Hacker News: WA

New comment by WA in "The Amazon tax"

WA — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:49:05 +0000

And Apple. Unsurprisingly, the brand name of my app converts best, except Apple wants an outrageous $3 per click or something. Of course, I simply live with no ads and trust in people finding the correct download link if they want my app and not the competitor bidding for my brand keyword.

New comment by WA in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

WA — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:01:58 +0000

Websites always have been shopping windows. They change with the seasons, they come and go. The idea that websites are forever and archived like newspapers might be laudable, but it really applies only to… online newspapers.

New comment by WA in "Flutter 3.47"

WA — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:33:44 +0000

Flutter: if you want a pixel perfect version of your app that looks similar on Android and iOS. Some quite popular apps use it and make a shit ton of money, for example Headspace. More here: https://flutterhunt.com/

React Native: totally viable, because core business logic is the same. If you want native UI elements and all the iOS Liquid Glass stuff, but don’t want to have to completely separate code based, React Native is a viable option if you don’t mind installing lots of third party packages for functionality you get out of the box in Flutter or true native apps.

Native mobile: I have one smaller app with quite a custom calendar view, written with Claude Code natively for Android and iOS. Coding agents help and you get maximum control. Mentally, it’s a bit cumbersome to direct you agent to do everything twice. While one platform can serve as a reference implementation for the other, it’s kinda annoying mentally "to do the same feature all over again and test and direct the agent". But it’s doable.

KMP: No experience, I just hate most things around Android.

PWA: That ship has sailed. Nobody knows about PWAs, most PWAs are bad. It’s a bummer really.

Capacitor: make an SPA (offline-first preferably), and use native code plugins via Capacitor. Still quite feasible, comparable to Flutter in the sense that you need to build a custom UI or use a fake version of Liquid Glass and Material. I use Ionic for that, but it’s a bit dated (still on Material v2). Heavily depends on your skills as a web dev to get good UX.

New comment by WA in "Flutter 3.47"

WA — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:19:31 +0000

WASM or JS doesn’t matter. The reason is Canvas instead of DOM. Flutter apps render to the canvas element, because this is the only option for the 2D game engine you mentioned.

New comment by WA in "Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak"

WA — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 06:12:37 +0000

Starbucks uses espresso machines that cost 4-5 figures. They have automatic thermal control. They never boil the water. While I agree with your overall sentiment, claiming that Starbucks makes coffee too hot and thus tastes bad is nonsense.

New comment by WA in "A Rant About “Technology” (2005)"

WA — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:43:32 +0000

I beg to differ. Earthsea is a good example of "tell, don’t show". It goes on and on with explaining things that happen without the showing part. It’s outright boring.

It might have been inspirational decades ago. Now, it reads dated. Tastes are different, but I’d not call it well-crafted at all.

New comment by WA in "GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization"

WA — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:32:30 +0000

If knowledge is a Swiss cheese, LLMs can help fill the holes, but not make the cheese bigger.

New comment by WA in "A graph that should be front-page news"

WA — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:30:10 +0000

Your post is the typical "it's not us, it's them".

- Per capita: US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

- Cumulative, US has the highest emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?c...

As a European, we have the same thing going on, except we're usually saying "let the US and China do it first", but our cumulative baggage is also pretty big.

In some way, the US and EU are even MORE responsible for reducing emissions and cleaning up their mess, because they reaped all the benefits of a high GDP because of massive burning of fossil fuels without investing heavily into renewable infrastructure.

New comment by WA in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

WA — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:21:22 +0000

The law doesn’t mention Cookies even once.

If your company is overcompliant, seems to be a company issue. This is a general trend I observed: way too many companies and even government entities don’t do certain things for "privacy reasons", while they’re just lazy and privacy is an excuse.

It’s not like not having a consent banner for necessary cookies will result in a fine right away. Most fines are for serious stuff.

New comment by WA in "Apple 'Hide My Email' vulnerability reveals peoples' real email addresses"

WA — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:34:21 +0000

Source? I don't think this is true. Doesn't seem to be the case for me. Maybe your email provider attaches your IP address?

New comment by WA in "Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark"

WA — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 05:27:07 +0000

He seems to be a bullshitter and partially fake. Just take a look at his LinkedIn profile.

New comment by WA in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

WA — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 07:52:30 +0000

Company names != brand names. Brand names != registered trademarks.

They could probably call it "Plenty Apps GmbH" and that would be fine.

New comment by WA in "There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days"

WA — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:09:23 +0000

Happened to me with GTA IV and I have been playing all games since GTA 1. Maybe I just grew too old for these story-driven games, but I never finished it and haven't touched GTA V at all. San Andreas was probably my favorite.

New comment by WA in "There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days"

WA — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:01:33 +0000

Single player = beating the "campaign" in Nightmare difficulty with Gauntlet only :) (but I don't remember how far I got)

New comment by WA in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

WA — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:27:46 +0000

The better use case would be to make AI cancel that damn subscription that lets you jump through 20 dark pattern questions and then tells you to call customer support.

New comment by WA in "Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years"

WA — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:22:25 +0000

- I recently read that most programmers SQL knowledge is outdated by 20 years and it’s true for me. There are quite a lot of features in most DBs that feel very "new" to me.

- Comparing SQL to React weakens the argument. SQL is the language, React is a piece of software. You certainly can run 30 year old JS today in modern browsers.

New comment by WA in "The Website Specification"

WA — Sun, 31 May 2026 07:28:24 +0000

.well-known/security is listed as a prominent example, but is not in the well-known category.

New comment by WA in "HTML Lists"

WA — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:18:50 +0000

And yet, no native select + search combined, which is a very common kind of list. The datalist is basically unusable, because you don't know any of the options.

New comment by WA in "Jumping into cold water can stop your heart"

WA — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 05:19:12 +0000

The worst part is that it’s impossible to tell if the author has just "improved" a correct article to add hyperbole or if the whole thing is hallucinated and all explanations are kinda wrong.

New comment by WA in "Do you want the US to "win" AI?"

WA — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:31:01 +0000

The question who will benefit from wealth generated by AI is never clearly answered. Or it's hand-waved away with some productivity gains mumbo jumbo (that never result in less work, just more, because everybody loads up on AI tools) or the good old trickle down lie.