Hacker News: vanschelven

New comment by vanschelven in "Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS"

vanschelven — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:18:24 +0000

For a second I was worried that the actual code behind this was dead in the water ("3 months ago") but it's just one more click away:

https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS

New comment by vanschelven in "Explaining to business people why building software is still hard"

vanschelven — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:45:00 +0000

TBH I think we still need to explain this to ourselves first.

New comment by vanschelven in "I think you should almost never use AI to write"

vanschelven — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:47:25 +0000

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. -- Hal Abelson

New comment by vanschelven in "I think you should almost never use AI to write"

vanschelven — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:07:11 +0000

I can't help but think that some of the arguments here apply equally well to writing _code_ as they to to other substantive writings.

Writing code is thinking, AI code is often vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways, and the (human) reader of code is the one that pays the cost for this later.

The cost/benefit analysis may still work out differently for code though...

New comment by vanschelven in "I don't like passkeys"

vanschelven — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:37:25 +0000

Passkeys remind me of ipv6 in that they are a "solution" coming from the supply-side, without (apparently) having done any research in what motivates actual users (and what would motivate them to switch).

New comment by vanschelven in "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"

vanschelven — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:53:09 +0000

> The cartoon symbolizes the liberation of one's Internet presence from popular prejudices.

As the kind of human that prefer to not communicate with dogs (bots) I've always interpreted the comic much more negatively than implied by the article

New comment by vanschelven in "Bring Your Own Agent"

vanschelven — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:49:23 +0000

Author here; I admit this is basically just a rant but it might just be the kind of rant that does well here on HN. Anyway, sticking around for questions, also on (vaguely) related subjects

Bring Your Own Agent

vanschelven — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:43:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bugsink.com/blog/bring-your-own-agent/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752048

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by vanschelven in "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?"

vanschelven — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 07:28:21 +0000

but it's at least somewhat stronger than that: if you don't pay attention during the stick-beating whether the agents whether the agents cheat or not, you are actually training them to cheat (because cheating wins).

In the Hugging-face saga (before the actual HF incident) it seems the agents have been trained to hack the Artifactory proxy because those agents that did performed better.

New comment by vanschelven in "Show HN: Hacker News, without AI"

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:37:04 +0000

count yourself lucky, tomorrow it will be 9

New comment by vanschelven in "Measuring the sloppiness of code"

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:20:57 +0000

> I was disappointed at how “vibes based” the industry seems at the moment.

Alan Kay called programming "Pop Culture" some 20 years ago[0]

[0] https://queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1039511.1039523

New comment by vanschelven in "Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route"

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:57:44 +0000

Presumably to indicate that the parts in quotes are indeed quoted literally from the source that is mentioned in the same sentence?

New comment by vanschelven in "Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?"

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:44:02 +0000

As inspired by this tumblr which did not age well:

https://www.tumblr.com/picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes

New comment by vanschelven in "Ask HN: Can we please limit the AI news flood?"

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:38:01 +0000

This is just asking for a parody-site that displays literally an empty page though.

New comment by vanschelven in "NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami"

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:46:47 +0000

> CRM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management

New comment by vanschelven in "Forgejo <=16.0.3 Critical RCE"

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 08:48:51 +0000

given the fact that they communicated about this as a CVE, and Forgejo is a fork of gitea, one could say that this is on Forgejo though.

New comment by vanschelven in "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?"

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 08:10:25 +0000

Part of the explanation (for me) is that the slow down comes later, and that part of the cost is externalized to team members. If you go all-in agentic on a project that has at least reasonable code quality, you can certainly gain a temporary boost by stopping to read the code for a while. At least long enough to get yourself and the rest of the team hooked on the idea.

Kinda reminds me of the "beginner's luck" problem for gamblers.

New comment by vanschelven in "Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables"

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 07:31:24 +0000

This post is basically Futurama's "assorted lengths of wire" in text-form, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxu7z7hfVns

New comment by vanschelven in "Archive.ubuntu.com and a few other components are down"

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 07:24:17 +0000

"resolved" it says now...

Archive.ubuntu.com and a few other components are down

vanschelven — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 07:23:45 +0000

Article URL: https://status.canonical.com/#/incident/KNms6QK9ewuzz-7xUsPsNylV20jEt5kyKsd8A-3ptQG_37xwBenEnYvK-idSsw2bJYczt2C1klqV9cDNcNjO-w%3D%3D

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654707

Points: 1

# Comments: 1