Hacker News: vandahm

New comment by vandahm in "What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)"

vandahm — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:56:30 +0000

I generally like ORMs but recognize that they have a lot of problems. The most common problem that I've seen is when an ORM makes it easy to select records in a way that looks efficient but really is not. Strictly speaking, this isn't a failure of the ORM itself -- it's the fault of the developer who is using the ORM and also the developer that didn't catch it in code review. But it's a case where the ORM is making work for everyone and obscuring legibility into the code instead of saving time and providing clarity.

I've written complicated stuff where an ORM isn't appropriate, but if I'm honest, a large fraction of what I've done in my career is just making boring software to automate menial clerical work, and ORMs are good enough for those kinds of projects.

New comment by vandahm in "Why I email complete strangers"

vandahm — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 05:21:23 +0000

I think the last time I emailed a stranger when I had no business reason to do so was to thank someone for creating an excellent set of instructions for running OpenBSD on the exact model of laptop I wanted to use. I didn't expect a response and I didn't receive a response. I just thought he should know that something he did helped someone else, and now he knows.

New comment by vandahm in "French-Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis', dies at 56"

vandahm — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:34:12 +0000

I read Persepolis in French, and I don't speak French as a native language, so I worry that I missed some of the art and the nuance of it. But, even so, I thought it was beautiful. She was an extremely talented storyteller, and I'm sad that she left us so soon.

New comment by vandahm in "Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled"

vandahm — Sat, 30 May 2026 06:45:46 +0000

This is what the internet is for. I only remember playing this game once or twice on a friend's N64, so I don't have any nostalgia for it, but the idea that someone chose this as their strange, impractical personal project is really satisfying.

New comment by vandahm in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

vandahm — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:59:35 +0000

I build ukuleles and guitars from scratch. That's not as niche as what a lot of people do -- it's just woodworking -- but I do software for a living and enjoy making durable, physical things in my free time.

New comment by vandahm in "I Don't Like Magic"

vandahm — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 21:30:00 +0000

I've used React on projects and understand its usefulness, but also React has killed my love of frontend development. And now that everyone is using it to build huge, clunky SPAs instead of normal websites that just work, React has all but killed my love of using the web, too.

New comment by vandahm in "Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act"

vandahm — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 21:19:50 +0000

What are the consequences of simply disregarding the UK ruling? Does Wikipedia have British employees, offices, or financial assets?

New comment by vandahm in "Show HN: I built an app to get daily wisdom from Mr. Worldwide"

vandahm — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 04:24:36 +0000

I wish I had thought of this.

New comment by vandahm in "Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row"

vandahm — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 07:05:25 +0000

But if you don't trust Apple, how to you get the key into the Secure Enclave to begin with? Doesn't Apple control the software on your device that provides the interface into the Secure Enclave from outside of it?

New comment by vandahm in "Disco Elysium Explorer"

vandahm — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 15:19:43 +0000

I love the game, but I know a lot of people who don't, for a variety of reasons. They were very opinionated about what kind of game they were trying to make, so you'd expect it to resonate strongly with some people and not at all with others.

New comment by vandahm in "Be Aware of the Makefile Effect"

vandahm — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 10:11:33 +0000

Honestly, my .zshrc file started out as a .kshrc file that was passed down to me by an older developer about 20 years ago, when I was still in university. I've added and removed a lot of things over the years, but there are still a few parts of it that I don't totally understand, simply because they work and I've never had a reason to think about them. The guy I got it from, in turn, got his from someone else.

In the old days, I had a .fvwm2rc config file that I got from my boss in the university computing center. I had no idea how it worked! And neither did he -- he got it from a professor when he was in university.

New comment by vandahm in "My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback"

vandahm — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 19:18:08 +0000

Your kid is awesome and, even with help from adults, this is an impressive accomplishment.

New comment by vandahm in "Were RNNs all we needed?"

vandahm — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:32:24 +0000

I made a RNN for a college project because I was interested in obsolete historical technology and I thought I needed to seize the opportunity while it lasted, because once I was out of school, I'd never hear about neural networks ever again.

Mine worked, but it was very simple and dog slow, running on my old laptop. Nothing was ever going to run fast on that thing, but I remember my RNN being substantially slower than a feed-forward network would have been.

I was so confident that this was dead technology -- an academic curiosity from the 1980s and 1990s. It was bizarre to see how quickly that changed.

New comment by vandahm in "Taming the beast that is the Django ORM – An introduction"

vandahm — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 06:20:19 +0000

> Will there be additional parts that cover how to create GROUP BY queries in the ORM? I find even seasoned Django developers struggle with these.

The last time I needed to do that, I ended up crying "uncle" and writing manual SQL. I wasn't happy about doing it, but I was happy that the framework left me an escape hatch so that I could.

New comment by vandahm in "Taming the beast that is the Django ORM – An introduction"

vandahm — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 06:16:44 +0000

I used Doctrine for a few years, and I remember thinking that it was about 50% awesome and 50% terrible. I wonder what I would think if I came back to it today.

New comment by vandahm in "Taming the beast that is the Django ORM – An introduction"

vandahm — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 06:14:24 +0000

I used Django a lot from about 2007 to 2010 and, then, went for several years without using it at all. When I came back to it, I was delighted to find that everything still worked like it was supposed to, just better. Congrats on getting it right on the first try. That's...not something that happens very often in software.

New comment by vandahm in "Gentoo Linux Drops IA-64 (Itanium) Support – Gentoo Linux"

vandahm — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 19:15:10 +0000

Aren't we all?

New comment by vandahm in "Grace Version Control System"

vandahm — Fri, 10 May 2024 04:39:20 +0000

I don't develop offline, but I've developed the habit of making lots of tiny commits, then rebasing them into a single commit before pushing. To me, a commit is for something I might want to undo and a push is for something that I either want to share or am afraid of losing. I'm not suggesting this is the best way to use version control or even a good way -- just that it's a habit I've developed and don't really want to unlearn.

New comment by vandahm in "Why I hate your Single Page App (2016)"

vandahm — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:19:29 +0000

I think that, in 2024, a lot of these problems aren't as bad as they once were, but when this article was written in 2016, SPAs really were a mess. Since then, people have mostly solved the URL problem and the back-button problem, and I think that if your organization has the headcount to support it, there are advantages to having the kind of very clean separation between your backend and your user interface that an SPA can provide. For instance, They can be developed by different teams, on different release schedules. Or, you can replatform your backend without rewriting your frontend.

Even so, I kind of wish that most websites still used old-school server-rendered HTML. I still run into all kinds of glitches that just could not possibly happen on a server-rendered site. As an example, I like to visit the Deutsche Welle website to catch up on European news stories that don't make their way to the US, and sometimes their site just flat-out doesn't load, because of some caching problem that I don't care about, because it isn't my problem as someone who just wants to read the news. Since the best DW's SPA architecture can possibly do is to make it look like server-rendered HTML, it's just nothing but downside to me personally. It might make sense for Deutsche Welle itself, but I don't work for DW, and I don't get paid to care about their problems.

In the end, I think the overall message of the article still resonates in 2024, even if it doesn't resonate as strongly now as it did when it was written. I think SPAs are good technology when they are used in the right way for the right reasons. But there's a kind of dogma surrounding heavyweight JavaScript frameworks, and I think it pays to be a little skeptical as a result.

New comment by vandahm in "Blue Ball Machine"

vandahm — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 08:07:10 +0000

Variation on a theme: https://hardsafety.ytmnd.com/