the best that US and China can offer, moving the goal post from that very generic statement to just comparing A32X with B737MAX?

So why not comparing 787 vs. A350, or C130 vs. A400, or Sikorsky vs Airbus helicopters? They’re comparable products that Airbus offer vs the competition. Did you know that 787 has got 1,900 sales and 1.300 deliveries, whereas A350 has 1,300 sales and 650 deliveries in the same time frame?

> It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers.

Did I say it doesn’t? Still, customers don’t have a choice. Boeing has been doing badly, yet the backlog of 737MAX is still more than 4.700 units and growing. No meaningful cancellation despite its problems.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#397
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, homes in the US were very small, far smaller than what you see today. Americans have a huge misconception about this, because the historic homes they see today are the ones that survived, and the ones that rich people lived in 100+ years ago. The homes that regular people lived in have all been torn down, because they were small and unremarkable. But you can see some of this if you visit neighborhoods b…

Yes, people's expectations around living space and privacy have inflated. What's your point? It's not as if Americans or Europeans are suddenly going to go back to tolerating having a bunch of kids in a cramped urban flat. And it was never "preferred". They mostly only ever did that in the first place due to religion and lack of birth control.

My point is that small living spaces aren't the reason Europeans aren't having kids. Middle-class Americans aren't having kids either, even though they live in suburbs with oversized houses that they're spending all their income on.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#398
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always humorous to see HN users praising the lifestyle of dense, walkable European cities. They don't realize how miserable it is to raise multiple children in the typical 2 bedroom / 1 bath flat that most locals can afford. It's not surprising that many couples have only one child.

Historically, homes in the US were very small, far smaller than what you see today. Americans have a huge misconception about this, because the historic homes they see today are the ones that survived, and the ones that rich people lived in 100+ years ago. The homes that regular people lived in have all been torn down, because they were small and unremarkable. But you can see some of this if you visit neighborhoods b…

Europeans didn't raise lots of kids in areas of dense small homes, that was happening outside the cities.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#399
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people's expectations around living space and privacy have inflated. What's your point? It's not as if Americans or Europeans are suddenly going to go back to tolerating having a bunch of kids in a cramped urban flat. And it was never "preferred". They mostly only ever did that in the first place due to religion and lack of birth control.

My point is that small living spaces aren't the reason Europeans aren't having kids. Middle-class Americans aren't having kids either, even though they live in suburbs with oversized houses that they're spending all their income on.

"All their income" is very funny to hear when a small house in Prague costs 2 million dollars - now check what's the average income there.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. If we’re talking about e.g. GCP we use “cloud”, but Chmura Krajowa is a Polish product and it has a Polish name, so we use “chmura”. We basically use the original name in this context.

Interesting. In Germany government uses the word cloud . Not Wolke. TIL something new.

It seems to me Germans in general like to use English phrases, but on the contrary from other European places I know, they like to use the original pronunciation and spelling. Us, Poles, like to make it sound like Polish, add our own declension and so on.
Post reply on HN