Hacker News Reader

ValtteriLon Ask HN: What are you reading?

Professional CMake: A Practical Guide

ValtteriLon AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems

Reminds me of a story about Ericsson engineers missing vital troubleshooting practice when Erlang turned out to be too reliable.

ValtteriLon Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

I made the jump to Immich a month ago after having to prune my Drive more and more often as my free Drive quota ran totally out after 8 years of freeloading.

My homelab had spare capacity and I had already offsite backups to Hetzner Storage Box sorted out so it didn't take long or increase my costs.

Very good experience so far. I moved all my photos including multiple complete wedding albums to it, something I couldn't do with Drive without "converting". Nice to finally have all the Google Photos goodies for everything.

Shout out to immich-go, a cli tool for bulk uploads from Google takeout archives.

ValtteriLon Ask HN: Why are onionv3 services not more popular?

Slow and TCP only. Also requires client to have software that raises the odds that you're doing something sketchy.

I did use them in the past to access my homelab via SSH but replaced that a long time ago with VPN.

ValtteriLon Ask HN: Why do you use Ubuntu?

I use it at work for ubiquity.

Every new member with Linux experience at least feels familiar with it, and therefore can get to speed faster and with confidence. When we build containers to be used or built on by other teams, Ubuntu as the base minimizes the friction and support needed for the same reason.

There are Arch/Fedora/etc users too, but Ubuntu is the common denominator. I think it is good enough.

At home I started with Debian and after a few missteps have always come back to it.

ValtteriLon Ask HN: Is Codex with GPT 5.5 Extra High being dumbed down?

I have attributed this experience to the same thing that happens when you look closely to AI-generated images. On the first glance they look great but closer inspection reveals flaws.

Perhaps one just learns to see through the model after a while.

ValtteriLon LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

Also in IEC 62443

ValtteriLon Ask HN: Do you read differently now that anything could be AI generated?

For AI written content I have a very low tolerance. I bounce right away when I notice I'm reading generated content, especially if it tries to be an essay or anything else than direct answer to my question at hand.

When it comes to books, I avoid anything written by an author debuting after 2022 unless there is a strong recommendation by someone close.

As for genres, it has made me read less purely technical books. My assumption is that I can learn enough of the subject as I go by chatting with a model.

ValtteriLon I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

>The feedback was simply: "What do you even need funding for?"

Not clear from the text, but what was your plan using the funding on? If you did not have a plan, what did you expect? VCs want to see how adding more money results in asymmetric returns.

ValtteriLon Parallel Perl – Autoparallelizing interpreter with JIT

Impressive, ambitious work.

I wonder how long he waited for the CPAN nologin case. I remember requesting a CPAN account 3 years back and it took ~2 months for someone to look at and accept.

ValtteriLon Ask HN: Which router makers do you trust most?

Mikrotik.

Past experiences include Cisco (bad incentives, they make a lot of money from certifications and licenses), TP-Link (broke the case physically when pressing a button, was left without updates after some time), Ubiquiti (could not handle the load of my home network. I had the edgerouter-x though which is weak)

ValtteriLon Ask HN: We're building a saving app for European savers and need GTM advice

Why would your customer invest in your system instead of going directly to stocks/ETFs?

The people holding 10k€+ in cash/ bank savings account that I know are old, tech illiterate, afraid of investing, and oblivious to the effects of inflation. They simply store the money somewhere so they can use it later at a short notice.

With these people you have way too much friction with the Coinbase way. Even if you succeeded in convincing them they deserve yield, it will be hard to compete with investing tools that are integrated into their banking apps that show higher profits than you.

ValtteriLon GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams

This. In my experience the people actively disliking it have only ever used Jenkins 1 or somewhy only used freestyle jobs.

There are numerous ways to shoot yourself in the foot, though, and everything must be configured properly to get to feature parity with GHA (mail server, plugins, credentials, sso, https, port forwarding, webhooks, GitHub app, ...).

But once those are out of the way, its the most flexible and fastest CI system I have ever used.

ValtteriLon European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

Dreambroker

ValtteriLon Claude Code On-the-Go

>Development fits into the gaps of the day instead of requiring dedicated desk time.

I find myself planning and jotting down things into a notebook while juggling adult/parent responsibilities. On little longer gaps I research. Then when the occasional longer gap happens I'm ready to start cracking on my desktop. I've been only dabbling with AI but have found that writing prompts by hand in the notebook and using the desk time to execute them works well. This also keeps me in the free tier.

ValtteriLon Ask HN: Who is using Nebula (mesh VPN)?

Never seen it deployed anywhere.

I'm planning to replace the traditional network architecture in my homelab with it to practice Zero Trust.

ValtteriLon Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)

Died by his own hand, I would add.

ValtteriLon Ask HN: Any example of successful vibe-coded product?

https://www.pientensuomi.fi/

Aggregator for finding things to do with kids in Finland.

At a family gathering was asking a relative how his beginner level programming course was going. Was blown away to learn that he had just vibed this and now had already a steadily increasing stream of traffic. I had already used it myself.

ValtteriLon Publishing your work increases your luck

No need to write any code for 3. Just search for backlink checker and you'll find multiple free ones.

ValtteriLon Ask HN: What developer tool do you wish existed in 2026?

You can get such disposable shell in k8s with a command like:

kubectl run -i --tty --rm debug --image=busybox --restart=Never -- sh

Doesn't use ssh though.

ValtteriLon Eurydice: a Rust to C compiler

Can Cargo install deployment tools like Ansible? I find myself using nix for those kind of tools despite how good $lang package manager is.

ValtteriLon Eurydice: a Rust to C compiler

Github: https://github.com/AeneasVerif/eurydice

ValtteriLon Ask HN: What are some modern technologies that you refuse to adopt?

- smart watches / rings

- shorts / TikTok

- Instagram / X / Facebook etc.

- the Apple ecosystem

- TV

- tablets

ValtteriLon Hiring a developer as a small indie studio in 2025

It was a phone call

ValtteriLon Ask HN: How would you set up a child’s first Linux computer?

Debian stable with KDE desktop on a nth hand desktop computer. Place it in a central place at home. Random probably used office-grade accessories. Install some games and libreoffice on it. Internet access only under supervision before age 10.

ValtteriLon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

My go-to development environment for Python projects is nowadays Nix for uv, and uv for Python deps.

Nix does not play well with python dependencies. It's so nice to have that part taken care in a reproducible manner by uv.

ValtteriLon Elixir 1.19

>Elixir releases now include a Source SBoM in CycloneDX 1.6 or later and SPDX 2.3 or later formats.

Having the $lang_ecosystem address this sounds godsent. Unfortunately we don't use Elixir at $work.

ValtteriLon Old Stockholm Telephone Tower

NK logo and all

ValtteriLon Ask HN: Do people lose interest in TeX/LaTeX after leaving academia?

I tried to use it in my business. I wrote contracts, testing reports, and even slide decks with it. Eventually, I decided the friction to be too much.

My partner (lawyer) didn't want to spend any time learning it as Word is the de facto in her field. So I had to either maintain also Word, or be on my own.

Testing report template consumed a lot of time to construct. I didn't have enough iterations generating reports to reap benefits from codification and git version control. Adequate Word templates on the other hand were easy to outsource for $100.

Slide decks were beautiful to me as an engineer but they didn't seem to convince the buyers (usually non-technical). I'm not super keen on presenting and the added stress from unfamiliar presentation tooling didn't help.