Hacker News: satnhak

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

satnhak — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:47:53 +0000

Fake news

New comment by satnhak in "Lines of code got a better publicist"

satnhak — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:51:38 +0000

I once worked in a company where there was an 80% code coverage requirement. Some enterprising contractor had a script that generated a single file with its own covering test suite the size of which could be tuned to achieve 80% over the whole codebase. Mostly the code was untested.

New comment by satnhak in "European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low"

satnhak — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:28:27 +0000

The problem is that if you look at Russia's actions they are mostly rational and predictable. And by Russian standards Putin is a moderate. The Western wet dream is to "Yugoslavia" Russia. Balkanize it, load it with debt and take all of its assets. They had their man in Yeltsin, but he was such an egregious drunk that even the CIA couldn't get him reelected. In many ways, if you look at things objectively, there may not be a Russia without Putin.

(and you show me a major country where they aren't poisoning political opponents, conducting significantly less relevant wars than the one in Ukraine, and all kinds of other things)

New comment by satnhak in "European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low"

satnhak — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:56:06 +0000

"Russia is good, actually" is a hard sell to anyone who has been indoctrinated by a lifetime of Western Russophobia. Is I think what you meant.

New comment by satnhak in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

satnhak — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:44:37 +0000

Good teachers have a thorough understanding of what they are teaching. My guess is that most teachers in UK schools don't. From my undergraduate degree, many years ago, the only people who went into teaching were bottom of the class. For example after a 3 year maths degree a guy who was enrolled in a teacher training course after graduation did not know what a linear function was (y = Ax + C simply blew his mind). It's hard to attract talent because at best it's a lifestyle job that is kind of awful while you're doing it where the pay is low and the expectations are low, but gives you 1/3 of the year off as compensation. Unless your primary concern is a job that fits around childcare, then teaching is not the job for a capable person (pragmatically). Also 80% of the concern in schools now is "safeguarding", which from what I can tell assumes that everyone is a constant threat to everyone.

Learning is not supposed to be fun, the way playing games is supposed to be fun. Sitting alone with books for hours at a time and thinking on problems has a certain joy to it, but that's hard won. Kidding children into thinking that it is, is a huge disservice to them.

New comment by satnhak in "EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada"

satnhak — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:27:43 +0000

The problem the UK has had is that although the British people voted to leave the EU, most MPs we're against it and there was a very concerted effort to not honour the electorate's wishes. Brexit happened in name and by default. It was the worst possible outcome, but probably predictable.

New comment by satnhak in "EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada"

satnhak — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:14:38 +0000

Actually, the EU has lots of (probably) intractible problems. For example the closest thing it has to a constitution is the TREATY OF LISBON (the constitution project having fallen apart), which begins HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF THE BELGIANS (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...). Compare that with the US constitution that begins "We the People of the United States" and you start to understand how bad the situation for the EU is.

New comment by satnhak in "Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE"

satnhak — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:30:54 +0000

That's exactly what I was thinking.

New comment by satnhak in "Mo RAM, Mo Problems (2025)"

satnhak — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:20:21 +0000

Thanks! Amazing website, so many useful articles. Wish I had a couple of free years to work through these books https://fabiensanglard.net/Computer_Graphics_Principles_and_...

New comment by satnhak in "I am building a cloud"

satnhak — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:35:11 +0000

AWS. Months of complex dev work to build using their CDK. Terrible disk speed. Frustrating permissions systems. Tiny deployments that take 30 minutes. Rollbacks that get stuck for hours. What you end up with is about 4 CPUs and 16Gb of RAM for $1000+ per month. No wonder Bezos could send his wife and Katie Perry on a jolly into space. The world's richest man 1 IOP at a time.

For that money I can get 5 big bare metal boxes on OVH with fast SSDs, put k0s on them, fast deploy with kluctl, cloudflare tunnels for egress. Backups to a cheap S3 bucket somewhere. I'll never look at another cloud provider.