Hacker News: zelphirkalt

New comment by zelphirkalt in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

zelphirkalt — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:44:26 +0000

Typical for HR. Not able to understand the qualifications of others, lauding AI, down-talking other people's work. The number of jobs I would have already gotten, if not for an HR person, who doesn't understand my qualification or the level of it, and if only they had asked a capable engineer to take one good look at my own projects, which I am exposing in my application documents ... The way HR people work, their work-ethics, and the way they do not work, is a huuuge problem.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Leaving Mozilla"

zelphirkalt — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:27:26 +0000

What if the EU bought some big chunk of Mozilla, something like Mozilla EU, and then ran it? Would the US then cry out against EU buying US companies and start to fund Mozilla?

New comment by zelphirkalt in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

zelphirkalt — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:22:59 +0000

I see what you did there.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

zelphirkalt — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:51:00 +0000

Or an early version of the Fremen suits from Dune.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

zelphirkalt — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:51:26 +0000

Written like you read my mind, honestly.

I have a mere 10y of experience, but also already looking for 1 year and also considering maybe I should become a teacher. Dealing with unruly children might be nerve wracking, and the tech level will be very basic, but I have always enjoyed enabling others to understand things and see them grow and having done my part in that. Also solid well taught foundations are very important. Currently, my only obstacle is, that it is not so easy to become a teacher where I live. Certain requirements kind of like certifications, that you can't just easily get, but need to invest a lot of time into.

Good to read of someone, who went that way. How did you manage the transition?

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

zelphirkalt — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:00:49 +0000

This is not semantic HTML.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

zelphirkalt — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:58:35 +0000

That's usually not even in the books of a typical SPA: It doesn't have fallbacks at all, and just shows a blank white page. Accessibility is always taking a rear seat with such SPAs.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use"

zelphirkalt — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:09:03 +0000

Now I only need non-engineers to understand this difference in architecture and design decisions, and I will have a job.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system"

zelphirkalt — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:06:16 +0000

You mean this one: https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/Makefil... ?

I don't see how ocamldep is used in there. It seems to use multiple different programming languages somehow. I don't find it easy to understand what it does. It seems to be building a website as well.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

zelphirkalt — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:09:38 +0000

The US has been on a course of self-owns ever since Trump got into office. That they still are a dominant power on the globe shows how much they were one before Trump, but it seems to be changing. At every self-own they commit, China laughs and inches up a little closer. I think we will see the day, when they are evenly matched in our lifetimes.

But which self-own exactly do you mean, of the many there are?

New comment by zelphirkalt in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

zelphirkalt — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:43:30 +0000

They mostly have overtaken in cars too. Their EVs are just cheaper, and they have built the infrastructure around it, even in more rural provinces. Building infrastructure is something they excel at anyway.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

zelphirkalt — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:33:18 +0000

I currently see the problem as follows: The knowledge worker like you sees the need for people like themselves to still be hired, and can reasonably argue for it. However, the management dudes and investors do not understand it, and it is difficult to make them understand, when their (short to medium term) profits depend on not understanding it. So whether you feel threatened or not, is just a matter of you feeling bad or not, but doesn't really matter, when it comes to finding a job.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system"

zelphirkalt — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:44:28 +0000

Can you link a Makefile for an OCaml project, which ensures reproducibility and locality? What I mean is checking checksums of dependencies upon when they are installed, and acting only in the project directory, not changing the surrounding system in order to run the program. Asking, because I tried and failed.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system"

zelphirkalt — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:40:54 +0000

I use GNU Make for my Python and GNU Guile projects just fine. For Python projects it becomes a job runner of tooling commands. For Guile projects it uses a SHELL that is a guix shell, which references channels and manifest, to ensure reproducibility.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "OCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system"

zelphirkalt — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:38:11 +0000

I tried to write some Ocaml stuff using a Makefile, because I also didn't want to use even more specific tooling, but it became ugly quickly, because I had to use `ocamlfind` and `ocamlc`, and provide a list of all packages to include and so on. It felt a bit like writing C at that moment, where you need to tell gcc what system libraries you are using, so that it compiles the program with those.

So in the end I tried using dune and opam and whatnot, but it all felt less than clear to me. Especially, the comment someone else made here about having 2 different types of files for dune to work ...

I just want a project local directory, that contains all my dependencies and a lock file to reproducibly built my projects. That's the minimum I expect these days. Or some equivalent alternative.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Are you expected to run five Python type-checkers now?"

zelphirkalt — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:17:02 +0000

So far I have been avoiding Pydantic as a huge-ass dependency. Instead I am relying on standard type annotations, lots of typed dicts and at service/program boundaries use a jsonschema. I like being able to specify the type of most functions, and get some hints, completions and so on, but I don't want to _have to_ specify every darn type. I also don't want to write a class for everything. Typing dicts is good and usually sufficient. If I wanted to write types for everything, then I could also just write Java or Rust or similar.

Unfortunately, I think the kingdom of nouns faction has long invaded the Python world and I see more and more companies demanding Pydantic and similar things. They are dragging us all the way to Java land, it seems.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

zelphirkalt — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:47:21 +0000

Food is already extremely cheap to produce. So cheap, that we waste approximately 50% of it, before it even gets into households. Yet we are still forced to use money to buy it in stores, instead of getting it at no or almost no cost. I think they will find ways to keep everything costing quite a bit.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

zelphirkalt — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:28:31 +0000

> In the future, coding may return to being an art form. People will no longer focus on utility alone, but instead on the enjoyment of the process of writing code itself.

Great, if someone will find it in them to pay me. Real bad, if not.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot"

zelphirkalt — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:00:49 +0000

Yep, this is how they do it. The domain registrar netcup did something like this to me.I went through their parent company (?) too, without success. They will put forth any reason to not have to delete your data. I suspect, that they either are trying to reduce work for themselves, or their platform is so crap internally, that they would have to get someone coding to delete the data.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health"

zelphirkalt — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 22:19:44 +0000

I had 1on1s every 2 weeks and it was always annoying. Partially, because I didn't feel like "opening up" to this team lead and didn't feel like he was on my side or had my back at all. In the end I should be proven right, due to something he did when I left the company and also right before I left, which was one of the reasons I left. Turned out my gut feeling was right, to distrust this guy. He probably just went through the motions of what he had read somewhere of how to be a team lead, instead of really being in it.