Hacker News: AstroBen

New comment by AstroBen in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

AstroBen — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:03:09 +0000

Yeah, fair point. They're certainly trying to push it in that direction but so far there are still alternatives. I've seen age verification get a hell of a lot of pushback so that's encouraging.

New comment by AstroBen in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

AstroBen — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:43:26 +0000

Yeah, but you're not beholden to them. There are 100 different hosts you can use if you own your own domain. If a host changes in a way you don't like, just move your domain elsewhere. If you're using Gmail, you're stuck with Google. Being independent of any one host is the important part to me.

Personally I have my own mail server and use smtp2go for sending which handles the deliverability issue. I'm not sure it's worth it going this way but I found it fun and its been 0 maintenance

New comment by AstroBen in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

AstroBen — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:27:37 +0000

Why is it an issue? I don't care what other people do with their email.

New comment by AstroBen in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

AstroBen — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:25:09 +0000

If it's not deterministic you can never fully trust it. In a deterministic abstraction I don't need to audit the lower levels.

New comment by AstroBen in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

AstroBen — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:15:58 +0000

If you don't feel that's worth it you can use Gmail, yeah.

New comment by AstroBen in "A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous"

AstroBen — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:55:15 +0000

It's not just work meetings. This is being taken to healthcare settings, also.

New comment by AstroBen in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

AstroBen — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:53:00 +0000

Register your own domain and use that for your email, and you'll no longer be held hostage by Google. Takes almost no effort and will cost you a few dollars a month.

New comment by AstroBen in "Write some software, give it away for free"

AstroBen — Wed, 06 May 2026 04:55:41 +0000

They're different goals though. Someone selling software is doing it to put a roof over their heads and money in their retirement accounts. If you straight up replace that with working on passion projects and giving them away you get.. homeless people.

I'm not sure the starving artist is an ideal to strive for, either. Surely there's a middle ground?

Obsidian's model seems fair: https://obsidian.md/pricing

JetBrains' lifetime "subscription" which gets locked at the version you paid for seems fair to me

I don't see why you can't work on something you're passionate about and make money from it. For those of us not retired, the money is essential to make it sustainable.

New comment by AstroBen in "Write some software, give it away for free"

AstroBen — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:58:36 +0000

I wonder if you'd also be arguing for libre software to reject available funding? What's the difference?

The Ruby on Rails foundation brings in a million per year: https://rubyonrails.org/foundation

The Linux foundation is funded at around $250m / year from a quick Google search

New comment by AstroBen in "Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine"

AstroBen — Sat, 02 May 2026 13:51:00 +0000

> That's not "AI tries to design something". That's an AI that has been trained, by the prompt stack, to behave like a senior designer with a working filesystem, a deterministic palette library, and a checklist culture

What, you don't want your senior designer to have a working filesystem and checklist culture? No deterministic palettes?

New comment by AstroBen in "Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw""

AstroBen — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 18:09:09 +0000

The only reasonable thing to do if you care about the longevity of your workflow is to build it around open-weight models.

If you choose to not be able to get work done without Claude you're at the mercy of whatever they want.

New comment by AstroBen in "Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw""

AstroBen — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:08:38 +0000

Not really. A person will eventually drink dirty water if it was the only thing available in a desert.

There's very little competition for SOTA models. The models themselves also weren't built by Claude. The current revenue has almost nothing to do with what Claude built.

Hell if it was so far ahead then they wouldn't be desperately trying to block OpenCode.

New comment by AstroBen in "HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing"

AstroBen — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:59:18 +0000

Even if this is right, by responding to the public issue here he's taking on some level of customer support. A simple "I forwarded the refund request to the relevant team and you should hear back from them" would be a million times better than ignoring it and closing the issue.

New comment by AstroBen in "HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing"

AstroBen — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:10:08 +0000

> bad customer service seems firmly in the "better to stay and advocate doing better from the inside" category

How about Anthropic agreeing to a $1.5 billion settlement for perhaps the biggest theft in history?

Weird how people forgot about that.

New comment by AstroBen in "HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing"

AstroBen — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:58:33 +0000

A real employee (bcherny) read the issue, responded that the bug was fixed, and then completely ignored the request for a refund.

New comment by AstroBen in "Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good"

AstroBen — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:03:43 +0000

So much of Apple's growth is anti-consumer.

You can't repair your device.

They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible, making it hard to leave, and not by making such a good product.

They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere.

They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.

They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store.

Anything I missed?

They make good hardware, yes, but I can't support them as a company.

New comment by AstroBen in "Notes from the SF peptide scene"

AstroBen — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:41:44 +0000

> What’s not talked about is the long-term consequences of falling into these groups where excessive drug self-experimentation is normalized.

Lots of people from the 2010-ish era of "aesthetics" and steroids are having heart issues now in their 30s (or earlier). Pretty sad to see.

To me it's fairly clear where this comes from: ambitious people convinced they've figured out some secret cheat code that no-one else has. I'm yet to see that path end well for anyone.

> You should recognize that they are a bad person

Maybe I'm giving them too much credit but I don't really think they're bad people. Young, arrogant, stupid, unaware of the consequences of what they're doing sure... but I don't think it comes from a malicious place where they're intentionally trying to hurt others.

New comment by AstroBen in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

AstroBen — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 04:11:57 +0000

I only see this being the case for throwaway code and prototypes. For production code you want to keep long term it's not so clear cut.

New comment by AstroBen in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

AstroBen — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:25:42 +0000

> skimming through an alien looking codebase, scratching your head trying to figure what crazy abstraction the last person who touched this code had in mind. Oh shit it was me? That made so much more sense back then

This is exactly how you learn to create better abstractions and write clear code that future you will understand.

New comment by AstroBen in "I’m spending months coding the old way"

AstroBen — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:16:09 +0000

I wish more was being invested in AI autocomplete workflows. That was a nice middle-ground.

But yeah my hunch is "the old way" - although not sure we can even call it that - is likely still on par with an "agentic" workflow if you view it through a wider lens. You retain much better knowledge of the codebase. You improve your understanding over coding concepts (active recall is far stronger than passive recognition).