Hacker News: vanschelven

New comment by vanschelven in "Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent"

vanschelven — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:32:50 +0000

Dropping Google Analytics on a page is indeed precisely active sharing of data with Google; it just happens to use your own browser against you rather than sending the data to Google from the server of the website.

There's no "active conspiracy" needed as long as this kind of behavior keeps being normalized by comments like the above.

New comment by vanschelven in "Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent"

vanschelven — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:06:16 +0000

Google Analytics as well as Microsoft, which indeed makes "tech companies". What are you implying here really?

New comment by vanschelven in "I moved my digital stack to Europe"

vanschelven — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:36:56 +0000

The fact that these "move off US infra" posts now routinely hit #1 on HN is itself pretty telling. Another example is the public outcry here in the Netherlands over selling off the company doing the infra for an important citizen-facing piece of government software (DigiD)...

New comment by vanschelven in "I moved my digital stack to Europe"

vanschelven — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:36:12 +0000

Trump may genuinely end up being the best salesman European hosting companies ever had. I run one of the tools mentioned in this post (Bugsink) and I literally had an uptick of Danish people/companies (specifically) reaching out to me after Davos.

New comment by vanschelven in "I Moved My Digital Stack to Europe"

vanschelven — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:25:52 +0000

If you/your company is already inside the EU, you can't really escape the EU's unpredictability, but you can to some extend reduce the blast radius of the American government's whims.

New comment by vanschelven in "I moved my digital stack to Europe"

vanschelven — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:18:38 +0000

They say

> Not everything moved. Cloudflare is a US company, I still use it, and I’m at peace with that.

which you admittedly couldn't read when you complained about it.

New comment by vanschelven in "Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config"

vanschelven — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:10:05 +0000

Indeed both the "..." and "disabling over removing" were in the windows 95 UI manual

New comment by vanschelven in "“It turns out” (2010)"

vanschelven — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:32:01 +0000

Before clicking the link I thought this was going to be about over-usage of the term by LLMs... it's not in my personal "red flag" list but it does seem to have a general applicability that's not connected to actually having something to say that fits well with LLMs

New comment by vanschelven in "“It turns out” (2010)"

vanschelven — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:28:25 +0000

The rebuttal is especially interesting because it simply let's the actual usages of the term speak for themselves. It turns out (ha!) that the Cambridge example is the only case that supports the OPs case.

New comment by vanschelven in "PivotOrDie – a public startup survival tracker"

vanschelven — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:02:17 +0000

How do you actually measure likeness?

New comment by vanschelven in "Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)"

vanschelven — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:48:23 +0000

Every journey starts with the first step... And those steps are finally being taken now. Don't see why this kind of naysaying would be the top comment here

New comment by vanschelven in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

vanschelven — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:45:34 +0000

I read a text from the 60s by my grandfather this week and seeing an emdash made the LLM alarm in my head go off... Had to really stop myself before I went all "and you" on him

New comment by vanschelven in "I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure"

vanschelven — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:29:43 +0000

Fair enough... though if I were to push my point: one could also say that dumbing down your mechanisms of email sending (i.e. ditching templates, or pulling the templates to your own codebase) would give the same advantage I talked about earlier of vendor-independance

New comment by vanschelven in "I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure"

vanschelven — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:05:28 +0000

It's funny that you say that because any time I sign in to one of the big cloud providers I wonder how anyone gets any work done there _at all_...

But to answer your question it's the top one from the menu and then you get a page that couldn't be more clear (IMHO as a customer)

New comment by vanschelven in "I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure"

vanschelven — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:01:51 +0000

But the argument is reversed! The more boring your tech stack, the _easier_ it is to host it anywhere (including Europe). So choosing boring tech is actually an enabler of this (and other) choices down the line.

It's only "a political commitment" as long as it doesn't affect you yet; and from the European perspective I'd say "the affecting has begun".

New comment by vanschelven in "I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure"

vanschelven — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 13:26:12 +0000

Happy to see Bugsink mentioned here as a solution for Error Tracking _and_ to not see it show up as one of the "harder parts" :-)

Just as a FYI: if self-hosting ever turns out to be too much work, it's also available Hosted.

New comment by vanschelven in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

vanschelven — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 14:37:43 +0000

Europe managed the first ~60 years of computing without the cloud just fine, and (as per greybeard HN-style comment) one can in fact wonder how much of the past 15 years of innovation has actually brought us for "your average org".

Also: there may be _a_ chance that the situation will improve, but as the Dutch say "Trust Arrives on Foot, but Leaves on Horseback" and your even given your "even if" the trust thrown away in the past year will take literal decades to repair.

New comment by vanschelven in "Sentry Alternatives for Error Monitoring"

vanschelven — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 15:54:15 +0000

Did you mistakenly post this? It's simply a link to the Sentry.io "About" page rather than any exploration of alternatives.

New comment by vanschelven in "How we lost communication to entertainment"

vanschelven — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 22:40:27 +0000

I wonder if the author is aware of Neil Postman's work, especially "Amusing ourselves to death". It seems very relevant to this article.

New comment by vanschelven in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

vanschelven — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 12:00:15 +0000

It's financially beneficial for them in exactly the same way as setting yourself on fire makes you warmer