I think I read some days ago another stat, that the average rating of “Show HN” posts is going down. So the pessimistic take is that people feel the bar to present their product in a “Show HN” is lowering.
(edit: striked) <strike>Is it deliberate that this post appears as “Show HN” itself? I hope not to be too negative, but to qualify as such I would expect much more that a page with two graphs.</strike>
I can edit the post and delete that part, but this would make OP's reply seem out of context. But HN markup does not support striking. I put some HTML tags there anyway, the sense should be clear.
Just mark your edit 'edit:'. I often have the same happen where I write a comment and then think 'oh, that's no good, I need to improve on it' and then in the meantime multiple people will comment and hopefully quote the original. That way at least you can see what they replied to rather than the version that I'm finally happy with. I've suggested HN increase the default size of the reply box but so far no takers on that.
I'd say if you get a job in the same company, Zurich is competitive. The problem is that if you lose your job at Google in Seattle there are several hundreds of FAANG positions and probably thousands of other 200k$+ SWE jobs you can reapply to. In Zurich you will maybe see a dozen of openings in the small subsidiaries of Apple, Microsoft & Co., and maybe some individual job offers from small AI companies, and applying to any of these positions basically means competing against the whole rest of the continent.
> and applying to any of these positions basically means competing against the whole rest of the continent
Which should not be an issue, if as I read a lot in this page, "all good European engineers move to the US". It means that you only have to compete against the "bad ones" that stayed back, right? /s
A lack of Unicode support in 2026 is like someone coming with dirty clothes to a job interview: it might not affect too much how the work is done, but immediately raises doubts about the underlying level of professionalism.
I guess they preferred more casual games like “Desert Bus” (1995), a really existing title, built to show how a realistic long-distance bus driving simulator would look like. It is still played today as a joke, mainly for charity events.
The article does not explain much about the “how”. Games Workshop was a small company that failed to grow for most of its history, then suddenly struck gold. Look at the stock quote: it fluctuated in the 400–800p band from 1996 to 2016, then soared for five years in a row, hitting 10'000p in 2020.
What happened in that crucial period? Did GW manage to spread its brand awareness to the mainstream public?
From someone who has been part of the hobby for a long time, I think a couple of reasons:
1) Total Warhammer, Space Marine, and an otherwise highly successful video game licensing program.
2) Being well positioned to ride the overall rise of nerdier hobbies being acceptable
3) A marked shift in the company towards being more open and...friendly? It's hard to overstate how much the "old GW" sort of viewed its customers with a vibe that sometimes came close to hostility. There's much better engagement now, and a business built on something other than "A mom will buy this for their 12 year old, and will lose them when they discover girls."
I think the image of 12 year old boys as GW's customer base is probably outdated. I know a woman who is _massively_ into Warhammer, and spends a lot of money and time on it. An N=1 anecdote is not data, but it would certainly be interesting to look in more detail at GW's demographic.
My guess would be that, like other 80s properties, many of the first generation of fans have now grown into adults with disposable incomes. I know thats the case with me and my circle.
I had the same thought. In high school around the turn of the millenium the warhammerers either got a few injections per year to their collections, as presents from relatives or from saved up allowances, unless they made a small business out of painting and selling figures.
Ten-fifteen years later they've started making big monies compared to a kid, and nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool.
Once the iPad generations take over I suspect Games Workshop will have it tougher.
It's crazy how much money people end up spending on these kinds of things. A hundred here, a hundred there, before you know it you've spent tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands. Most probably don't even realize they're spending that much.
I think Henry Cavill was a big part of why it grew in popularity. As Henry Cavill's career and profile grew, he did not shy away from putting his favorite nerdy interests in front of the media spotlight, which included Warhammer. That obviously caught the imagination of the internet crowd who ran away with it to create all sorts of memes with Cavill as the God Emperor, or "Behold the Omnissiah!" memes. That naturally sparked the interest of a lot of bystanders, and credit where credit's due, Warhammer lore is deeply enthralling.
Thanks, an interesting theory! I last played Warhammer (Fantasy) in the past century, we were a small circle of friends and I never heard the game mentioned by “non-nerds”, so it was quite surprising to me to find out some years ago that the Games Workshop Company has become one of Britain's “national champions”.
Total War: Warhammer came out in 2016 and was a massively popular game that kicked off a franchise.
If I recall right that was when GW started seemingly letting pretty much every studio take a crack at making games with their IP. There was a lot of trash but the sheer number of games put out meant they kept having 1-2 a year that were popular.
Yeah, they used to be immensely against anyone licensing their IP because they didn't want anyone who wasn't them making something with it, at one point going as far as to start their own record label. Now they seem to let anyone make video games with it.
They have successfully pivoted from a hobbit focused solely on board games, which requires travelling to someone's house with your figurines, going to the shop, etc.
to something broader, selling video games, science fiction novels (of mediocre quality), miniature painting alone, etc.
Many of their adult customers only buy and paint the miniatures to relax, without ever actually playing with them, for example.
This has allowed them to significantly increase their prices.
They are also much less hostile towards fans. If my memory serves me correctly, in the 1990s they went after a fan who had tattooed one of their characters on himself...
Now they are hunting down 3D print models, but leaving fans relatively alone.
> in Switzerland they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers
Putting UK and Switzerland in the same pot is wrong, the pay scales are totally different. 100k$ is 80k CHF which is entry level salary for a SWE. The difference between Switzerland and US is at senior level (reaching 160k CHF is much more difficult than reaching 200k$).
I was extremely surprised not to see Bartosz Ciechanowski (ciechanow.ski) on the list, possibly the only author able to raise 1000+ upvotes on each and every of his posts. But, indeed, he has not published at all in 2025! Hope he comes back this year.
The sales tax is a fair point, but not the currency one. American companies are extremely quick to increase the Euro-denominated prices when this currency becomes weaker; six months would have been more than enough to perform the opposite adjustment. Anyway I can see how selling in the Europe has more friction (legal risks, costs of translations etc.), which must somehow be compensated.
2. To show me the types my editor requires me to, in the best case, hover the mouse over the keyword, which is 100x slower as moving my eyeballs. In the worst case it additionally takes several seconds to compute the type (my shop uses metaprogramming heavily).
To each their own, I come from the land of dynamic typing and writing down types is the bane of my existence, especially when they can be inferred.
2. Type annotations are always on on VScode for rust in places they are omitted. There must be a setting in your editor to show you the types without highlighting. It might take a bit to load at startup though.
(edit: striked) <strike>Is it deliberate that this post appears as “Show HN” itself? I hope not to be too negative, but to qualify as such I would expect much more that a page with two graphs.</strike>
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