<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: vladms</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vladms</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 10:15:58 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=vladms" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I compare different foundational models on the problems I solve with AI, the differences are not that large to prevent a switch if the price gets too high. I do this like each 6 months, just to assess what is the risk of getting dependent on one provider. It's not yet worring, at least for my use-cases.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 19:08:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172199</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172199</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172199</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You could say so. Over the years I paied for a couple of courses that would include the classroom lecture at some known universities and did the course homework as well. Some of the companyes I worked for also sent me to ~1-week courses when I asked if I can improve on some topics.<p>While I had an influence on the general topic of the course I ended up discovering various things that I wouldn't have expected. I did not equally like all professors, but I felt it was better than reading a text.<p>I wouldn't do this for "<insert latest language/library here>", but there are many complex interesting topics out there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 15:47:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48169966</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48169966</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48169966</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Did an LLM teach you a topic you did not feel like learning?<p>For me the best human teachers were the ones that managed to make me interested on topics that I thought are boring/useless (many times my opinion being stupid, mostly due to lack of experience).<p>So far with LLM I learn about things I know something (at least that they exist) and I am interested in, which is a small subset of things that one should learn during lifetime.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 09:10:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158371</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158371</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158371</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Instead the pressure to consume alcohol comes at a grassroots level.<p>Lately the trend seems to be slightly decreasing, see : <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890</a> (of course heavy dependent on the country and the timescale selected)<p>>  Social alcohol consumption is deeply rooted in human culture<p>This is actually dependent on the culture and not all are the same, interesting paper on the topic (in cultures with higher agricultural interdependency alchool was not used as a tool for social cohesion): <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/404116345_On_the_Functional_Redundancy_of_Alcohol_Tolerance_in_Rice_Societies" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/404116345_On_the_Fu...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 07:44:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157799</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157799</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157799</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> To them it's still a cost/benefit analysis, and history has shown short term benefit trumps many other things for these companies.<p>Doesn't that depend on the company though? Not all companies are focused in the same amount on short vs long term benefits.<p>There are costs of not following the regulation (example, did not check in detail: <a href="https://www.enforcementtracker.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.enforcementtracker.com/</a>) and I do not hear (media, social network, etc.) anybody complaining about fines so I think it will just continue ad hopefully will change their opinion at some point.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 15 May 2026 10:21:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48146815</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48146815</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48146815</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Completely agree. My point is that they will start realising it not when vibe coding (as you say, nobody will ask them for clear specifications) but as soon as they will try to use it for more than one happy path demo. Then they will "patch" one case and break another and so on. And then they will probably complain LLM-s are crap at coding, same way some lazy product manager complained before when asked questions that they did not think about ...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 20:27:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087598</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087598</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087598</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In my experience people that did not hand code enough imagine that the hard part is coding, and not clearly defining all the possible edge cases and use cases.<p>So, in my view, more people will (or should) understand now what is hard when building complex things, if they pass the stage of "I have a nice POC that works for this one case".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 08:57:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082196</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082196</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082196</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>True if you use only chatGPT to do something and accept the generated stuff as the final output.<p>Probably not the case for anime pictures, but in other domains, you can use chatGPT as a first level and then go on the improve it from there. To make a parallel: if you draw with a pencil on a piece of paper, you would still think of yourself a doer even if you did not manufacture your pencil or paper.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 08:52:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082177</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082177</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082177</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "We see something that works, and then we understand it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Reminds me of <a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/927/</a> - and to avoid confusions: everybody has good intentions and think they know better.<p>We definitely should try to improve and experiment with any system, including education, but I really doubt it is that easy to improve education and it will depend on objective, culture and political environment more than doing A or B.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 08:49:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082160</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082160</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082160</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "We see something that works, and then we understand it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The problem with "learned everything ourselves" is that you might have niche interests and you miss things. Things I learned that probably I wouldn't have by done by myself: computer architecture (memory, buses, cpu-s, instruction set), and related VHDL/Verilog; how complex is synchronization (implementing from scratch synchronization libraries); different programming paradigms (functional languages); compilers & operating systems (kernel modules, etc.); various types of maths (dsp); algorithm complexity analysis.<p>Some I ended up using more during my career than others, but knowing more definitely reduced my tendency to think "ah, that should be easy".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2026 08:41:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082124</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082124</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082124</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The more I think of it I thinkt that secrets are a tool of the rich and powerfull to keep the weak and poor subjugated. I for one think that a society with lots of transparency (think at least on financial transactions and wealth) would reach a more honest state.<p>And there are examples where this actually works - like the stock exchange: people agree that to be able to take good decisions, the publicly listed companies must be transparent.