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huijzer

3,991 karma · joined August 3, 2019

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huijzer··on I Deleted 168,000 Lines of Comments. My AI Agent Didn't Notice
Makes sense if the comments were AI generated as the author writes since AI during reading the code has roughly the same context as with which it produces the comments. I would be more curious for a test with human written comments.
huijzer··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
In a few days, I created a few apps with AI. One saves multiple mechanics 5-15 minutes per day and another can save multiple hours of mistakes during the project, and one saves a lead engineer 15 minutes per day. These savings should add up over multiple years assuming all keeps running as it does now. I’m having good hopes because there have been few bugs so far. Mostly just tweaking.
huijzer··on Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Disney. You mean the company that hid an image of topless woman in The Rescuers (1977) movie and from which many child stars have gone off the rails in later life, main actor kissing a 11 old in Blank Check (1994), and the 2026 lawsuit by Raquel Lee Bolleau among other scandals that anyone as a parent would hope not to be there
huijzer··on A Modern Web App in C
SQLite is a database. The main idea of a database is to support concurrent reads/writes although databases differ in how much concurrency they allow
huijzer··on A Modern Web App in C
But the real question is, does Caddy support it?

The answer is: it does but via community plugins.

huijzer··on Grieving the Loss of Details
> “I didn’t care about practicality, building useful programs, or writing code per se: all I wanted is to understand how the machine works.”

Over the years, I’ve transitioned from building “beautiful” stuff to nowadays building stuff that works. I still want it to be perfect but now not for me but for the user. If I think it’s ugly, but the user wants it that way, then who am I to decide against it? They will have to use the software, not me. Seeing a user be happy with the software is super nice. Way more enjoyable than me just making stuff for myself.

huijzer··on Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
Been running services myself for a few years now. This is what I'm lately running. Maintenance is just running apt-get update and upgrade myself every 2 weeks. Apart from that, I don't spend much time on it. The config is basically a Git repo with one folder per Docker Compose service. And then one Caddy which reverse proxies to the other services. I just give each service a unique port. Not Docker network namespaces nonsense. Everything is just a separately running Docker service and they connect via the ports.

- fx (my own blog software)

- syncthing (sync files to remote servers for backup)

- borgbackup (store old copies of files for backup; via cron)

- radicale (calendar)

- pingvin-share-x (file sharing with other people)

- Forgejo (GitHub-like clone; using it many times a day most days)

- vaultwarden (self-hosted Bitwarden)

- immich (not really using it much)

huijzer··on The Slow Formation of Durable Software
You can also remove features with AI faster than before. During the initial development phase, that's the most important part IMO
huijzer··on Why were Victorian elites so effective?
> they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked.

If you go through history, it's hard to find a king that is not like that. The only difference is that some kings (and nowadays: presidents) are better at keeping a clean public image, see The Prince by Machiavelli for details.

huijzer··on Penguin Mail – open-source Rust email client for Linux with AI
0.5.0 is a new feature 0.4.1 is a bugfix

In practice, 0.5 can be assumed to be breaking but then how do you specify non breaking new features? 0.4.1? Moving to 1.0.0 makes things a lot clearer. For breaking, just go to 2.0.0 etc

huijzer··on Penguin Mail – open-source Rust email client for Linux with AI
See also https://0ver.org/#notable-zerover-projects
huijzer··on Penguin Mail – open-source Rust email client for Linux with AI
> Calling it version 1.0 is bullshit though.

There is a case to be made to always start at 1.0, especially libraries with public API’s. The reason is that if you use semantic versioning then below 1.0 you can’t properly declare a new release to be a feature or bugfix release (for example, 0.4 to 0.5. Is this bugfix or feature?). Above 1.0.0 this is easy (for example 1.1.0 vs 1.0.1).

huijzer··on Gods in the Classroom: Religion and Education in First Millennium BCE Babylonia
> And even in the religions were it was asked to not kill other fellow humans, well fellow humans have been killed in the name of...

If you mean the Templars and their Jerusalem crusades, it's likely that they were adhering another religion (or no religion) and using Christianity as a guise.

From the Wikipedia page for Baphomet (a famous occult symbol that is a god-like figure depicted as half man half animal; similar to ancient Egyptian gods such as Anubis), "The name first emerged in the 14th century during the Trials of the Knights Templar, when the order was accused of heresy for worshipping Baphomet as a demonic idol." This is just one of the bizarre activities that the Templars appeared to have participated in. Other witchcraft and occult ideas can be found on many of the churches that the Templars have founded including the Notre Dame. When looking through all the works of the Templars, it's just incredibly hard for to make a case that they have read or adhered to any part of the Bible. Maybe some things in letter, but definitely not in spirit. (For example, Matthew 22, "Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.")

huijzer··on Gods in the Classroom: Religion and Education in First Millennium BCE Babylonia
> you din't do any offerings last harvest.

Even in the Old Testament, offerings were not seen as the end all. Primary aim should be giving heed to the commandments like thou shall not kill etc.

