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vander_elst

764 karma · joined December 10, 2014

vander_elst [at] hotmail [dot] it
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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.
vander_elst··on Why does Mill use Scala?
It seems this is mainly a scala project and then they are using scala also for the configuration, it probably makes sense for them.
vander_elst··on Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel
It seems fuchsia might me something for you
vander_elst··on Purelymail: Cheap, no-nonsense email
Do you have a link? The nearest best I can find is https://www.zoho.com/de/mail/zohomail-pricing.html which is ~12 bucks a year
vander_elst··on Hard numbers in the Wayland vs. X11 input latency discussion
Wayland is just a protocol that is probably implemented over and over and each implementation might have issues. It's mostly likely the different implementations having issues.
vander_elst··on The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job
If what's written on the blog is true, the interviewee knows their stuff technically and the interviewers were just bad: they wanted to check some boxes, feel good about themselves and be done. Nonetheless, by self admission the interviewee also didn't speak English very well ("This was my first interview for a foreign company and the first time in life I spoke english") and that could also be part of the problem or something we didn't know is how the overall communication went, this might have played a part in the rejection. A candidate, but also an employee, might be very strong technically, but they should be able to clearly communicate their solutions and play well within a team, having a genius Anarchist might not always be the best. Anyway, from the post, I'd have moved forward with the candidate and if they were rejected they probably dodged a bullet. Best of luck with the next interviews!
vander_elst··on Bunster: Compile bash scripts to self contained executables
Are there performance drawbacks in particular with long pipelines (e.g. something like `cat | grep | sed | bc | paste | ...`)?
vander_elst··on Dinner for One: British comedy Germans have been laughing at for years (2018)
Literally watching it right now. The best part of the German sketch is that before the sketch there's a presenter explaining why it's funny.
vander_elst··on Inside the university AI cheating crisis
Why cannot this be solved by written exams?
vander_elst··on ChatGPT Pro
> 25 prompts

Interested to learn more, is that the usual break even point?

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