Hacker News: vstollen

New comment by vstollen in "Increasing your practice surface area"

vstollen — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 07:24:25 +0000

I like the idea of the article. However, I wonder what are ways to increase the practice surface area for programming / software engineering?

I can think of various high-Level activities such as analyzing systems we interact with on a day-to-day basis. However, I cannot come up with exercises that would improve my code itself.

New comment by vstollen in "XSLT removal will break multiple government and regulatory sites"

vstollen — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 20:55:13 +0000

One (admittedly niche) use case for XSLT is that it’s the only way I found to make RSS feeds both understandable for humans and machines.

For example, I use it add an explanation of what RSS is and some styling to the RSS feed of my personal website [1].

[1]: https://vstollen.me/atom.xml

New comment by vstollen in "Ask HN: Which co-location providers would you recommend in EU?"

vstollen — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 16:56:16 +0000

I don't do colocation myself, so I don't know what makes a good co-location provider. However, Hetzner has a Colocation offering: https://www.hetzner.com/colocation

Drawing an Enderman in LaTeX (2014)

vstollen — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 16:52:53 +0000

Article URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20240421200248/http://sidenote.hu/2014/07/20/drawing-an-enderman-in-latex/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685517

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by vstollen in "Bananas: Cross-Platform screen sharing made simple"

vstollen — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 12:09:02 +0000

Do both the sharing and receiving users need to install the app? If not, it would probably be much easier to start using the app if at least the receiving user could view my screen from their web browser.

Apart from that, I often fall back to https://github.com/adamyordan/laplace when I need to share my screen. It works in the browser and has great image clarity. Sadly, the demo instance is down, so you need to host it yourself. Also, it can have trouble inside some enterprise network/firewall setups.

New comment by vstollen in "Taskwarrior – CLI Task Management"

vstollen — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 12:18:25 +0000

I've used Taskwarrior (and Timewarrior [1]) for some time and one thing they uniquely do is automatically rank your tasks by a number of factors.

For your tasks, you can set priorities, a deadline, dependencies, and more. Using this information, Taskwarrior computes an urgency score so you can see your most urgent task using:

  task next

Sometimes I wonder what a GUI-based app would look like that does such urgency rankings.

[1]: https://timewarrior.net/

My Guide to Applying for Junior Software Engineering Roles

vstollen — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 14:56:09 +0000

Article URL: https://vstollen.me/blog/junior-sde-applications

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41321023

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by vstollen in "SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube"

vstollen — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:18:05 +0000

This somewhat reminds me on the discussions around the Web Monetization API [1] a few years ago.

I still wish for a service that gives me access to all paywalled sites or a way to sending all websites I visit a little money in exchange for them not serving ads.

[1]: https://webmonetization.org/

New comment by vstollen in ""We ran out of columns""

vstollen — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 15:39:40 +0000

Yess, we were the software team for a university library. There wasn't a lot of pressure and people on my team generally had a chill and comfortable life.

However, there wasn't a lot of room for ambition.

New comment by vstollen in ""We ran out of columns""

vstollen — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 00:40:51 +0000

This made me think of my first job. I was the sole developer on a project because the old developer left. Nothing was documented and nobody knew why things were designed the way they were.

We had no code reviews, no design docs, no tests, nothing. We made the changes the way we thought they were right and would git pull them onto the production server.

After I struggled to get productive for the first four months, my manager went on a four-week Christmas vacation. In a moment of frustration, I seized the opportunity and rewrote the whole project from scratch. I don’t remember if my manager ever noticed, but that was the moment I finally got productive.

New comment by vstollen in "Apple Maps on the web launches in beta"

vstollen — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 17:36:06 +0000

What I miss the most from Apple Maps is their lack of user content (at least in Germany). While I can find many pictures and reviews of every tiny store on Google Maps, Apple usually only has a handful of reviews and almost no photos submitted.

TLDR: Lessons from 1 year of building with LLMs

vstollen — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 18:16:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dylandavis.net/2024/07/tldr-1-year-of-building-with-llms/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41049105

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by vstollen in "Button Stealer"

vstollen — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 09:35:16 +0000

Are (updates to) extensions from the Chrome and Firefox store usually vetted before publication?

I‘ve heard that Firefox will only run signed extensions. Would you trust this process?

New comment by vstollen in "Button Stealer"

vstollen — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 09:29:50 +0000

I haven’t used it myself, but the LanguageTool browser extension might allow users to use a self-hosted or locally running instance.

New comment by vstollen in "Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog?"

vstollen — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 06:57:12 +0000

Along the lines of Julia Evans’ “Optimize for conversions” [1], can you gauge the popularity of your post by the replies you get?

[1]: https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/02/20/measuring-blog-success/

New comment by vstollen in "Re: Do people IRL know you have a blog?"

vstollen — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 06:40:33 +0000

While I don‘t write much, my website is directly associated with my real name. As a result, friends regularly stumble upon it.

Most of them don’t care for the topics I write about. However, they usually get a little excited, as if they found a real-life Easter egg.

Maintainers of Zitadel and Ory discuss their tradeoffs as identity platforms

vstollen — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 17:05:13 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/zitadel/zitadel/discussions/4175

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39876562

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by vstollen in "Figgie: Simulate stock trading with a deck of cards"

vstollen — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 13:33:28 +0000

I’ve played a few rounds and the group is often surprisingly good at finding it. Players start with their hands and set prices accordingly. If the other players agree, the price difference gets more extreme quickly.

New comment by vstollen in "Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)"

vstollen — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 22:45:40 +0000

Similar experience with Comdirect. They also have a 6-digit pin.

When I asked support why I have to pay for my depot (even though its free if I have a checking account) they said they signed me up under two separate customer IDs, but they cannot simply consolidate them. I have to open a new depot and transfer my stocks.

New comment by vstollen in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

vstollen — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 15:46:29 +0000

https://vstollen.me

I don't write much. The most interesting article is probably one where I reflect on my AWS internship. :)