Hacker News: eythian

New comment by eythian in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

eythian — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:11:09 +0000

That's not really true. Especially in the more touristy places, credit cards are generally accepted and it'd be unusual for it not to be. If you're out in a village in, I dunno, Brabant, then sure. But the places that visitors are likely to be I'd expect cards to work.

I think even AH accepts credit cards these days, though I haven't tried it myself.

New comment by eythian in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

eythian — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:07:10 +0000

> My colleague took a train regularly in the Netherlands a few years back that was cash only.

I don't know what a few years back was, but I can't believe there was a train in NL that was cash at all for quite some time. In the past over 10 years it's always been an OV-chipkaart, and you can get an anonymous one that you pre-load with money. I'm not even sure if you can pay with cash, short of buying a ticket/loading the card from a person at a desk.

> Dutch websites also have to offer whatever the Dutch payment provider is (I forget).

iDeal, which Wero is based on.

About the only thing I use cash for in NL is paying for my barber as he doesn't take any card, and I'm pretty sure that's black money.

Germany has always had a bit of a relationship with cash, I'd always keep €1-200 in my pocket when I went there, though this is changing now.

> I think we will manage without Visa just fine.

There is also Cirrus and Maestro which are run by Visa and Mastercard, which appears on a lot of debit cards around the world, though I don't know exactly how it works (i.e. do the cards tend to use the local network within the country and only go to the cirrus etc. networks when international, or do they do it always?)

New comment by eythian in "The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible"

eythian — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:09:58 +0000

There was a "shadyurl". The site itself seems to be long gone, but this'll give you some context: https://www.mikelacher.com/work/shady-url/

New comment by eythian in "I program without syntax highlighting"

eythian — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:58:40 +0000

I'm pretty sure Turbo Pascal/C/etc and perhaps vim had syntax highlighting (though perhaps not the other bits) before the first VS release, I'm surprised they hadn't encountered it already.

New comment by eythian in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

eythian — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:31:05 +0000

I've been on the other side of that (not google), taking people to lunch who are interviewing. Usually you're picked because they're from the same country as you or something like that. At least where I work it's not like those messages. Instead it's lunch because food is good to have, and if you were lunching with them you weren't involved in the interview process at all, and it gave them a person to ask questions of and get an unbiased-as-reasonable response. If there were real red flags I'd probably raise it, but otherwise I had no contact with anyone in the hiring process regarding that person at all.

New comment by eythian in "The government ate my name"

eythian — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 11:00:29 +0000

In NZ there are restrictions on what you can't name a child (titles that represent royalty e.g. "king" or certain positions, e.g. "justice", or ones that can lead to excessive mockery, e.g. "sex fruit"), but the line seems to be hazy as "Number 16 Bus Shelter" was apparently permitted.

As for legally renaming yourself, I really don't know if the same rules apply. Probably the title-related ones, or ones that could be offensive, but I'd expect that's about it.

But just getting called whatever you like isn't a problem. I know quite a few people who don't go by their legal first name.

New comment by eythian in "The government ate my name"

eythian — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 10:51:49 +0000

In NZ someone I know has a single name. Due to the constraints of the system, effectively he has no first name and only a surname. In things where a first and last name are required (I think the drivers licence system needed it), he uses "citizen" as a filler.

It can go the other extreme too of course: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360848808/worlds-longest-nam...

New comment by eythian in "Germicidal UV could make airborne diseases as rare as those carried by water"

eythian — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:43:14 +0000

It's a minor point, but it's interesting that they used having AC as a proxy for mechanical ventilation and conclude that it's rare in Europe. At least where I live (NL), mechanical ventilation is common - I think required in some situations - even though AC isn't. It's basically a fancy extractor fan that pumps air outside, so bringing fresh air in. That said, you'd need to reverse that flow to add filters.

New comment by eythian in "Is OOXML Artifically Complex?"

eythian — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:02:42 +0000

I was not aware there was an RFC for CSV, but the concept of "simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV" is, in my experience, not something that exists. In a previous job, a chunk of my work was taking CSV files that were given to us and writing tooling to process them into a structured form for import elsewhere (typically we'd do a few test runs, and finally do a cut-over with final data, so it had to be scripted.)

During this I saw just about every variant of CSV and character encoding known to man, often inside the same file. Once I had a file that had UTF-8, MARC-8, Latin1, and (yes really) VT100 control codes. All in one file.

