Hacker News: julik

New comment by julik in "What we know so far about Spain train crash"

julik — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 09:37:34 +0000

So they have lineside signaling as backup but it does not have blocks? That looks like misengineering, wow. Some reports said that the renfe train rolled for 25km - if this is what their fallback is like - it is absolutely inexcusable. Oh my...

New comment by julik in "What we know so far about Spain train crash"

julik — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 11:18:09 +0000

It is the proper procedure, and it does come (in a lot of countries, AFAIK) with a lot of guardrails:

There will be a so-called "train order" allowing passage of a specific section ignoring the safety system warnings, which has strict validity limits both in time and in the area where it applies, usually denoted by specific hectometric mileposts

When cab signaling is involved (LZB is one of these) and it malfunctions, the entire system normally changes to "driving on sight only" - which indeed limits the train to 40, 30, 20, sometimes - 15 km/h (see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marche_%C3%A0_vue) or the line gets switched to lineside signaling - if it is available.

I don't know how you could violate all of those rules - both from the driver's side and from the traffic control side - but it sounds absolutely horrible. Like an override of at least 2 (if not 3) very explicit safety margins.

Herringbone: A pure Ruby Parquet I/O library

julik — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 11:12:15 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/julik/herringbone

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50287231

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by julik in "I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories"

julik — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 22:17:51 +0000

Many did, however it was never in the open source package. A few tried (Hippocratic license, which guaranteed that your software wouldn't be used by pretty much anyone) but it doesn't work. It is hard to only give things to parties you like - moreover, have a guarantee that you both like them today _and_ will like them in the future.

Having your work hoovered up by Big AI is no different to having your app hosted by AWS whereby AWS makes a ton of money and you get the bug reports to fix for free (if you are lucky). Only before it would take AWS to fork and maintain something like OpenSearch in such a situation.

It's a sad situation but exploitation is hardly new, and hardly unique to software.

New comment by julik in "I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories"

julik — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 18:57:00 +0000

It was "where are the vibecoded Photoshops" a year or two ago. Behold: now they are here - crude in places but workable. Building a new pro-level app with its own UI paradigms and concepts is going to be the next frontier. Give it 6 to 12 months, I'd say.

New comment by julik in "I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories"

julik — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 18:51:11 +0000

No, like outsourcing the inbetweening - which was being done for decades at this point

Thank you, but I prefer it my way

julik — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 15:03:53 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.julik.nl/2026/10/thanks-but-i-prefer-it-my-way

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50221955

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by julik in "Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby"

julik — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:09:31 +0000

Appreciate the feedback.

That said: I am not obligated to quote a speech that is freely available for everyone to listen to or to read. I don't know which "comments" exactly I have "distorted", but - on the other hand - this is an opinion piece, not a Reuters ticker report.

New comment by julik in "Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby"

julik — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:52:51 +0000

I think I have received more of what was _not_ said than of what was said. I did watch the entire thing a couple of times just to make sure I haven't missed something. I think this article explains it better https://jardo.dev/what-about-rails

New comment by julik in "Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby"

julik — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:48:15 +0000

True, and there is also Crystal which is - in a few aspects - better than Go even, and has way more pleasant aesthetics.

The way the JVM didn't take off doesn't surprise me because Sun and Oracle have bodged it so bad, and because there were legitimate issues using the JVM when your project was small. I can't shake the feeling that to this day, even the coveted JetBrains products still fill like Swing. Indents are ugly, widgets are ugly, window refresh takes 3-4 refresh frames instead of 0, font rendering is just-not-quite-good-enough... and that does stick.

Also, the Java community was not necessarily receptive to progress - mostly because so much stuff depends on it (including very highly paid, senior carreers). They mostly went "The JVM is great for developing your own toy language, go have at it" but it would always be the-actual-Java interop. For example, my adventures with Clojure ended very abruptly because I simply do not know Java well enough to feel comfortable when I get a NullPointerException.

Which I obviously did get on my second line of REPL input.

New comment by julik in "Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby"

julik — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:43:26 +0000

The journey always has value, in retrospect (if you manage to get through in one piece). But - to be honest - if I could have prompted my way to the software I built back then instead of grinding through the bits and bobs - I would have done it.

I can appreciate the internal beauty but getting "a thing that does thing and does it well", and seeing others enjoy using it has way more value for me than "what type system could work more elegantly here".

New comment by julik in "Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby"

julik — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:39:10 +0000

Thank you for stopping to read my article and yet mustering the energy to write such a long rebuttal. The point about hexapdf is duly noted, my omission.

I deliberately refrain from the whole DHH racism/faschism/nazism/oligarchy axis because that is not something I would like to convey nor discuss where I post.

You are right that he is primarily a businessman - and a very successful at that, specifically in marketing and creating hype. The very point that I am making though, is that of all the application points he could choose for applying his hype prowess he chose to dunk on the community that got him where he is.

And one of the things I have enjoyed immensely - and I know I am not alone in this - is writing Ruby commercially, also with other people. Simply due to DHH being such an influencing figure - the markets do notice, so whoever already was yelling "Ruby is dead" now gets more ammunition. I do believe this was an absolutely unnecessary, harmful gesture. But hey - it happened.

> And you can also try to convince the hexapdf author to improve hexapdf

The days of spending months to convince anyone of anything like that are largely over, but that deserves another article - and it's not a great phenomenon, even though it produces more artifacts (a lot of them quite good).

New comment by julik in "Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby"

julik — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:29:08 +0000

If people want to have the OG transcript - they can always find it. I was translating the message he (willingly or not) has sent out to that particular audience, in that particular context.

New comment by julik in "Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby"

julik — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:26:09 +0000

...maybe, but for now - we dance (OP here)

New comment by julik in "Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby"

julik — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:24:53 +0000

When I was becoming a self-taught software engineer it also was hilarious, no doubt about it - and very inefficient. I did enjoy it and did build some stuff, and not all of it was bad.

So, if anything, if the intent is "I can do it all myself and I will fire you now" - I love to see them stumble, if the intent is "I want to get my hands dirty and let's work together" - I will be happy to assist. It's not a pipe dream: it does happen.

New comment by julik in "Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby"

julik — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:20:39 +0000

OP here - no, I am not under pressure to do vibe code for work, I do it willingly (but - IMO - responsibly). And I do not think hand-coding will be sustainable for most tasks simply because it will be very hard to justify in most situations where you work with other people - be it on community basis or commercially. It's hard to say "I have to spend a week doing this by hand" when the next person is expecting you to do this in an afternoon (and rightly so).

I think we should write code by hand from time to time to not lose currency - but it's not the primary nor the default anymore.

Living in the Weimar Era of Ruby

julik — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:53:41 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.julik.nl/2026/10/the-weimar-of-ruby

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054474

Points: 99

# Comments: 57

New comment by julik in "Show HN: Performative-UI – a react component library of design tropes"

julik — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:54:32 +0000

That is absolutely delightful

New comment by julik in "Cloudflare Flagship"

julik — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:44:59 +0000

https://github.com/flippercloud/flipper

New comment by julik in "Stop Using Conventional Commits"

julik — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:23:42 +0000

It is bad terminology, yes. But also - a pretense that you know the overarching influence of a commit ahead of time, which you don't - but once you have conventional commits everyone on the team and the LLMs have to spend time/tokens inventing that stupid nomenclature.