Hacker News: spkm

New comment by spkm in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

spkm — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:29:17 +0000

I'm a german software developer working for a japanese corporation in a german subsidiary. I agree with pretty much everything in your post. Especially the exhausting chain of approvals and also the unwillingness to make quick/tough decisions feels like walking through molasses at times. However, there is also an upside to this. I can actually confirm that they take quality control very serious, probably due to the losing face cultural thing if the product fails the customer and therefore rarely do quick last minute changes or crunch, because it degrades quality.

New comment by spkm in "Germany's train service is one of Europe's worst. How did it get so bad?"

spkm — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:47:31 +0000

Privatization and capitalism.

New comment by spkm in "Just use a button"

spkm — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 21:02:31 +0000

Just don't use animated gifs inbetween text.

New comment by spkm in "Self-hosting email like it's 1984"

spkm — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:59:56 +0000

I've been selfhosting for like dunno 10-15 years. Cheap kimsufi box, opensmtp, dovecot, later then rspamd, done. Never really had a problem. At one point telekom.de blocked my mailserver. I contacted them via postmaster@telekom.de (or something) explaining that while kimsufix boxes are notorious for shady stuff, this is actually a legit mailserver and they whitelisted me shortly after (yeah I was surprised too how smooth that went). So, yeah, can't confirm all the troubles everyone seems to get on about. However I do own the kimsufi box (and the corresponding IP) for a long time now, so maybe I'm just lucky.

New comment by spkm in "That Old NetBSD Server, Running Since 2010"

spkm — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 10:52:41 +0000

"void linux" is a great distro if you want BSD-like but still linux. It also uses runit instead of systemd.

New comment by spkm in "Unix is both a technology and an idea"

spkm — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 11:20:58 +0000

Fully agree. Also, jq exists, a simple example how open and simple interfaces (text streams) allow for extensibility. There is a reason why so much is built on top of "simple terminals".

New comment by spkm in "My (Herb Sutter's) C++ Now 2023 talk is online: “A TypeScript for C++”"

spkm — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 00:57:20 +0000

Probably not, I'm just wondering why a C++ toolchain is supposed to handle this though.

New comment by spkm in "My (Herb Sutter's) C++ Now 2023 talk is online: “A TypeScript for C++”"

spkm — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 00:07:22 +0000

> That means you have a mix of FORTRAN, ada, c, rust, some custom internal corporate language, and so on all mixed with the C++. If your build system cannot handle that mess i'm not interested

In that case I would just use the rust toolchain which I'm sure can handle this stew.

New comment by spkm in "C++23: The Next C++ Standard"

spkm — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 23:55:43 +0000

Maybe if you used a typesafe language, you wouldn't have to track down 100 other more significant problems (:

New comment by spkm in "XUL Layout is gone"

spkm — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 12:03:40 +0000

I work for a Japanese company and if you've ever worked with them you know they go crazy with testing (often automated). I get bugreports like this constantly. And while you might argue if that's a use case or not (mostly it's not), a crash is still a crash! We do go the extra mile to analyze and fix those. It makes the software overall more robust and on occasion you really find a much severe underlying issue that would have exploded in your face also in other, more realistic workflows. Don't dismiss bugs without at least understanding what's happening! As others have stated, a lot of these weird issues are race conditions which might suggest a bigger problem in the design.

New comment by spkm in "Productivity Blocker"

spkm — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 10:33:41 +0000

"Got it!"

New comment by spkm in "Show HN: Match(it): A C++17 pattern-matching library with lots of good stuffs"

spkm — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 19:12:09 +0000

TBF, everyone hates these cryptic errors :)

New comment by spkm in "Show HN: Match(it): A C++17 pattern-matching library with lots of good stuffs"

spkm — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 19:10:21 +0000

It's my impression that people tend to underestimate "junior engineers" in the C++ world. I'm always impressed at conferences that there are so many young people holding presentations about really advanced topics.

IMHO this "no junior will ever understand that" attitude comes mostly from older folks who learned C++ as C with classes and to whom even the STL is a work of the devil.

New comment by spkm in "Can the 64 and 128 survive? (1988) [pdf]"

spkm — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 00:22:58 +0000

I miss my childhood :(

New comment by spkm in "TensorFlow Lite for Commodore 64"

spkm — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:08:29 +0000

It's worse, turns out in the end it's just 0s and 1s.

New comment by spkm in "Running a private mail server for six years, easy peasy"

spkm — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 18:43:34 +0000

I absolutely agree. I'm also self-hosting all sorts of stuff, including mail (opensmtpd, dovecot) and never really had a problem. At some point a mail to telekom.de was refused by the telekom because of my IP (I host on a kimsufi/OVH box). However, after contacting telekom about it they immediately removed me from the blacklist and it works fine ever since.

New comment by spkm in "Ask HN: What do you think of the Wordle guy not monetizing it?"

spkm — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 14:40:38 +0000

Which is my fetish.

New comment by spkm in "See how DMARC, SPF, and DKIM work interactively"

spkm — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 22:31:09 +0000

Same here. A test email to my google account indicates it passed DKIM.

New comment by spkm in "The Day the Good Internet Died"

spkm — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 23:52:28 +0000

Yeah, everybody does it with wordpress now.

New comment by spkm in "New in Git: switch and restore"

spkm — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 18:54:34 +0000

I completely agree. At work we still use SVN, so I'm used to TortoiseSVN which is OK imo. Now for GIT there's TortoiseGIT, but it was such a bad experience. The TortoiseSVN background made it even worse, because things seemed similar, but did totally different things. So weirdly, for SVN I still use Tortoise, but for GIT, I prefer the CLI client.