<p>Of course changing from "full secrecy mode" to "let's be more transparent" can't happen suddenly, but there are places where there are more transparent (ex: in Norway you can ask for someones tax declaration) and the country continues to function. And you can't do it in all places: if you are in a place where people hate each other for various reasons with passion (ex: skin color, place of birth, what you believe in etc.) then keeping secrecy is smart while the society solves the other things. If you think secrecy is what protect I think it is taking a huge chance. Hatefull people around will make at some point a mess and can affect someone, secrecy or not.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 09 May 2026 19:03:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077346</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077346</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077346</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "We need a federation of forges"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So does Bluesky app have control over what data it aggregates and can decide (without checking with a user) not to aggregate data from a host? I am trying to understand what are the implications for a user, and a bad scenario where one would disagree with an action of the app.<p>And if the answer is "yes" then at least when someone "makes their own app" can they easily use "Bluesky hosts list" + add special extra hosts (or remove specific hosts) so that the app relies on the platform, with the exception the disagreement point?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:13:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953923</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953923</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953923</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Meta told to pay $375M for misleading users over child safety"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Deeper than that, it might be food for thought if someone can't stop doom scrolling. It does not matter the platform, if people are "addicted" to "bad news" it might be the person at the corner of the street ("the end is nigh! repent!"), the pharmacy next block or something else.<p>I personally stopped using Facebook because it was annoying me with useless doom and aggressive comments of people on stupid topics. If it would have showed me only cat pictures (like Instagrams does) or reasonable stuff (news, etc.) I would have continued using it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:25:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47517063</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47517063</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47517063</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For voice conversations the issue can be more latency than filling the context. Without knowing the site is hard to say, but if he had multiple pages worth of text (dunno, type of cars, procedures, some emotional story, etc.) and a "slower" model, it might be worth it to use RAG to preselect fast a small portion and use LLM to refine the answer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:17:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495229</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495229</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495229</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is an adapter 3.5mm jack to USB-C which works great, so from my perspective there is no option removed.<p>I keep the adapter with my wired headphones (which I bought many years ago), and I did not encounter any issue (falling, heavy, etc.), it's just a slightly longer wire and a couple of euros spent to buy it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Mar 2026 13:11:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376345</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376345</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376345</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The total number of people working on the project might remain similar no matter if it's one company or many smaller companies. Writing clear documentation and API, well thought from the start is harder the larger the project.<p>Maybe there would be a benefit from having less layers of management, but multiple small companies or one big could have the same structure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:31:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47365807</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47365807</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47365807</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Unfortunately, the public tender process encourages awarding contracts to these giants that repeatedly fail to deliver on even basic opsec and still believe in security-by-obscurity<p>So what you think would be the solution ? From what I see (both public tender or not), I would claim that "any large IT project/company will suffer from security issues", so not sure what is the added value to single out a process (the tender) or a region (Europe) if there is no obvious alternative.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:26:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362964</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362964</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362964</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Irak war seemed to me reasonably "in plain sight". And there were other blunders as well. What I find amazing though is that more people passionately believe very strange reasons.<p>30 years ago people were like "meh, sure we don't get something, I bet there are hidden interest that I don't know about". Nowadays they are like "oh, yeah we attack country X because they have aliens that attack us telepathically, I know that for sure and if you don't agree you are an alien too!".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:22:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47353206</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47353206</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47353206</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Technology can change things but people that profit today from something will oppose a change.<p>Case in point: switching from oil to renewables - which can lower dependency to external actors a lot as solar panels and windmills have life span of years, so even if the producers suddenly refuses to sell more, one has some time to find an alternative - was done slower than it could have because of "discussions".<p>Since 20 years I almost feel the discussion "climate change or not" is fueled by people that want dependency on oil, such that we don't talk about the issue of a couple of big producer points of failure (USA, Russia, Gulf countries). Not sure if oil companies are smart enough to finance green groups (to which I agree generally but is besides the point), such that the public discourse stays in a conflict area (climate) rather than a simple one (independence), but if they are that would be meta-evil.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:14:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47353066</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47353066</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47353066</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vladms in "Show HN: s@: decentralized social networking over static sites"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It depends a lot on how accessible those services are. I tried to host some git repos 5 years ago and it was a hassle (needed mostly private git and reviews nothing fancy). I tried again this year and using forgejo was extremely easy. I don't remember exactly what problems I had before, so maybe I got better at finding things, but this time felt more polished. Containers, reasonable defaults, good tutorial on how to start, took in total less than one hour. I did in the meantime an upgrade and that was really 5 minutes (check change-log, apply it and go)<p>Of course, lots of work was done in the background to reach this point, but I think it is possible. Will I make the effort to make that happen for a social network? No, because I am not using them that much.<p>Technically things become simpler (in the sense that you can do it "at home" and if you add LLM-s to answer you when you don't know some obscure option it is even easier), but identifying well the use-case, deciding defaults, writing documentation, juggling trade-offs will remain as hard as before.<p>Note/edit: something being possible does not mean one should do it, so I think it will depend on everybody's priorities and skills. I wish though good luck to anybody trying...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:11:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47351797</link><dc:creator>vladms</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47351797</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47351797</guid></item></channel></rss>