Hacker News: vogelke

New comment by vogelke in "Declining America"

vogelke — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:59:01 +0000

Probably. As an American, I have to agree with you -- it's been the case for many years (WAY before Trump) that within 50 miles of our border, your rights go to wherever last year's snow went.

It's too bad so few people can say "My country, if right to be supported, if wrong to be corrected."

New comment by vogelke in "Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)"

vogelke — Tue, 19 May 2026 05:11:20 +0000

I have a Dell 2208 monitor with 4 USB-2 ports. If I bought three of these switches, would I be able to share keyboard/mouse/monitor between two machines? My monitor does not have HDMI, just VGA.

New comment by vogelke in "Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]"

vogelke — Mon, 18 May 2026 04:19:19 +0000

Best part about open source -- Mercurial is still around, I use it for my home servers, and it's being maintained. I can use git, but Mercurial's workflow just makes more sense to me.

New comment by vogelke in "Colossus: The Forbin Project"

vogelke — Sun, 17 May 2026 07:57:29 +0000

The "Demon Seed" book was creepier (and a lot more pervy) than the movie.

New comment by vogelke in "Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise"

vogelke — Wed, 13 May 2026 16:21:40 +0000

I hope you're kidding. I've seen lots of 'Net people claim to be experts, and I wouldn't trust most of them to feed my cat.

New comment by vogelke in "Linux 7.0 Broke PostgreSQL: The Preemption Regression Explained"

vogelke — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:50:57 +0000

https://lwn.net/Articles/343828/ describes Alan Cox trying to fix the TTY layer, being trashed by Linus, and removing himself from the maintainer page.

New comment by vogelke in "The operating cost of adult and gambling startups"

vogelke — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:04:50 +0000

Exactly. Legal drugs get weaker because you can exchange information about minimum required dosages (saving money) without risking arrest.

Illegal drugs get stronger for exactly the reason you stated in your first paragraph.

New comment by vogelke in "Advancing human gut microbiota research by considering gut transit time"

vogelke — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:43:34 +0000

> It's a one lane road and "over taking" is not possible.

Best poop-related comment I've seen.

New comment by vogelke in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

vogelke — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:43:27 +0000

Your core skills are fine. Unfortunately, appreciation for those skills has already been blasted into orbit by the AI-BS bubble.

This tech has made it easier for second-handers to pass off inadequate work as the equal of your work. They're too lazy to exert the effort to read/think/write, and being second-handers, they're fine with the APPEARANCE of reading, thinking, and writing.

This has been going on for millenia, and the only fix I've seen is to call it out every time it rears its head.

New comment by vogelke in "Stop picking my Go version for me"

vogelke — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:30:22 +0000

Thank you for this article. If I want to be told when to upgrade, I know where to shop, i.e. Bill's Bloatware in Redmond.

New comment by vogelke in "Personal Encyclopedias"

vogelke — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:19:10 +0000

Great example of a commonplace book. Jillian Hess has written extensively about this -- her books are well-researched and organized.

New comment by vogelke in "Building docs like a product"

vogelke — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 08:42:01 +0000

I've read at least 8 articles this week about LLMs having massive hallucinations/brain-farts when writing testbeds for code. Unfortunately, the author didn't see the problems until he tried adding a test; then he had a huge WTF moment.

The fact that the LLM you mention gave good answers is probably more a reflection of YOUR documentation than any particular "brilliance" on the LLM's part.

New comment by vogelke in "Reading Without Limits or Expectations"

vogelke — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 07:01:32 +0000

If I treated reading like a chore, it would start to feel like a chore.

I'm not being graded. If I start a book and I don't care about the subject or the characters after 50-100 pages or so, it goes in my Goodwill pile. The only decent exception to that for me is Stieg Larsson -- his "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" books take their time getting started without being boring.

New comment by vogelke in "A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom"

vogelke — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 09:20:04 +0000

> I don't think I've ever seen a school essay back then that wasn't obviously written by a parent.

That's when you discuss the essay with the kid, and if he can't understand something that presumably he wrote, immediate consequences. First time == suspension, second time == removal from that class.

New comment by vogelke in "Ask HN: Best codebases to study to learn software design?"

vogelke — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 06:36:26 +0000

I'd recommend the book "Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think". Published by O'Reilly, ISBN-10 ‏ : 0596510047

New comment by vogelke in "What if we made advertising illegal?"

vogelke — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 20:12:39 +0000

> millions of victims from false advertising of Big Tobacco

People have known that smoking is bad for your health for around 400 years. You can't fix stupid, not even by making advertising illegal.

New comment by vogelke in "Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained"

vogelke — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 10:43:21 +0000

I use it for two things:

* saving webpages as text with the links nicely organized at the bottom, and

* calling it from mutt (MUA) to display HTML parts of mail messages.

It works great and it's consistent.

New comment by vogelke in "Yash: Yet Another Shell"

vogelke — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 23:29:56 +0000

I keep my history in a format showing the current working directory next to each command. If you're interested, have a look at

https://bezoar.org/src/dotfiles/README.htm#command-history

New comment by vogelke in "Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?"

vogelke — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 12:36:35 +0000

Sounds like "Landru" in ST:TOS.

New comment by vogelke in "What you've got is in fact a people problem"

vogelke — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 07:08:01 +0000

Sounds a lot like working with the US Air Force, unfortunately.