HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

vander_elst

801 karma · joined December 10, 2014

vander_elst [at] hotmail [dot] it
submissionscomments
vander_elst··on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
Where do German pensions come from?
vander_elst··on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files
I also think that the keystrokes are strictly less and the loop feedback is faster and more robust, but I'm curious to read different points of view.
vander_elst··on I watched Gemini CLI hallucinate and delete my files
Maybe a sidetrack, but I find it difficult to see the productivity boost in asking an LLM to move some files rather than just do it myself. Is this a common use case?
vander_elst··on Jujutsu for busy devs
I've been using JJ as my daily driver for ~6 months. It is so nice to be able to immediately rebase everything on top of everything, undo last command, restore a previous state, ignore and postpone conflict resolution. It is such a boost in productivity!!
vander_elst··on Jujutsu for busy devs
I think the workflow in JJ is a bit different in this case, you can try to have a base commit `jj new -m 'base'`, then create an anonymous commit on top `jj new`, then make some changes in the anonymous commit and when you are ready to send out a PR/MR you squash `jj squash` or split `jj split` and squash what you need in the base commit.
vander_elst··on What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
I think the article makes sense for me. IMO, a 10x decrease in mental load at an affordable price would be the key. Examples: * You can bring and pick up the kids at the daycare/babysitter every day of the week, every time of the day. * Household chores take at most 10 minutes a week. * High quality school and education standards are available everywhere (Probably there's more) I think that if such problems would be cracked more people might consider having more kids. I think at the moment these problems are easily solvable with a lot of money, so it would seem that kids have become a luxury good. So affordable support for the masses might be an answer.
vander_elst··on New Date("wtf") – How well do you know JavaScript's Date class?
> parsing of strings that do not remotely resemble actual dates.

But this is somehow my point, what were the reasons that lead to parse those strings as dates. I guess the answer is usually legacy, but in that "legacy" why did someone need to take those decisions? My naive way of parsing dates would be to reject everything that doesn't have a well defined format while the format is well defined and at least somehow composable, but here someone had the need (I hope the had the need) to parse these seemingly random strings, I wonder why.

vander_elst··on New Date("wtf") – How well do you know JavaScript's Date class?
One thing I wonder is how could this have happened. It seems that this what a herd of absolute beginners would come up with: strong inconsistency and a bunch of heuristic that are not composable. But I imagine this was not the result of a bunch of beginners, what were the forces that lead to such a situation?
vander_elst··on The magic of through running
It might be nice on paper, but I think that in the Munich implementation there are quite some issues given that there is only a single track connecting Pasing (basically Munich West) to Munich East. In the last years almost every weekend there is maintenance work on the tracks, which introduces issues and doubles the time you need to move to the center. When a track is suddenly blocked, and this happens ~once a quarter, all the S-Bahn trains are blocked and you'll need a lot of patience to get back home. I wonder how it'd be with a more decentralized system where there are 2/3 ways to reach the edges of the city and not a single track
vander_elst··on A man who visited every country in the world without boarding a plane (2023)
How can you stay 24+ hours in Vatican City as a tourist? Are there hotels there? It seems there is https://www.residenzapaolovi.com/en/, but it's not within the Vatican.
vander_elst··on I use zip bombs to protect my server
Also interested in this. For now I've left a server up for a couple of weeks, went through the logs and set up fail2ban for the most common offenders. Once a month or so I keep checking for offenders but the first iteration already blocked many of them.
vander_elst··on University of Waterloo withholds coding contest results over suspected AI use
Why isn't it possible to run these contexts in a computer room with no access to the Internet? This plus a minimal amount of supervision would remove cheating? Am I missing something? Maybe schools don't have a computer room these days?
vander_elst··on Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
Interested in learning more, do you have links to the sources?
vander_elst··on Apple and Meta fined millions for breaching EU law
That might be a very risky bet. Currently a lot of people are looking for alternatives of US products, if Apple gets out of the EU, it might not be that easy to get back as the market might have drastically shifted.
vander_elst··on Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative
+1 for Navidrome, I self host both jellyfin and Navidrome. Navidrome wins hands down for music. With Jellyfin it's harder to categorize and then search, Navidrome provides a great experience out of the box.
vander_elst··on YAML: The Norway Problem (2022)
If you have a schema, why not using directly something like protobufs?
vander_elst··on 2025 AI Index Report
Meta question, why does the website try to make it more difficult to open the images in a new tab? usually if I want to do that, I right click and then select "open image in a new tab". Here I had to go through some loops to do it. Additionally, if you just copy the URL you get to a image that's just noise and that seems to be by design. I still can access the original image though and download it from AWS S3 (https://hai-production.s3.amazonaws.com/images/fig_1e.png). So the question, why all the loops, just to scare off non-technical users?
vander_elst··on Trump only simulates madness [Stock Insider Trading]
The potential consequences is that he probably will make a ton of money. Assuming historical data might somehow resemble what will happen in the future, he'll probably get away with it after his term as well. Hopefully, the prediction is wrong though.
vander_elst··on Nissan eyes shifting Rogue production to U.S. due to tariffs
Serious and genuine question, how? It seems that some of the layoffs in the administration might be illegal, however they still happened and there are no legal consequences yet. High ranked officials discussing national security matters on non approved platforms *is* illegal, yet nothing happened and I bet nothing will happen at all. Given this background, how will the Constitution prevent such a case?
vander_elst··on Show HN: I vibecoded a 35k LoC recipe app
I think this needs a NSFW added to the title, on the first page at the moment there are at least 50% of NSFW recipes.
vander_elst··on Are Levi's from Amazon different from Levi's from Levi's?
Not op, but operating the same way.

The competition might be cheaper than the manufacturer.

vander_elst··on How I got 100% off my train travel
Any insights why trains are pathologically late? It's easy to blame incompetence, but I think it's too naive, I wonder what are the causes connection are late day after day, year after year. Why is it so difficult to create a reliable model for something we have been working for dozens of decades and we have a good control of?
vander_elst··on I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days
Thanks, but to me this feels too high level I'd really need to see a video of such things to better understand what's going on, how much time it took end to end, what was the quality. Yes I could spend 3 days and 300 bucks playing around with the tool, but I'd prefer to learn things offline first.
vander_elst··on I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days
Are there any videos showing these very advanced use cases? I'd be interested in learning how to achieve this level of proficiency. At the moment I still feel I'm better off without ai
vander_elst··on Optimistic Locking in B-Trees
A bit of a tangential question. Does anyone have any experience with cedars?
vander_elst··on StrictYAML
What would be the advantages over something like textproto?
vander_elst··on MacBook Air M4
The price point seems quite interesting, a framework laptop costs more...
vander_elst··on What is vibe coding? How creators are building software with no coding knowledge
Old man yelling at cloud here, I guess but, what do you do when something doesn't work? How do you ensure security if you have no clue what's going on underneath?
vander_elst··on Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
Previous discussions:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36308366

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37506640

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398027

vander_elst··on The Plan 9 Foundation
hug of death for the website? It takes a lot of time to load and sometimes if fails.
← PreviousPage 3 of 10Next →