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WA

9,458 karma · joined November 20, 2009

I run a bootstrapped B2C webapp/app. Mostly a lurker on HN.
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WA··on Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
Apple's 30% tax was introduced under Steve Jobs and there were no small business exemptions back then. Jobs died in 2011. It's time to stop extrapolating what Jobs would be doing 15 years later in 2026 if he were still around. Could be the same, could be better, could be worse.
WA··on A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
Why not? You can select Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, and others.
WA··on AI Tribalism
The author of that post Nolan is a pretty interesting guy and deep in the web tech stack. He’s really one of the last people I’d call "tribal", especially since you mention React. This guy hand-writes his web components and files bug reports to browsers and writes his own memory leak detection lib and so on.

If such a guy is slowly dipping his toes into AI and comes to the conclusion he just posted, you should take a step back and consider your position.

WA··on I Like GitLab
I used GitLab only as a remote repo for private projects, no CI at all. The laggy interface and that damn browser check every so often made me close my account.
WA··on Skip is now free and open source
The new direction isn’t Liquid Glass, but a more unified branding across Android and iOS. WhatsApp, Google Maps, Instagram, Netflix, Prime Video, and many others don’t look dated, because they don’t make heavy use of the older iOS design language at all.
WA··on Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
Komoot gets shittier every week too. Takes way too many taps to plan a route, search still sucks, "go premium" in your face all the time.
WA··on The Military Is Being Forced to Plan for an Unthinkable Betrayal
Will do
WA··on The Military Is Being Forced to Plan for an Unthinkable Betrayal
Can you post a few ideas for fellow Europeans without disclosing what you’re doing? Are we talking small-scale stuff like "use Linux instead of Microsoft" or bigger, political things? Because as a German, I kinda feel pretty powerless and yet, I do have time and possibly resources that could be spent.
WA··on The Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button
> when all someone knows is React or other frameworks, things get overengineered

The next level annoyance is that everybody just assumes React to be the default for everything.

Check the Shadcn website. The landing page doesn’t mention that this is a React-only UI library at all. Same with Radix. The marketing sounds like a general-purpose UI lib. You gotta dig around a bit to realize that this is React-only.

WA··on The Walls Are Closing in on Tesla
You were duped. Tesla‘s paint it black video is from 2016 and one the first obvious lies. People called Musk out on his BS 10 years ago, but he successfully managed to keep a "genius" imagine in the media up until COVID-19 hit. Media sentiment changed around 2020/2021 to adjust to reality of Musk being a massive fraudster.
WA··on 2025 was the third hottest year on record
Please attempt steelmanning the global warming greenhouse effect and its consequences as an intellectual exercise.
WA··on Claude Cowork runs Linux VM via Apple virtualization framework
Thanks for sharing. Which one do you use for what?
WA··on Every country should set 16 as the minimum age for social media accounts
Kids in 5th grade use WhatsApp for entertainment to send hundreds of messages per day filled with memes and slop. From the perspective of one kid in a class chat, this is indistinguishable from an algorithmically curated feed.
WA··on Perfectly Replicating Coca Cola [video]
It's true. You can find literally zero sodas, chewing gum or other candies that have the root beer taste in Germany.
WA··on Eat Real Food
Exactly this. Rapeseed oil is obviously a seed oil. You can have a chemically extracted version or a cold-pressed version. "Seed oil is bad for you" is a typical simplistic Twitter/Reddit conspiracy theory.
WA··on Eat Real Food
> Keto and carnivore diets have been shown to be pretty good for people with inflammatory conditions

No. The scientific evidence of a carnivore diet reducing inflammation is pretty weak. The scientific evidence of a vegan diet reducing inflammation is way stronger.

WA··on Eat Real Food
Too much protein is bad for your kidneys.
WA··on Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
Not entirely true. They had one product at first. I think it was UI kit. The full app templates that came later were a separate product and they charged again. However, you’re right insofar as they added more templates to the later product for free.
WA··on I switched from VSCode to Zed
I find Zed's inline git diff confusing. I want a side-by-side comparison of the entire file. That's currently a dealbreaker for me.
WA··on Finland detains ship and its crew after critical undersea cable damaged
Only works if you find someone to pay. I listened to a lengthy (German) podcast about international maritime law. To sum it up: you can’t do that much, because you won’t find the responsible person/company/state.
WA··on Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol
Nice, but way too many abbreviated descriptions and no way to see the full name of a symbol without clicking on it. Needs a tooltip / title.