Isaiah 1:11, "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats."

1 Samuel 15:22, "And Samuel said, Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams."

Ecclesiasticus 35:1, "He that keepeth the law bringeth offerings enough: he that taketh heed to the commandment offereth a peace offering."

King David also requested God to accept his lifting of his hands as a sacrifice, Psalm 141:2, "Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice."

Hebrews 10:6 (New Testament), "In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure."

huijzer··on Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage
Why?
huijzer··on So you think you could be an electrician?
Well okay you have your anecdotal evidence while I have mine, and they seem to be opposed to each other so I guess the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Some like it and some don't. Some hurt their bodies and some don't. It also matters a lot which trade exactly. Painting ship tanks is not good for the lungs it seems to me.
huijzer··on So you think you could be an electrician?
> You can get jobs and have a career without education, certification and licensing?

Yes.

> Why is there any less?

Smaller company and down to earth attitude.

> I wonder what your experience is?

It's less safe than an office that's for sure. But the biggest accident in the company of 100 people has been due to arc flash and not due to walking across the shipyard. In general, the older colleagues seem physically as healthy if not healthier than average for their age; some having worked there for more than 20 years. I'm also surprised by this. The shipyard looks very dangerous but somehow not much happens to the electricians it seems from what I hear and see in the older colleagues.

huijzer··on So you think you could be an electrician?
Perhaps over time doing complex things yes but for now I’m definitely a rookie I can tell you making many rookie mistakes like loosing tools xD
huijzer··on So you think you could be an electrician?
I always wanted to help people and realized more and more that nobody ever needs a programmer apart from the medium to big corporations. I’d rather help individuals. That plays a big role.

Financially, it doesn’t matter that much. In the Netherlands salaries are much lower than compared to the US while taxation is very high. So I personally don’t care whether I get paid 5200 euro per month or 3200 per month since after correcting for taxes and government benefits the difference is a lot less. I also don’t need much anyway. I don’t mind living in a cheapish house with a cheap car and I also don’t like vacations (I don’t like change). Compared to programmer the salary isn’t that much lower anyway. I could go build my way through management positions in government or so for more bucks but then I would need to spend it on useless things to make me happy again so seems like a net loss too.

huijzer··on So you think you could be an electrician?
I recently switched to being an electrician in ship construction after a MSc in Computer Science and PhD in Data Science with heavy focus on writing software/services.

So far, I like it a lot. The work is physically demanding but the colleagues are nice, down to earth and come up with good jokes (I also see this a lot when I watch trades videos on YouTube). Also nice is the feeling of having made something at the end of the day and the lack of office politics. I didn’t do any extra education, they say I’m picking it up fast so it seems I can go without. I think that would hold for most programmers since it’s a very similar mindset that you use especially when you start troubleshooting.

huijzer··on Pi 1.0
Alacritty plus Zellij works great for me. Much easier to use than tmux
huijzer··on Coding Is Not Solved – Alex Ewerlöf Notes
> Note: I use AI every day and it is entirely possible to create high quality software with it, so long as you are not lazy and incompetent.

What I in general try to teach the other people about AI: It can be a great tool, but check the results! Especially in the case of engineering: Check and then double check.

huijzer··on Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust
If you go that way, why not write LLVM Intermediate Representation? And if you know your server CPU anyway, why not write machine code?

I personally like Rust for web applications a lot because you can catch many bugs at compile time instead of during tests or runtime.

huijzer··on What About Rails?
> People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to interact with a UI.

If the UI is completely local and the chat is not, then I prefer UI.

huijzer··on GPT-6 Sol and Luna
> especially when you factor in ChatGPT usage (even 6 Astra Pro) is essentially unmetered on the 20x plan.

I’m currently on the 5x plan and burned through 5% today on a difficult task in 15 minutes so I doubt that. If you got the wrong kind of tasks that you work on, it can go fast.

huijzer··on Don't Use AI to Write
I agree. Writing manually and thoughtfully and then letting the AI figure out the nitty gritty implementation works very well.
huijzer··on Saving another 100TB of RAM
> In a way, RAM becoming more expensive has ushered in a new era of forced optimizations, which I'm really happy for

Isn't this mainly Cloudflare's scale though? That's literally also what's in the introduction written as the reason why they are doing the optimization

huijzer··on EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'
> The Americans are no longer our friends

We say as Europeans while interacting daily with USA engineers and other people here on HN - a site ran by Silicon Valley investors - while we usually talk about USA-made software. I personally do not hold every American accountable for the actions of their government.

huijzer··on Julia 1.13 highlights
Good point. I had great success with Rust indeed, which can catch errors early.
huijzer··on Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
I always write my assembly by hand because nobody appreciates the craft anymore. It’s all hidden by those pesky compilers which generate extremely inadequate code that could easily be improved by some thinking on the programmer side /s

I do think a better programmer will be a better prompter just like a better compiler engineer will be a better programmer (when performance matters at least).

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