Hacker News Reader

jsattleron Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

I appreciate the feedback, thank you!

jsattleron Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

I'm building BetterCapture: https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture

It's a native, resource efficient screen recorder for macOS. It supports HEVC, H.264, ProRes 422/4444, HDR, Alpha Channels and more.

jsattleron Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

I'm currently working on BetterCapture (https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture), which is a lightweight (~4MB size and low memory/cpu footprint) screen recorder for macOS that lives in your menu bar. It supports ProRes 422/4444, HEVC, and H.264 — including alpha channel and HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. System audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recordings, like the menu bar, dock, or wallpaper.

No tracking, no analytics, no cloud uploads, no account. MIT licensed. Everything stays on your Mac.

I'm currently planning and designing a plugin system, so others can contribute new functionality without affecting the scope of BetterCapture itself - which should stay as small as possible.

jsattleron The Dress: Blue or White? (2015)

I was thinking exactly the same haha

jsattleron Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture

I'm building a lightweight screen recorder for macOS. It supports lots of features you'd expect from a professional screen recorder such as ProRes 422/4444, HEVC/H.265, and H.264, capturing alpha channels and supports HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. Can capture system audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recordings, like the menu bar, dock, or wallpaper.

No tracking, no analytics, no cloud uploads, no account. MIT licensed. Everything stays on your Mac. Still early, but happy to hear feedback!

jsattleron The Sling: Humanity's Forgotten Power

You're welcome, I also enjoyed the video very much.

jsattleron Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

I'm not aware of it. Found this reddit comment though: https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/1lkqzii/comment/mztwd5...

Seems like just a HW AV1 decoder.

jsattleron The Sling: Humanity's Forgotten Power

Recently came across this website after watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpxSaOiT2LE. Seems like a cool hobby to try for when I'm finally replaced by AI. I knew about the sling from movies but I didn't know this is actually a thing to do. Very impressed how far you can sling something with it (477m/1564feet). Sharing this in case someone is on the hunt for a new cool hobby.

jsattleron Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

Thanks, really appreciate the feedback!

jsattleron Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture

It's a lightweight screen recorder for macOS that lives in your menu bar. It's built with SwiftUI and ScreenCaptureKit, uses the native Content Picker to select what you record, and supports ProRes 422/4444, HEVC, and H.264 — including alpha channel and HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. System audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recordings, like the menu bar, dock, or wallpaper.

No tracking, no analytics, no cloud uploads, no account. MIT licensed. Everything stays on your Mac.

jsattleron Agentic Productivity System with Plain Markdown

Anthropic released Cowork a few days ago. I tried it for a few minutes and it was unusable for me. It crashed several times and felt very buggy. What I liked was the idea of the productivity plugin. I set up my own version of it that is agent agnostic and can be easily customized. Here are the main ideas and a link to a template to fork.

jsattleron I miss thinking hard

I had similar thoughts recently. I wouldn't consider myself "the thinker", but I simply missed learning by failure. You almost don't fail anymore using AI. If something fails, it feels like it's not your fault but the AI messed up. Sometimes I even get angry at the AI for failing, not at myself. I don't have a solution either, but I came up with a guideline on when and how to use AI that has helped me to still enjoy learning. I'm not trying to advertise my blog and you don't need to read it, the important part is the diagram at the end of "Learning & Failure": https://sattlerjoshua.com/writing/2026-02-01-thoughts-on-ai-.... In summary, when something is important and long-term, I heavily invest into understanding and use an approach that maximizes understanding over speed. Not sure if you can translate it 100% to your situation but maybe it helps to have some kind of guideline, when to spend more time thinking instead of directly using and AI to get to the solution.

jsattleron Ask HN: How many hours do you work per week?

How is live with 36h days?

jsattleron Ask HN: How many hours do you work per week?

Not a trick question. 8h per week sounds crazy. What was the size of the company?

jsattleron Two kinds of AI users are emerging

Some years ago, I was at a conference and attended a very interesting talk. I don't remember the title of the talk, but what stuck with me was: "It's no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow". This talk was before all the AI hype. Working at a big company myself, I think this has never been more true. I think the question is, how to stay fast.

jsattleron Founding is a snowball

Great story, thanks for sharing. Besides the part where it says "Other people will see its glory and join their smaller snowballs into it.", it sounds a bit like marriage too.

jsattleron Netbird – Open Source Zero Trust Networking

Sounds interesting. How is it different to tailscale (or headscale)? I was planning to setup tailscale to replace my custom wireguard setup.

jsattleron Outsourcing thinking

Very interesting, thanks for sharing this. After reading Karpathy's recent tweet about "A few random notes from claude coding quite [...]" it got me thinking a lot about offloading thinking and more specifically failure. Failure is important for learning. When I use AI and they make mistakes, I often tend to blame the AI and offload the failure. I think this post explores similar thoughts, without talking much about failure. It will be interesting to see the long-term effects.

jsattleron Thoughts on AI-assisted software engineering (2026)

Wrote down some thoughts on AI-assisted coding after reading Karpathy's "A few random notes from claude coding [...]". Mostly about the ego part, what happens to learning when you offload failure, and which skills matter more now. Hopefully, sharing this will help others stay positive despite all the hype and negative headlines. Thanks for reading :)

jsattleron How did he do that? [video]

I'm actually not so interested in the editing software. I think that part is doable with any modern video editing software. I'm more interested in the screen capture and how to preserve the transparency. He mentioned Cleanshot X somewhere for screen recording, but I doubt that he is using it for the recording. I tried it and it did not support the transparency that you can see in his videos.

jsattleron How did he do that? [video]

I would like to understand how he creates the transparent/blurry terminal overlays in front of the video. My hypothesis is that he creates two videos. First, the screen recording with alpha channels. Second, the video of him coding. He then layers them on top of each other. Any other ideas? Which screen recording software supports this kind of recording?

Hint: I think that he is not streaming the video as a wallpaper, because in some videos you can see his screen with the regular wallpaper.

jsattleron Ask HN: How does your company release software?

What about documentation, quality/test reports, change logs etc.?

jsattleron Calm Coding – A Spotify Playlist

for those of you who seek calm piano beats while coding