Hacker News: repelsteeltje

New comment by repelsteeltje in "Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers"

repelsteeltje — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:35:17 +0000

Add CoolBlue (Netherlands) to that list.

Initially a post order-only for consumer electronics, but added bricks & mortar stores because many customers (of all ages, btw) prefer IRL service, viewing and touching actual hardware.

New comment by repelsteeltje in "Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers"

repelsteeltje — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:22:09 +0000

That's the same issue I hear Apple users complain about: how it's such a drag to copy paste screenshots from keynote into powerpoint, every time they can't present from their own laptop.

New comment by repelsteeltje in "EFF to Courts: Don't Rewrite Copyright over AI Hype"

repelsteeltje — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:17:17 +0000

I don't think the reason for copyright law is compensation, per se. It's ownership: being in a position where the creator is able to decide what to do with it. Compensation being one option, but also restricting use our controlling access.

New comment by repelsteeltje in "1960s theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer"

repelsteeltje — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:16:24 +0000

Sounds like the question Ylvis posed [1], years ago. :-)

[1] https://youtu.be/mbyzgeee2mg

New comment by repelsteeltje in "Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak"

repelsteeltje — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:35:35 +0000

The first part boils down to any civil servant: inflexibility and lower wages aren't for everyone, but it should not be impossible to attract talent intrinsically motivated to contribute to public cause. Especially when it's OSS.

The second part is a bit closer to the heresy angle: new public management forbids competing with "free market". Of course, many EU governments have always found and used all kinds of loopholes to support "independent enterprises" like railways, airlines, power companies and banks once they become too big to fail.

Maybe commodity open source software has reached that level too...

New comment by repelsteeltje in "Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak"

repelsteeltje — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:50:46 +0000

Well put.

Would it make more sense if this Sovereign Tech Agency behaved less like a Sovereign Tech Fund and simply hired the developers? Or is civil servants developing OSS commodities too much of a heresy?

New comment by repelsteeltje in "Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022"

repelsteeltje — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:20:36 +0000

While I usually prefer to attribute incompetence rather than malice, it's hard to deny corruption is a likely factor here too. But the "freakton of money" aspect IMO needs nuance. I wager that the wealth of those cronies doesn't come close to my western living standards, so who am I to judge?

New comment by repelsteeltje in "Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022"

repelsteeltje — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:43:31 +0000

Okay, but isn't it likely that the outcome of those scientific investigations will be that the Himalayan foothills should not be inhabited at all, except maybe a couple of places? What I mean is: Sure, politicians and contractors could do better, but I believe the primary reason for villages and bridges in those valleys is that people want them there. Standard of living is exceptionally low and this is just one of many hazards.

New comment by repelsteeltje in "Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers"

repelsteeltje — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:39:24 +0000

But that would simply result in Most Americans don't want AI Data Centers, which isn't the same as NYMBYism. I think many Americans see the benefits of having access to unicorn farts and may even support having more data centers. Just not in my backyard, thank you.

(Ftr. the article doesn't have an opinion on whether Americans like AI, just my take.)

New comment by repelsteeltje in "OpenNode – Bitcoin Payment Processor"

repelsteeltje — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:18:59 +0000

The ambiguity of the word "Open" has a long history. Going back to at least late 1980s, when X Window "skin" OPEN LOOK (by AT&T - Sun consortium) had license issues and Open Source Foundation started work on OSF Motif.

New comment by repelsteeltje in "OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation"

repelsteeltje — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:13:55 +0000

That would be truly ironic: companies get big harvesting any data with questionable copyright implications, then hide behind DMCA if access to the harvest is used "inappropriately".

New comment by repelsteeltje in "OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation"

repelsteeltje — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:08:03 +0000

> [...] would be protected from the market.

One might step back and ask: why would a well funded company with free mining access to all the information in the world need to be protected from the market, if the market suggest less money and resources are sufficient?

Something something cathedral / bazaar? Communism / capitalism? Control / anarchy?

New comment by repelsteeltje in "FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder"

repelsteeltje — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:55:00 +0000

Sample accurate editing is with AAC is a pain though. Especially if you also have video, because frame rates are usually incompatible.

If you want flexibility without fully transcoding both audio and video, Opus is your friend

New comment by repelsteeltje in "FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder"

repelsteeltje — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:49:33 +0000

Why not use a lossless codec if you care about quality? Or use Opus, descent for specht and works pretty much anywhere these days.

New comment by repelsteeltje in "Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year"

repelsteeltje — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:38:46 +0000

The correlation between job cuts and ai growth is real. But it's related more to ai cost than ai performance. Especially in Oracle's highly leveraged case.

New comment by repelsteeltje in "Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes"

repelsteeltje — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:51:36 +0000

Etymologically you're correct that semites refers to [all] people from middle east and horn of Africa. But the label is from the European perspective, where it was used to refer to Jews. I'm sure that if they'd had a say in it, they would not have referred to themselves as Jews.

But yeah, there is indeed some irony in the term "antisemitism" in the context you describe

New comment by repelsteeltje in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

repelsteeltje — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:23:52 +0000

> Sorry, but to me an LLM is nothing but a tool. It is not a replacement for my expertise and it is definitely not something to outsource my thinking to.

Great on you, that's indeed how LLMs should be used, proper. But if anything, the article demonstrates someone is trying to outsource thinking to an AI agent.

New comment by repelsteeltje in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

repelsteeltje — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:25:10 +0000

I agree that's fine in that at least it's doesn't cause unmaintainable garbage. And might even get you up to speed quicker that reading the docs old school.

But the GP point, that you're better off finding people that already, truly understand and are familiar with the tech (ie. Astro), imo still stands.

New comment by repelsteeltje in "A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent"

repelsteeltje — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:59:20 +0000

You mean, use encryption (+base64 or something) as a "poor man's" string-escape? Interesting idea!

New comment by repelsteeltje in "The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++"

repelsteeltje — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:07:08 +0000

There will always be cases (like audio processing, car brakes, pace makers) where hard real-time constraints prohibit GC languages (as well as l1 cache, instruction reordering and other optimizations). Also, consider that Python's performance frequently originates in it's bindings to libraries written in C, C++, Fortran, Rust.

I recently ran a few Java benchmarks and found that an array holding a bunch of objects incurred approx 3x the number of bytes compared to the expected number based on underlying class data structure. With current RAM prices, that is something to consider if you're building software that's meant to scale. Mileage may vary, but I expect JavaScript or Python will be similar.

So, sure. There is a case to be made that ergonomics and dev velocity. And premature micro optimizations might take your focus away from good systems architecture. But I've frequently found the need to peal of leaky abstractions and having to understand and be savvy at low level stuff too. Nothing wrong with studying the guts of a C64 or Amiga, today.

Python, Java or TypeScript are good educational tools, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you'd confine yourself to them without understanding computers.