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santah

498 karma · joined June 10, 2019

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santah··on Anthropic S-1
No, that's the result of their own (private) shares being worth more (which they owe to 3rd parties).

It's a good problem to have.

santah··on Apple HomeView
It could've been wide screen I agree.

Again, dumbfounded they completely passed on this use-case ...

santah··on Apple HomeView
It's shocking to me it doesn't support apps from the AppStore nor any kind of (video) media streaming.

Otherwise looks like an ideal kitchen TV/Movie playback device.

santah··on Dots: Always-on agents
Nor the EU :(
santah··on Show HN: How to mentally calculate the day of the week for any date
Awesome site and guide, I just don't understand why all dates have the month in front of the date.

Isn't this very confusing to anyone outside US?

I get why it defaulted to this format, but in this day and age - it's trivial to automatically adjust it to the user's localization / preferences.

santah··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
https://next-episode.net

It's a (now more than 20 years old) TV tracking website and community.

I've been using Claude 4.5 Opus (now 4.6) more and more these days modernizing and redesigning sections that haven't been touched for a decade or two. I don't trust LLMs much, but by breaking the work into small, self-contained tasks and testing constantly - I'm making surprisingly fast progress.

santah··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
20 years and counting, working on https://next-episode.net (it's a TV/Movies tracking website and community).

I've dedicated this week to some maintenance tasks that are long overdue (mainly modernization of the code and the database), kinda delaying the inevitable (which is to work on harder tasks in my todo - like adding features to the mobile apps).

santah··on Ask HN: I underestimated how lonely building solo can be
I can totally relate.

In addition to "no one to bounce ideas off" - no one to really share the pain and responsibility with when there are problems. It's all on you.

Thankfully, my users are very generous with their feedback, so when I do in fact do a "nice job" - I'm told so :)

For how long have you been building solo?

After 20 years, for me, I can tell you this - what helps me the most is exercising regularly (ideally on all weekdays) AND having kids.

Because of the kids, I rarely have the time to feel lonely and the regular physical exercises keep me in a (fairly) good mental state.

It felt the worst in my first years of solo dev, when all I did was work and hardly spent any time to socialize and take care of myself.

I'm sure it'll get better for you too as your project evolves and your life along with it.

santah··on Show HN: I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
This reminds me a of a very faithful (in browser) recreation of Windows XP I stumbled upon recently, may've even been on HN:

https://win32.run/

Good times.

santah··on Ask HN: Why don't mobile apps use pure black for dark mode?
I can tell you my reasoning.

While developing the dark mode theme for my mobile app, I experimented with pure black background first.

It looked off.

I couldn't figure out why it looked off (design wise, but also seemed weirdly hard to read) until I played with a bunch of other mobile apps with dark mode (which I used already and liked) and noticed their backgrounds are not black.

Then I just tried a couple of shades of "almost black" and the improvement was huge - easier on the eyes and more pleasurable to read.

I don't have a scientific explanation why this is the case, just I wanted to kinda directly answer the question with my anecdotal experience of why I do it.

santah··on Tell HN: Server error (5xx) in Google Search Console may not be 5xx at all
Simply identifying them by IP so that each Google bot instance is a unique user ...
santah··on Tell HN: Server error (5xx) in Google Search Console may not be 5xx at all
I rate limit because of aggressive bots (scrapers and ones trying random injection attacks etc).

And yes, it's returning 429 ...

santah··on Tell HN: Server error (5xx) in Google Search Console may not be 5xx at all
Cool. Let me know if it turns out it's the same thing.
santah··on Tell HN: Server error (5xx) in Google Search Console may not be 5xx at all
I can't find a problem with the 429 ...
santah··on The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance
I don't believe these numbers.

Here is a screenshot from my self hosted Matomo installation for my traffic today up until now:

https://i.imgur.com/WcfQKdT.png

Firefox blocks most analytics scripts by default, so these articles rely on very skewed data.

Any other devs with self hosted tracking solutions want to share how their browser stats look like?

santah··on Ask HN: What is your policy regarding smartphones for your children?
9 and 12 boys.

They carry dumb phones for calls only (we gave them one when they started going on multi day trips from school or outside of it at age like 6/7).

They both have laptops and can game on and communicate with friends and classmates.

They have old iPhones they sometimes use at home (with no sim cards). Those don't leave the house and are very rarely used (mostly to chat in friends groups).

They don't watch youtube (except for music sometimes). They know what TikTok is (because all their friends watch it), but they don't (currently) have interest in it (mainly because we've had long talks about how terrible doom scrolling social sites and short videos is).

If at some point we give them smart phones with sim cards, we'll heavily restrict social media sites and apps, but I plan on keeping the dumb phones in use for as long as possible (hopefully until 15-16).

santah··on Ask HN: Is “sign in with Facebook” dead for indie developers?
Not in the US, but yeah, I may be able to get a phone and an address through some 3rd party service(s), but I'm not sure it's worth the overhead, especially if it's just to pass the verification (and potentially users would not be able to really get in touch through them).
santah··on Ask HN: Is “sign in with Facebook” dead for indie developers?
Yeah for now, I use "Advanced Access" to get the user's email address and pre-fill it so they only need to create a username.

Also these email addresses are automatically set verified (no need to go through the email verification process).

I guess I can make it work without the "Advanced Access", but it'll be a lot more cumbersome and I wonder if it's worth it.

santah··on I spent $35,000 on a “typo domain” 8 months ago. Is it a good investment?
Just a quick question on your traffic / conversion stats.

How come you have (almost) as many conversions as you have leads?

How do you count these?

santah··on Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
I'm still experimenting different things with it so I can't tell you how exactly I'll end up using it, but yeah, ideally it should go beyond what you mentioned ...
santah··on Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
I've made a screenshot of what a users sees once they start the trial:

https://i.imgur.com/Hc5taiX.png

The most important Premium features are listed there.

santah··on Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
Here is a screenshot of the list of the prominent Premium features:

https://i.imgur.com/Hc5taiX.png

santah··on Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
Please get in touch through the "contact us" link on the bottom of Next Episode so I can investigate what is happening.

There was no recent change affecting the movies list (other than some design tweaks which wouldn't limit the number of movies you see in your list).

santah··on Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
Yeah, ads (for free users) and Premium membership which removes them and unlock features.
santah··on Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
I run https://next-episode.net for about 18 years now.

It's a website + mobile apps that help users track what they're watching (TV shows and movies).

I wouldn't say trends over the years affected the business much, but I'm playing with the ChatGPT API currently to try and improve some aspects of the functionality and maybe add some new cool AI powered features - so there's that.

santah··on Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
Thanks!
santah··on Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
No cloud providers as far as I'm aware.

They were all from the same 4-5 ASN networks, all based in Russia.

santah··on Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
Wasn't really worried about that.

I didn't do it as a super quick burst, but in a space of multiple hours.

First because the proxy servers were super slow and second - I couldn't automate it - their servers had some kind of bot detection which would catch me calling the URLs through script.

Instead, I installed a browser extension which would automatically reload a browser tab after specified timeout (I've set it to 10 sec or something) and I opened like 50 tabs of the honeypot URL and left it there to reload for hours ...

santah··on Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
I tried but couldn't redirect back to my website as they stripped / rewrote all JS.
santah··on Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?
Yes, constructed the honeypot URL using the proxy site and called it (thousands of times) so I can get them to fetch it from my server through their IP so I can log it.
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