Or better, if 90% of all symbol names are abbreviated, your design simply doesn't work. This is especially apparent in the "arrows" section.

WA··on Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
Deutsche Bahn is a joke among Germans by now. It is THAT bad. It's utterly unreliable. We pretend everything is fine, that we have some functioning infrastructure, but it just pretends.

They have some policy that they need to give you a reason for a delay and they'd happily announce something like "we're late because of another train in front of us" and the irony is, of course, the train in front of us is probably late, too, and you never get to know the real reason. No, strike that. The real reason is because the entire system is completely messed up. Train time tables are fantasy by now.

> In DB’s official statistics, a train counts as “on time” if it’s less than six minutes late.1 Cancelled trains are not counted at all.2 If a train doesn’t exist, it cannot be late.

This is true and it is ridiculous.

WA··on UBlockOrigin and UBlacklist AI Blocklist
And they don’t reason. They do prompt smoothing.
WA··on US sanctions EU government officials behind the DSA
Nationalism is on the rise in most EU countries and they get away with saying all kinds of things you apparently dream about, but feel censored to say. The tale of lacking free speech is a lie.

Free speech in the EU is different from the US. Insulting people is not considered free speech in the EU. Calling "fire" in a packed cinema wrongly is not covered by free speech in the EU.

You can say a lot of things, but you might feel social pressure, which is a feature, not a bug.

WA··on iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA
Apple could've made Lightning open and maybe Lightning would've been the new USB-C, if it is the superior product. But no, they chose not to.
WA··on iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA
This is the future of the internet. More and more countries have their local laws and international companies need to comply with local laws. This has been the case forever for companies selling products and (physical) services and some digital services restricting music and movie rights in certain countries, but it will expand to more and more services and apps in the future.
WA··on Lotusbail npm package found to be harvesting WhatsApp messages and contacts
> It doesn’t use the public WhatsApp API, it reimplements the official WhatsApp client auth.

Nothing wrong with that if the official API has less features.

> Authentication uses a shared secret and it’s obvious that you as a third party obtaining this secret from your users

What do you mean? Usually, you install such a package to automate WhatsApp for your own account.

WA··on 30 years of <br> tags
Good article! A few thoughts popped into my head while reading:

- My favorite deployment is rsync over SSH and occasionally, I still upload a file over SFTP.

- MongoDB will always AWALYS be in my mind as the buggy database that bought itself into dev minds with lots of money but ultimately was all hype and risky to use from a business perspective. Turns out, especially with the rise of TypeScript that most data has a solid structure anyways and while NoSQL has its places, most projects benefit from good old SQL.

- Slack launched in 2013? Man, time flies.

- I still hardly use Docker and just deploy straight to a VPS running Debian.

- I remember the first years of TypeScript, which were kinda tough. Many projects had no types. I sometimes considered to use one package over another just because they had proper types.

- VSCode is a good thing and if you don't go too crazy with plugins, it works stable and performant. I like it.

- Next.js gives me MongoDB vibes. An over-engineered, way too "magical" framework that hijacked developer minds and is built on the weird assumption that React, a DOM manipulation library, belongs on the server. I never got the appeal and I will just wait this out. Meanwhile, I'm having fun with Hono. Easy to build API-based backends as well as MPAs with server-side HTML generation, runs on Node, Bun, Deno and whatnot, feels lightweight and accessible and gives me a lot of control.

WA··on Ask HN: How Old Are You?
(Order is randomized by HN, sorry if that makes this a Where's Waldo task)
WA··on The past was not that cute
We just live longer than back then and have way more opportunities to see these (mostly) late-life diseases. Same with cancer.

Yes, average life span was shorter back then because of child mortality. But the vast majority of surviving adults never reached age 80. Old age was 60-70 and many of these diseases only occur at 70+ in significant numbers.

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