All in all, I'd prefer something that actually could be validated for some sort of correctness (this said, another time I got an XML export from some software that was invalid XML, so...)

New comment by eythian in "Everything from 1991 Radio Shack ad I now do with my phone (2014)"

eythian — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:11:52 +0000

It depends on the region and specific needs, but a common reason for not encrypting is that it adds complexity in an emergency (where, e.g., people might need to communicate from other regions nearby, or ambulance needs to talk to fire, maybe civil defence or AREC needs to be involved.) The simplicity of plain unencrypted radio can outweigh the benefits of secrecy.

This said, different places weigh factors differently, there's no one-size-fits-all answer.

New comment by eythian in "ReMarkable Paper Pro Move"

eythian — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 10:38:22 +0000

I noticed in the 3.20 release notes they said they're working on this, and to contact them for early-access. https://remarkable.com/business though you'll have to scroll past the marketing guff for a bit.

New comment by eythian in "SSL certificate requirements are becoming obnoxious"

eythian — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 15:42:28 +0000

I run a few low-stakes hobby things, and LE cert automation took the "once a year or so figure out how to do this because I haven't done it in a year and I should write it down but when I'm done I just go to the pub instead" to "", which was a nice change. Now I only have to interact with it when I add a new vhost to the web server, and that's just run a command to do so.

New comment by eythian in "SystemD Service Hardening"

eythian — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 14:34:17 +0000

My feeling, without evidence, is that a lot of the hate is vocal people who don't like this thing that does stuff differently to what they're used to. I get the feeling, I still understand /etc/init.d and runlevel symlinks and /var/log better than systemd, but that's because I have many more years of experience interacting with it, breaking it, fixing it. Whenever I have to do stuff with systemd it's a bit annoying to have to go learn new stuff, but when I do I find it reasonably straightforward. Just different, and most likely better.

New comment by eythian in "Pebble Time 2 Design Reveal [video]"

eythian — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 14:00:24 +0000

They never ran Android, it was always a custom firmware.

New comment by eythian in "Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act"

eythian — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:13:22 +0000

Netherlands currently has no government, so I'm not sure that's an argument :)

New comment by eythian in "I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class"

eythian — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 13:08:26 +0000

You are right! Bimodal indeed, thanks

New comment by eythian in "I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class"

eythian — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:09:33 +0000

In my (limited) experience, programming classes, especially intro level, often end up with a binomial-ish distribution anyway. I was casually assisting some research on why this is when I was helping teach labs and such so was interested. I'm sure more research happened after I wasn't doing that any more, but I remember the best way of removing this at the time was catchup classes.

A lot of intro programming builds directly on previous lessons, much more so than, e.g., maths. If you missed how variables work (off sick, just didn't get it, whatever), you're still stuck when it comes to functions and anything else following and then you're going to fail - it was quite predictable. We studied other university courses and nothing came close to the pattern we were seeing, except "computing for chemistry" or something, which was basically the same sort of course just in a different department.

So we added explicit catch-up classes a few days after a topic was covered so if you missed it, you could get quite personal help on getting back up to speed. This really shifted the distribution to the right, then the people who failed were either those who just didn't care, or those under more extreme circumstances where this couldn't help (or those who just could not learn programming for love nor money but that was rare ime.)

New comment by eythian in "I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class"

eythian — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 14:59:36 +0000

In my undergrad, a few decades ago, it was typically the case that assignments and exams both were a part of your final score. Often it was something like 40% exam/60% assignments, but this could change.

However what you mention about different people being better in different circumstances reminds of what our maths courses typically did, it was called "plussage" IIRC. Basically, the scores were calculated, and you got the best score from a 40% exam/60% assignment weighting or a 60%/40% (or something, the exact values are lost to time.) So if you were bad at exams but had done the work through the semester, you got a boost. Or if you were bad at deadlines but had still studied, you weren't (too) penalised.

New comment by eythian in "Vibe code is legacy code"

eythian — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:42:01 +0000

Interestingly, I have a server that only has IPv6 SSH open to the outside world, and it has exactly zero that aren't me fat-fingering a password. It does have an externally visible hostname, which says to me that the bots aren't looking at hostnames for SSH, just IP(v4) addresses.

New comment by eythian in "Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly a century"

eythian — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 10:39:49 +0000

That museum (Escher in het Paleis) is worth visiting if you get the chance.