Hacker News: BTBurke

New comment by BTBurke in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

BTBurke — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 02:16:21 +0000

I made the decision to leave Github a couple months ago when I retired and started heavily working on personal projects. I like the idea of radicle and used it for a while, but it's complicated to set up and maintain if you want to run your own seed node and pin your personal projects.

What I ended up with is a version of a static forge - Charm's soft-serve to host the repos and a forked version of the pico.sh pgit static site generator. I added git-bug integration to track issues in the repo and an alternative CLI to git-bug that works better when collaborating with agents.

A static forge site is very resilient to bot traffic because it only renders a limited number of commits, instead of pathologically allowing a near infinite number of URLs for bots to crawl.

https://kilimanjaro.io if you want to see what it looks like.

New comment by BTBurke in "If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like someone getting good at design"

BTBurke — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 01:54:50 +0000

I’d be interested in seeing those if you’re open to sharing.

New comment by BTBurke in "Jack Dorsey has set a 10 btc bounty for Nostr based alternative to GitHub"

BTBurke — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 19:26:44 +0000

Insane how the entire global economy moves things of this value around all day every day and we have no problem with it.

Are you suggesting it's impossible to outsource development work to someone for $220k?

New comment by BTBurke in "Jack Dorsey has set a 10 btc bounty for Nostr based alternative to GitHub"

BTBurke — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 15:00:39 +0000

Why doesn't he then do that and pay someone $$ to build it? This is just marketing for whatever this web3 thing is.

New comment by BTBurke in "Want anonymity? Make a persona not a mystery"

BTBurke — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 17:49:40 +0000

Now no one will believe my real name is Gill Bates.

New comment by BTBurke in "Show HN: DriftDB – an open source WebSocket backend for real-time apps"

BTBurke — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 13:19:05 +0000

One more thought - any consideration of hooking this to Cloudflare's queue? Then you could optionally connect another worker to that and e.g. persist everything in their D1 SQLite database.

New comment by BTBurke in "Show HN: DriftDB – an open source WebSocket backend for real-time apps"

BTBurke — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 13:08:26 +0000

That works perfectly for what I'm using it for. Thanks for building this!

New comment by BTBurke in "Show HN: DriftDB – an open source WebSocket backend for real-time apps"

BTBurke — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 12:57:56 +0000

This is great. I'm going to use this with something I'm working on. The edge behavior is just what I need.

When you say limitations are a "relatively small number of clients need to share some state over a relatively short period of time," I read in another comment about a dozen or so clients, but what about the time factor? Can it be on the order of hours?

New comment by BTBurke in "Ask HN: How do you have fun?"

BTBurke — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 18:44:02 +0000

Been playing in beer leagues for a long time. There's one for everyone - whether it's hockey (my vice), baseball, softball, basketball, etc. - just tons of options.

It's half about the sport and half the people. I've made lots of friends playing hockey at midnight during the week.

New comment by BTBurke in "Show HN: I made an offline-ready hiking trail companion app"

BTBurke — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 10:55:27 +0000

Nothing is ready to be shared yet, but when it is I'll announce it here first for beta testers:

https://lists.sr.ht/~scooter/mototripper-dev

You can subscribe by sending an email to ~scooter/mototripper-dev+subscribe@lists.sr.ht. Feel free to send a hello to the list with what you'd like to see. I'm banging away on it every night when I get home from work.

New comment by BTBurke in "Show HN: I made an offline-ready hiking trail companion app"

BTBurke — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 10:55:09 +0000

Nothing is ready to be shared yet, but when it is I'll announce it here first for beta testers:

https://lists.sr.ht/~scooter/mototripper-dev

New comment by BTBurke in "Show HN: I made an offline-ready hiking trail companion app"

BTBurke — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 10:54:23 +0000

It's open source so when it's ready you can fork it and call it anything you want. Some of the features are meant to be specific to motorcyclists. And as far as getting the word out, it's easier to make it specific to a particular community since I know where they hang out online and how to get it in front of eyeballs.

New comment by BTBurke in "Show HN: I made an offline-ready hiking trail companion app"

BTBurke — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 10:52:31 +0000

I'd love to hear more about what improvements you'd like to see. Nothing is ready to be shared yet, but when it is I'll announce it here first for beta testers:

https://lists.sr.ht/~scooter/mototripper-dev

You can subscribe by sending an email to ~scooter/mototripper-dev+subscribe@lists.sr.ht

New comment by BTBurke in "Show HN: I made an offline-ready hiking trail companion app"

BTBurke — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 19:07:31 +0000

Everything has been done at least once. If we don't try to improve on what's out there, no progress will ever made.

I think Osmand works fine for some things but really sucks for planning long, time-bound trips, which is my use case.

New comment by BTBurke in "Show HN: I made an offline-ready hiking trail companion app"

BTBurke — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 16:12:32 +0000

This is great. I've been working on an adventure motorcycling trip planning app which has similar requirements of being able to work offline as you ride your preplanned trip.

Yours is a good example of what can be done by keeping it simple and not getting wrapped around the axle with complicated frameworks.

It makes me regret all the time I've spent trying to figure out the absolute best tech stack to use rather than just working on finishing the damn thing.

New comment by BTBurke in "Relative popularity of programming languages on Hacker News"

BTBurke — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:02:06 +0000

Let's just accept you can build just about anything in any language. When I see posts like "I built X in Rust," I just assume the process was so onerous that they had to impress others by saying they did it the hardest way possible. /s

New comment by BTBurke in "Ask HN: How do you and your spouse handle big income differences?"

BTBurke — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 11:53:05 +0000

Precision in this particular case is the enemy of happiness.

New comment by BTBurke in "Ask HN: Your admittedly useless side projects?"

BTBurke — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 12:09:06 +0000

I have a couple apps that only I use or are used by a handful of friends. For hobby projects, I never regret building things that I think are useful but I can't be assed to try to market them to others.

1. Mototripper - live streams my location when I'm on a long distance adventure motorcycle trip so my kid knows I'm still alive and moving. (e.g. <https://www.mototripper.app/track/~knobbies> - a trip through Finland, Sweden, and Norway I took a couple weeks ago.) Built with Sveltekit.

2. Vatinator - an app to apply OCR to Estonian receipts to claim VAT reimbursement. Built with NextJS.

New comment by BTBurke in "Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?"

BTBurke — Sat, 09 Oct 2021 08:24:36 +0000

U.S. diplomat. Programming is a hobby and keeping up with the tech sector is relevant to my job.

New comment by BTBurke in "Twitter enables tipping with Bitcoin, plans to let users authenticate NFTs"

BTBurke — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 18:14:21 +0000

Here's my question - NYT could charge me $5 and then deduct from my balance on a per-article basis.

Do we need crypto to enable those transactions? If micropayments made sense, why haven't they caught on already with the payment infrastructure 99% of people already have? Micropayments via crypto are just payment with extra steps.

I'm not for/against either one. I'd just like to see a coherent argument against the idea that crypto is a solution looking for a problem.