Hacker News: clmul

New comment by clmul in "Digital euro clears key hurdle as EU seeks to break free from U.S. credit cards"

clmul — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:16:35 +0000

Paying with credit card gives you at least some leverage when a merchant doesn't hold their end of the deal. Good luck getting your money back with iDEAL (it's not possible right now).

New comment by clmul in "GenCAD"

clmul — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:53:11 +0000

As someone also working on CAD in their spare time, also tried the hosted app. I get the feeling that this is made by someone who has never opened a (professional) CAD app at all. It feels like a mix between a tool like blender and CSG-style CAD, but even all of that doesn't seem to work. Maybe this is the proof that vibe coding does not work, at least not for this kind of application.

In my own project I use LLMs very sparingly and hesitantly, but made the observation that they are not very useful on the hard parts of CAD. I expect this is because of a lack of training material. Most professional CAD applications are proprietary and books on the topic are usually sparse on implementation details. The non-BRep CAD applications such as OpenSCAD and family are probably overrepresented in the training data.

This might also explain why people's experiences with LLMs are very varied. If you stay in the happy path of CRUD web development and stuff all is nice and well, but if you start to veer off this path you get more and more challenged.

New comment by clmul in "It’s not mold, it’s calcium lactate (2018)"

clmul — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 18:26:08 +0000

People in the Netherlands are usually not at all proud of their cuisine, but the cheese is definitely a nice aspect (as someone who eats the >1 year ripened stuff almost daily)

Although for me some of the French cheeses are the best. Just what you're used to I guess :D

New comment by clmul in "We Kind of Suck at That Right Now"

clmul — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 16:43:37 +0000

It seems like the advice is primarily relevant if you are already very talkative and/or complaining too much about everything wrong. In that case, it will not hurt to take a step back sometimes: this is also leadership.

Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal

clmul — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 13:07:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ecb.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40696769

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by clmul in "Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora"

clmul — Sat, 11 May 2024 12:28:56 +0000

This is what I could see with my camera in the east of the Netherlands, and even with the naked eye I could easily see some red at times: https://imgur.com/a/kloWEOl

New comment by clmul in "Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora"

clmul — Sat, 11 May 2024 12:27:10 +0000

Around 1 AM at night this was the view in the east of the Netherlands: https://imgur.com/a/kloWEOl

With the naked eye I could see moving bright "clouds", and sometimes see streaks of red inside them. After 1:30 it died out quite rapidly for me.

New comment by clmul in "Most of Europe is glowing pink under the aurora"

clmul — Sat, 11 May 2024 12:24:07 +0000

In the east of the Netherlands I was seeing something similar to what you describe, but when particularly active I also saw a reddish glow in places. This is a timelapse I made around the same time: https://imgur.com/a/kloWEOl

Alan Kay – Doing with Images Makes Symbols: Communicating with Computers

clmul — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 11:45:52 +0000

Article URL: https://archive.org/details/Dr._Alan_Kay_Doing_With_Images_Makes_Symbols_Communicating_With_Computers_1987

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35244937

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by clmul in "Dutch farmers organise mass protests in face of farm closures"

clmul — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 16:22:23 +0000

Well, if you produce crops instead of livestock, you are not emitting any nitrogen compounds so would in theory be totally unaffected by regulation.

New comment by clmul in "Dutch farmers organise mass protests in face of farm closures"

clmul — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 16:17:27 +0000

The "local nature" (barely anything left), has already been sacrificed for decades to this. For example, a large drop in insect populations has been recorded, likely because of intensive farming practices. So continuing to do this (apart from EU regulation) does not seem to me like it is very wise. Agriculture is also very dependent on some kind of local nature existing (think pollinators). If you don't care about nature at all, it will be a very dead place soon enough. We are also part of nature, after all.

New comment by clmul in "Dutch farmers organise mass protests in face of farm closures"

clmul — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 16:11:51 +0000

Even with the proposed reduction in the amount of farm animals the Netherlands will still produce more than enough meat and milk to meet domestic demand, and the reason that construction can't continue is precisely the excess nitrogen emissions produced and the physical space consumed by by the farms. The country simply isn't large enough to not make this tradeoff. And if you don't care about the biodiversity, sooner or later you'll find out that you can't continue with agriculture at all because there are no pollinators left.

New comment by clmul in "Dutch farmers organise mass protests in face of farm closures"

clmul — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 15:49:32 +0000

The reduction in farm animals isn't going to happen within a year (there are not even very concrete plans yet), this will likely be a very long process.

New comment by clmul in "Dutch farmers organise mass protests in face of farm closures"

clmul — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 15:43:48 +0000

The Netherlands simply has too many farm animals and overfertilization has been a problem for decades. This is especially visible on this map from 2011 [1]. The overfertilization will lead to biodiversity loss, as plants that prefer nutrient poor soils will be outcompeted by plants that can harness the excess nitrogen and/or that prefer acidic soils [2]. Due to EU regulation and court orders only recently did this become a real mess, where building projects couldn't even continue because of the limits on nitrogen emissions.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_Global_Fertil...

[2] https://www.wur.nl/en/Dossiers/file/Nitrogen.htm

New comment by clmul in "Chemistry of Cast Iron Seasoning: A Science-Based How-To (2010)"

clmul — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 06:14:13 +0000

I have a similar experience with stainless steel pans. We use them for everything (also eggs, which people seem to find especially hard on the internet). After getting used to the pans (especially cooking on the right temperature), I just don't get the obsession people have with non-stick pans and seasoning.

Additionally, there is something else I wonder about: people often seem to be recommended those pans "requiring" seasoning from a health-conscious perspective, but to me it seems like everything that is involved in seasoning could be worse than just using a non-stick Teflon or ceramic pan to begin with. I mean, isn't seasoning basically burning oil and making a layer of burnt stuff at the bottom of your pan? Can't this stuff flake into your food? I can't find much about this on the internet, so maybe I'm wrong, but it just doesn't feel right to me.

Appeal by Astronomers (on the effect of satellite clusters on astronomy)

clmul — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 13:58:31 +0000

Article URL: https://astronomersappeal.wordpress.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23006992

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by clmul in "People are planting more vegetable gardens"

clmul — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 19:57:49 +0000

Given that because of quarantine measures a lot of people have little or no work to do at the moment, that might be a potential source of farm labor (which is mostly unskilled labor anyways)?

New comment by clmul in "People are planting more vegetable gardens"

clmul — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 19:53:28 +0000

In the Netherlands, soon after the first measures were put in place, they decided to open up the wholesale stores to private persons (normally, by law, only businesses are allowed to use these). I have no idea how many people actually go there, but in the light of this situation it may well have been a smart move.

Personal Observations on Reliability of the Space Shuttle by R. P. Feynman

clmul — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 10:23:12 +0000

Article URL: https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22544570

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation

clmul — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 18:07:25 +0000

Article URL: http://www.pbr-book.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22300812

Points: 2

# Comments: 0