HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mdemare

2,358 karma · joined May 18, 2007

Michiel de Mare

Freelance Clojure and Ruby developer, location The Hague.

submissionscomments
mdemare··on I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s
Ok, but now you need to trust DNSSEC.
mdemare··on HTML Can Do That
Also temperature, weights, distances…
mdemare··on HTML Can Do That
I did not know that and I’ve been here quite a while…
mdemare··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
I bet tax law is Turing-complete.
mdemare··on AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
What if mankind is creating god in their own image?
mdemare··on Dutch Train Map Simulator
No, but check out Rotterdam Centraal, Haarlem and Groningen. Also stunning, IMHO, is Antwerp, Belgium.
mdemare··on Show HN: Read the Tape – Wordle for daytrading, five blind S&P 500 charts a day
The interesting answer by the author, will_asouka, has been marked 'dead' for some inscrutable reason.
mdemare··on What `for x in y` hides from you – From Scratch Code
AI slop. Flagged.
mdemare··on Berkshire's $397B Bet Against an Overheated Market
The Buffett indicator has been over 120% since December 2016. It dipped to 130% in March 2020.
mdemare··on I think I have LLM burnout
I’m experimenting with the following in my settings:

“Look at the first letter of the prompt, and use the style of the matching literary stylist enumerated here:

For English:

A — W. H. Auden

B — Bill Bryson

C — Italo Calvino

D — Joan Didion

E — T. S. Eliot

F — William Faulkner

G — Gabriel García Márquez

…”

I certainly don’t see emojis any more.

mdemare··on It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
Companies will keep doing what they're doing now - they'll just use another verb than "buy" or "purchase". Which would be a small improvement, I guess...
mdemare··on 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
Honesty, in any game quests feel artificial, whether they've been generated by humans or AI.
mdemare··on Blogging can just be stating the obvious
“When everybody knows that everybody knows” by Steven Pinker is about this.
mdemare··on Claude subscriptions no longer include Agent SDK and Claude -p usage
Very sad to see this (and cancelled my subscription). My home-grown web-based orchestrator will now have to rely on just codex and Gemini. One of the reasons that I was wary of turning it into a product.

Eventually Google and OpenAI will probably follow Anthropic, but they’re not quite as capacity-constrained.

mdemare··on Swift 6.3
Python 3 barely managed to dethrone Python.
mdemare··on When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
Sure, but it's pretty trivial to generate a CLI application that talks to that API.

That's how I let agents access my database too. Letting them access psql is a recipe for disaster, but a CLI executable that contains the credentials, and provides access to a number of predefined queries and commands? That's pretty convenient.

mdemare··on Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
Often in movies you have the scrappy character that rises to the occasion by making a great speech, winning everybody over. I used to love those scenes.

Now, I've realized, in real life they wouldn't have let them finish their first sentence.

mdemare··on Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists
The Netherlands has had a similar scheme for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist_subsidy_(Netherlands). 1956-1987.

mdemare··on ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
No, this is incorrect. Investors like buybacks, so when the buyback is announced, share prices may rise, but certainly not by the amount of the buyback. They don't go up when the buyback gets executed, unlike dividends, which decrease the share price at the moment when they get distributed.

The equations are: nr_shares * share_price = cash_of_company + value_of_company_excluding_cash.

In a buyback, cash_of_company decreases by the buyback, and nr_shares decreases by buyback / share_price.

Consider the extreme case, a lemonade stand with a bank account with $1M. 1000 shares outstanding, share price $1000. After a buyback of $900K is announced, 900 shares are sold for $1000. $100K remains in the company's bank account, 100 shares remain outstanding, at ... $1000 per share.

mdemare··on ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
This is not quite correct. If a dividend happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the dividend, the number of shares remains constant, so the share price dips by the amount of the dividend per share. All investors get the dividend.

If a buyback happens, the market capitalisation drops by the amount of the buyback, and the number of shares drops by the same ratio, keeping the share price initially constant. The money goes to the investors who sell.

Buybacks are nevertheless good for investors who hold. They now have shares in a company whose market cap is 100% growing enterprise, instead of 90% enterprise and 10% bag of money. That means that if the company keeps doing well, the share price will increase faster than it would have done otherwise (it will also drop faster - it's no longer anchored to an inert pile of cash).

mdemare··on Bugs Apple loves
Yeah, me too, that form factor was perfection. So pretty, so nice to hold!
mdemare··on San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k
That's why they should be phased, and not too steeply.

If they're phased, e.g. at 30% (for every additional €1 you earn, benefits decrease by €0.30), you have the problem that when you are applicable for several of them (e.g. for children, child care, chronic illness, etc.), the benefit reduction adds up as well, so you're quickly back at an effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) of 90% or even over 100%.

You'd think that it wouldn't be beyond the capability of our society to declare that "the EMTR shall be at most 70% at any point in the income curve", and do the math to make it work, but apparently not.

mdemare··on Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'
Organism, not species.
mdemare··on Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'
For those that want to stick with thermodynamics, imagine an organism that stores 1% of consumed calories as fat, and uses the other 99%, and that cannot - for whichever reason - turn fat back into calories.

Completely in accordance with thermodynamics, and yet, "just eat less" doesn't work.

mdemare··on The future of software development is software developers
Software development is a bit like chess. 1. e4 is an abstraction available to all projects, 3. Nc3 is available to 20% of projects, while 15. Nxg5 is unique to your own project.

Or, abstractions in your project form a dependency tree, and the nodes near the root are universal, e.g. C, Postgres, json, while the leaf nodes are abstractions peculiar to just your own project.

mdemare··on Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
8kb to specify the order of the clips, but not a single bit is used to describe a single pixel of a single frame.
mdemare··on Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan
So bizarre! It really shook my belief in Philips' competence at the time.

I mean, take a 100 minute movie, sliced into 1-second clips. 8kB is not even enough to store all possible orders you could put those clips in. I would hate to think so ill of any of my friends or colleagues to think that they could believe such an obvious fraud.

mdemare··on Trump's new visa fees spur offshoring talks, hiring turmoil
Gentle reminder that the Netherlands has lots of very smart software engineers that prefer to stay there, especially if there were more interesting software companies active there.
mdemare··on Alibaba's new AI chip: Key specifications comparable to H20
> has the market cap of a medium-sized country

"According to investors, today's value of Nvidia's expected future profits over its lifetime equals the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within a medium-sized country in a year."

Don't compare market cap with GDP, when you spell it out it's clear how nonsensical it is.

mdemare··on I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
Until the day when I can right-click on a folder and create a folder inside that folder, I'll consider the Finder inferior to the Windows 98 explorer. Come on, that's an absolute basic feature!

The right-click context menu of a folder has 15 items! Most of them I've never used! Colors, tags, quick actions, compress, make alias? But no "New Folder"?

But I moved to the mac, in 2005, because of the unix terminal. I had been using Cygwin for years, but an OS that had it included, natively? On good hardware? Yes, please.

I'm never moving back to Windows (ads in the OS??). To switch to linux it would take great hardware with 100% support. Not holding my breath, but it might happen one day.

Page 1 of 25Next →