Hacker News: jgb1984

New comment by jgb1984 in "Don't use passkeys for encrypting user data"

jgb1984 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 09:13:29 +0000

The title could've been shorter: don't use passkeys. Period.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Over 80% of 16 to 24-year-olds would vote to rejoin the EU"

jgb1984 — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:40:19 +0000

Numbers from Denmark and the Netherlands (the only two European countries where it's allowed to gather such statistics) show that non-EU immigration is a net cost to the society (and economy). In the Netherlands a non-western asylumseeker comes to about 800.000 € to 1.300.000 € net cost to the state over the persons lifetime, depending on what you take into account. And that's purely the financial part, we're not even talking about the increase in crime and the ghettoisation of most western European cities. It's a tragedy, for everyone involved (because most 2nd and 3rd generation non-western immigrants still live a life of poverty in Belgium/Netherlands).

New comment by jgb1984 in "Claude Code is being dumbed down?"

jgb1984 — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:14:08 +0000

I like claude models, but crush and opencode are miles ahead of claude code. It's a pity anthropic forces us to use inferior tooling (I'm on a "team" plan from work). I can use an API key instead but then I'll blow past 25$ in an hour.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Can I start using Wayland in 2026?"

jgb1984 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 10:03:09 +0000

For me wayland offers only downsides, without any upsides. I feel the general idea behind it (pushing all complexity and work onto other layers) is broken. I'll stick to xorg and openbox for many years to come.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?"

jgb1984 — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 08:13:27 +0000

Based on my experiments with anthropic, openai and gemini, your codebase must be an unsalvageable nightmare by now.

New comment by jgb1984 in "A new AI winter is coming?"

jgb1984 — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:13:37 +0000

I sure hope another winter is on the way, the LLM hype wagon is beyond exhausting.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?"

jgb1984 — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:43:18 +0000

Debian: The Universal Operating System, same as the past 25 years.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Better pre-commit, re-engineered in Rust"

jgb1984 — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:10:37 +0000

I did some digging in the issues and PR's of pre-commit, the guy seems to be a major douche. Too bad, because uv is amazing. Might look at an alternative to pre-commit in the future.

New comment by jgb1984 in "I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars"

jgb1984 — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 23:26:06 +0000

You're falling into the false dichotomy that always comes up with these topics: as if the choice is between the cloud and renting rack space while applying your own thermal paste on the CPUs. In reality, for most people, renting dedicated servers is the goldilocks solution (not colocation with your own hardware). You get an incredible amount of power for a very reasonable price, but you don't need to drive to a datacenter to swap out a faulty PSU, the on site engineers take care of that for you. I ordered an extra server today from Hetzner. It was available 90 seconds afterwards. Using their installer I had Ubuntu 24.04 LTS up and running, and with some Ansible playbooks to finish configuration, all in all from the moment of ordering to fully operational was about 10 minutes tops. If I no longer need the server I just cancel it, the billing is per hour these days.

Bang for the buck is unmatched, and none of the endless layers of cloud abstraction getting in the way. A fixed price, predictable, unlimited bandwidth, blazing fast performance. Just you and the server, as it's meant to be. I find it a blissful way to work.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?"

jgb1984 — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:25:49 +0000

I don't use AI. Problem solved. The software I make will be better off in the long term.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Python developers are embracing type hints"

jgb1984 — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 09:24:40 +0000

There is nothing python-2 about my python-3 dynamically typed code. I'm pretty confident a majority of new python code is still being written without type hints.

Hell, python type annotations were only introduced in python 3.5, the language was 24 years old by then! So no, the way I write python is the way it was meant to be, type hints are the gadget that was bolted on when the language was already fully matured, it's pretty ridiculous painting code without type hints as unpythonic, that's the world upside down.

If I wanted to write very verbose typed code I would switch to Go or Rust. My python stays nimble, clean and extremely readable, without type hints.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Python developers are embracing type hints"

jgb1984 — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 07:09:52 +0000

Couldn't agree more! I've been using Python for almost 20 years, my whole career is built on it, and I never missed typing. Code with type hints is so verbose and unpythonic, making it much harder to read. Quite an annoying evolution.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Zoxide: A Better CD Command"

jgb1984 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 11:44:24 +0000

I was using autojump for years (on debian) until I lost my jump history several times in the past few months. Turns out it's a known race condition bug fixed in a newer version:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1110899

Migrated to zoxide instead, seems to work fine! Only need to get used to using z instead of j, muscle memory hard to adjust, might set an alias :)

New comment by jgb1984 in "Nvidia buys $5B in Intel"

jgb1984 — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 07:29:54 +0000

I've been using Nvidia gpus exclusively on debian linux for the past 20 years, using the binary Nvidia drivers. Rock solid stability and excellent performance. I don't care for Wayland as I plan to stay on Xorg + Openbox for as long as I can.

New comment by jgb1984 in "It is worth it to buy the fast CPU"

jgb1984 — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 09:41:31 +0000

Specifically: buy a good desktop computer. I couldn't imagine working on a laptop several hours per day (even with an external screen + keyboard + mouse you're still stuck with subpar performance).

New comment by jgb1984 in "DBCrust – A modern database CLI"

jgb1984 — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 07:20:26 +0000

No way an AI built tool is getting anywhere near my database.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?"

jgb1984 — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 06:50:33 +0000

I'm not using AI for anything. I read and write my own emails, make my own slides, write my own python code using vim, debian, openbox, bash and tmux, just as I have been for almost 20 years. I don't even use an LSP or autocompletion! Hell, I even read actual books, on paper!

And yes, I did test ChatGPT, claude, cursor, aider... They produce subpar code, riddled with subtle and not so subtle bugs, each of my attempts turned out to be a massive waste of time.

LLM is a plague and I wish it had never showed up, the negative effects on so many aspects of the world are numerous and saddening.

New comment by jgb1984 in "GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that's not the worst of it"

jgb1984 — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 07:07:47 +0000

I don't understand how you can have the patience to deal with an LLM like that. As if you're dealing with a low skilled but highly stubborn intern. Sounds like an awful waste of time to me.

New comment by jgb1984 in ""I met a founder who writes 10k lines of code a day thanks to AI""

jgb1984 — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 08:46:51 +0000

What a load of crap.

New comment by jgb1984 in "Software Rot"

jgb1984 — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 13:43:17 +0000

Today we vibecode our software, so the rot is built in from day one!