Hacker News: sjamaan

New comment by sjamaan in "Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)"

sjamaan — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:52:15 +0000

> Also you get to do cool SQL shit nobody understands and you become invaluable =)

Goddamn right!

New comment by sjamaan in "Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people"

sjamaan — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:11:24 +0000

The people involved in commissioning and funding nuclear power plants don't understand nuclear physics either.

The customer doesn't need to understand how the solution works, as long as they can understand that it would solve their problem (in the case of the power plant: producing "clean" energy) and any potential drawbacks or limitations (in the case of the power plant: the waste byproduct).

The point here is that as a "tech person", it's your job to help the customer understand the cost of what they're asking, and come up with a satisfactory solution based on your understanding of their needs.

New comment by sjamaan in "An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story"

sjamaan — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:26:14 +0000

So much is missing from this story. Did they report it to the relevant data authority? Did the fix they said they applied actually fix anything? Etc.

New comment by sjamaan in "Stop Sloppypasta"

sjamaan — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:41:27 +0000

I think before, it was easier to spot. Before, the effort spent would often show in the volume or consistency of the writing. Now, one can create a big, wordy and convincing-sounding document (without any grammatical errors!) in mere seconds. It also provides for some convenient plausible deniability: you can always claim the LLM only helped you here and there with the wording.

So now, even figuring out that it was a careless or lazy job takes a lot more time, which drastically skews the economics in favor of the careless person.

New comment by sjamaan in "Technical Excellence Is Not Enough"

sjamaan — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:15:38 +0000

I realize it's been "written" by an LLM, but the content could have been written by someone I know. It's eerie how this person thinks exactly the same way. It's never their fault, always the others', and they are always obviously right and no amount of arguing can change their mind.

On The Problem of LLM-Assisted Contributions to Open Source Projects

sjamaan — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 08:49:50 +0000

Article URL: http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/articles/open-source-and-llm-contributions.txt

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47163577

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by sjamaan in "“Car Wash” test with 53 models"

sjamaan — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:00:04 +0000

Exactly this. The question states it as a fact, so why would you go back and point out the inconsistency?

New comment by sjamaan in "Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data"

sjamaan — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:54:54 +0000

Also, car companies have a lot at stake and are a clear target. The scammer is hard to even identify, and has no reputation to worry about. Of course in case of a sold extension, the original author of the extension may have a reputation they care about, but only if they're still making other extensions.

New comment by sjamaan in "Why S7 Scheme? (2020)"

sjamaan — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:25:07 +0000

S7 is very cool indeed. It also comes as a single C file, which makes it easy to embed.

As a CHICKEN maintainer, I'd love to hear what the author was missing in the FFI part of the manual.

New comment by sjamaan in "Show HN: We Built the 1. EU-Sovereignty Audit for Websites"

sjamaan — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:42:50 +0000

Good point regarding registrar. Thinking a bit further, there's also the top-level domain: if that's under US control (eg .com), it could still be yanked away from you.

New comment by sjamaan in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

sjamaan — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:58:22 +0000

My blog is at https://www.more-magic.net, mostly about programming (with a focus on Scheme) or adjacent stuff.

New comment by sjamaan in "Eat Real Food"

sjamaan — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 10:45:54 +0000

> - Force better labeling, like the Nutri-Score in France and EU

NutriScore is mostly useless, to the point of being misleading. The system was cooked up by the industry, which explains a lot.

It is a label that tells you how nutritious a given product is "compared to products in the same category". So you could have, say, candy or frozen pizza with a NutriScore A and that would be just fine according to this system because it happens to be more nutritious than other candy/pizza. In other words, a product having a NutriScore of A doesn't mean the product is actually healthy or good for you.

New comment by sjamaan in "The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source"

sjamaan — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 07:59:36 +0000

Then you should support the Free Software Europe's "Public Money, Public Code" campaign: https://publiccode.eu/en/

Trustworthy software through non-profits?

sjamaan — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 05:11:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.more-magic.net/posts/trustworthy-software-through-non-profits.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46157040

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by sjamaan in "Notes on Bhutan"

sjamaan — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 04:23:33 +0000

Yeah, investing it in bitcoin sure beats selling the power to India at bargain bin prices during summer time only to have to buy it back in winter time at premium rates. I think this really shows his majesty's wisdom and ability to think ahead (iiuc it was his decision to start mining bitcoins using green energy).

New comment by sjamaan in "Notes on Bhutan"

sjamaan — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 08:31:16 +0000

Tourism is not really a growth sector. There are too many hotels already, with hoteliers complaining they can't get bookings at a decent price because there's too much competition undercutting them, and tour operators demanding lower prices than is sustainable.

Truthfully, the GMC is Bhutan's best bet at growth. The idea is to attract foreign talent who can train and educate locals, so that it can act as an attractor for youths, and a flywheel for prosperity in the country.

New comment by sjamaan in "The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing"

sjamaan — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 06:00:27 +0000

Same with the big Crowdstrike fail of 2024. Especially when everyone kept repeating the laughable statement that these guys have their shit in order, so it couldn't possibly be a simple fuckup on their end. Guess what, they don't, and it was. And nobody has realized the importance of diversity for resilience, so all the major stuff is still running on Windows and using Crowdstrike.

New comment by sjamaan in "My stages of learning to be a socially normal person"

sjamaan — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 10:19:53 +0000

> When someone uses my name in conversation, it makes me think less of them, because it's so unnatural and clearly they might be doing it to manipulate me.

Oh man, I always find it so slimy when people do that! I've also noticed it's mostly HR people or sales people who do this, so clearly it's a phony technique they learned somewhere. But I suppose it gets taught because it works, maybe for people who don't pick up on the fact that it's so forced?

New comment by sjamaan in "What the hell have you built"

sjamaan — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:29:34 +0000

Sounds like the best type of place to work for me. Instead of being a replaceable cog in a meat grinder that doesn't even pay well, working with boring tech, you get to work with talented people in an actually interesting language and get decently paid.

And best of all, you don't feel the need to keep chasing after the latest hype just to keep your CV relevant.

New comment by sjamaan in "What the hell have you built"

sjamaan — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:04:01 +0000

This is also how you can identify decent places to work at: look for job postings that emphasize you aren't expected to already know the language.

For example, in the recent "who's hiring" thread, I saw at least two places where they did that: Duckduckgo (they mention only algorithms and data structures and say "in case you're curious, we use Perl") and Stream (they offer a 10-week intro course to Go if you're not already familiar with it). If I remember correctly, Jane Street also doesn't require prior OCaml experience.

The place where I work (bevuta IT GmbH) also allowed me to learn Clojure on the job (but it certainly helped that I was already an expert in another Lisp dialect).

These hiring practices are a far cry from those old style job postings like "must have 10+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails" when the framework was only 5 years old.