Hacker News: bkummel

New comment by bkummel in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

bkummel — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:32:16 +0000

Without having read the article, reacting on the headline: no single person should be allowed to control our future. Democracy is a thing in large parts of the world, and we should try very hard to keep that functioning and even improve it.

New comment by bkummel in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

bkummel — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:13:48 +0000

No shit, Sherlock!

New comment by bkummel in "MCP Server Is Eating Your Context Window. There's a Simpler Way"

bkummel — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:54:16 +0000

There's already an open source tool that does exactly the same thing: https://github.com/knowsuchagency/mcp2cli

New comment by bkummel in "Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked"

bkummel — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:22:30 +0000

I see comments about Swedish personal identification numbers. But the article is about source code that's leaked, not a database of numbers, right? I was thinking: should government source code not be open source anyway?

New comment by bkummel in "Palantir and other tech companies are stocking offices with tobacco products"

bkummel — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:01:18 +0000

I used to envy people that work in Silicon Valley, right where all the action is. But with all the recent developments, I don't anymore. I'm happy that I live in Europe, where we are still acting more or less normal these days.

New comment by bkummel in "Palantir and other tech companies are stocking offices with tobacco products"

bkummel — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:16:09 +0000

A fully stocked fridge with alcoholic beverages also doesn't belong in a work place.

An Ode to Hackathons

bkummel — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:58:39 +0000

Article URL: https://bartkummel.net/blog/2025-12-14_Ode-to-hackathons.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287497

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bkummel in "Public trust demands open-source voting systems"

bkummel — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:13:58 +0000

Why go through all of that? If you vote on paper ballots, the paper trail is baked in.

New comment by bkummel in "Public trust demands open-source voting systems"

bkummel — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:12:44 +0000

True! In The Netherlands, where I live, we still vote on paper ballots. The ballots are counted by hand. The counting is public, anyone can go and observe the counting.

New comment by bkummel in "Public trust demands open-source voting systems"

bkummel — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:09:53 +0000

You can introduce procedures to minimize the error to a point that it’s not significant anymore.

Having a paper trail and an observable counting process is worth a small error margin.

New comment by bkummel in "Public trust demands open-source voting systems"

bkummel — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:06:56 +0000

I live in The Netherlands. We are a reasonable modern country, where a lot of things are automated, even in governmental organizations. However, voting is still done on paper ballots. And those paper ballots are then counted manually. This has huge benefits. There always is a paper trail. It’s hard to manipulate votes without getting caught. If there’s any doubt about a certain district’s results, the votes can be recounted. This happens regularly.

Why do we need machines? Counting the votes for e.g. the parliament only takes 24 hours or so, generally. And we don’t have elections every week, right?

New comment by bkummel in "Leveling Up My Homelab"

bkummel — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 10:11:14 +0000

If you ask me, this is not a Homelab anymore.

New comment by bkummel in "AI is impressive because we've failed at personal computing"

bkummel — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 16:19:27 +0000

Yeah dream on. I’m an engineer and know what structured data is. And yet I miserably fail to store my private files in a way that I can find them back without relying on search tools. So how on earth are we ever going to organize all the world’s data and knowledge? Thank god we found this sub-optimal “band aid” called LLMs!

New comment by bkummel in "Start your own Internet Resiliency Club"

bkummel — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 12:42:42 +0000

I think the point of the article is not to use that mesh network as a replacement for internet. I think the author's idea is that the mesh network would provide the "resilience club" a communication channel while they work on recovering the regular internet.

New comment by bkummel in "Start your own Internet Resiliency Club"

bkummel — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 12:41:47 +0000

New comment by bkummel in "Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one"

bkummel — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 16:08:23 +0000

Yeah, let's focus on the liability, let's cover our ass. Instead of worrying about what this headshot thing really is about: giving everyone a fair chance by factoring out possible discrimination based on gender, race, haircut...

New comment by bkummel in "Show HN: Cot: a Rust web framework for lazy developers"

bkummel — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 14:45:56 +0000

Frameworks that do “everything” are not a good idea. I’m from the Java ecosystem. Spring is the “batteries included” framework there. If you have migrated any real world application to a new major version once, you’ve learned forever that “all in one” frameworks are bad. Please don’t do it!

Instead, use scaffolding tools, that give you a head start on creating a new project, using smaller, specialized libs.

Also, don’t use an ORM. Just write that SQL. Your future self will be thankful.

New comment by bkummel in "Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop"

bkummel — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 08:38:22 +0000

https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

New comment by bkummel in "Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color"

bkummel — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 19:54:46 +0000

This seems random and contra intuitive. The article is also confusing, containing a section on how to set a solid color as a background, while that is actually what causes the issue...

New comment by bkummel in "Right to root access"

bkummel — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 16:53:13 +0000

Hear, hear!