Hacker News: _1tem

New comment by _1tem in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"

_1tem — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 04:25:27 +0000

Security conscious domain. We do automations on behalf of our clients and they don't want credentials stored. "Handling" 2FA automatically is completely unacceptable, it breaks the entire point of the 2FA security model. Besides, login sometimes involves out-of-band 2FA methods including phone number.

New comment by _1tem in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"

_1tem — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:12:27 +0000

What about hybrid automations or human-in-the-loop flows? We have automations where the human starts by logging in, then hands over to the agent. Some parts may even be Puppeteer automated. This also means the session may be long running, typically for months at a time and the agent needs to notify the human again if they get logged out. None of the existing browser automation platforms I have tried make this easy or cost effective, so we are currently trying to build our own. Would love to consider Simplex if this is solved.

New comment by _1tem in "TigerBeetle is a most interesting database"

_1tem — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 15:48:00 +0000

Sounds awesome but can I use it like a regular database for my Laravel/Rails/Django app?

New comment by _1tem in "Building the heap: racking 30 petabytes of hard drives for pretraining"

_1tem — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 15:43:11 +0000

And not just any video data, they specifically mentioned screen recordings for agentic computer uses. A very specific kind of video. My guess is they have a partnership with someone like Rewind.ai

New comment by _1tem in "BrowserPod: In-browser full-stack environments for IDEs and Agents via WASM"

_1tem — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:34:58 +0000

I wonder if this would enable the truly "serverless" application I've been thinking about. Imagine shipping a whole Rails/Laravel/Wordpress app to the user to be run in their browser with sqlite. Technically you would only need a CDN to distribute the app.

New comment by _1tem in "Show HN: Sculptor – A UI for Claude Code"

_1tem — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:18:52 +0000

It's not clear to me what a "container" and "pairing" is in this context. What if my application is not dockerized? Can Claude Code execute tests by itself in the context of the container when not paired? This requires all the dependencies, database, etc. - do they all share the same database? Running full containerized applications with many versions of Postgres at the same time sounds very heavy for a dev laptop. But if you don't isolate the database across parallel agents that means you have to worry about database conflicts, which sounds nasty.

In general I'm not even sure if the extra cognitive overload of agent multiplexing would save me time in the long run. I think I still prefer to work on one task at a time for the sake of quality and thoroughness.

However the feature I was most looking forward to is a mobile integration to check the agent status while away from keyboard, from my phone.

New comment by _1tem in "Selling Lemons"

_1tem — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 16:42:07 +0000

People who want the Good Stuff in life acquire taste and expertise or rely on the opinion of trusted people who have taste and expertise. It's always been like this. Otherwise acquiring the Good Stuff is a matter of random chance.

New comment by _1tem in "Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code"

_1tem — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 11:37:42 +0000

This is not just for LLM code. This is for any code that is written by anyone except yourself. A new engineer at Google, for example, cannot hit the ground running and make significant changes to the Google algorithm without months of "comprehension debt" to pay off.

However, code that is well-designed by humans tends to be easier to understand than LLM spaghetti.

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 14:09:18 +0000

I, as an engineer, absolutely support keeping private APIs private in order to preserve the performance of products. This is a good policy decision and a good engineering decision. Allowing others to build products on top of private APIs creates false user expectations. The user doesn't know the difference between a public or private API, they just expect their devices to work properly. If you allow a private API to be abused, then third parties may create crappy products (such as fake AirPods) which will ruin the battery life and security of Apple devices. The user doesn't know who to blame, Apple or the third party. It is absolutely within Apple's rights to protect their private APIs from misuse in order to preserve security and performance of their products for all users. The user is free to choose a different brand if they want interoperability. I, as an Apple user, want security and performance, not interoperability. If I wanted interoperability I would choose Android. The EU has no right to force Apple to become crappier like Android.

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 05:39:10 +0000

In order to build a high performance product you have to control all of the API surfaces. Apple devices battery life would suffer if any shoddily written third party device could operate with crappy drivers for it.

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 05:34:20 +0000

It’s about the fact that opening your API limits your own engineering capabilities. A device with an open API has a different security and performance profile.

So Apple has to sabotage their own devices performance and security to let other people use it. The EU has no business in this.

If Apple provided public APIs for their products their own mobile devices battery life and security would be worse due to crappy third party integrations. Apple achieves high performance experiences precisely because that is a ENGINEERING REQUIREMENT to build high quality products.

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:44:16 +0000

The 25% number you quoted is for the entire European market including Russia and the Middle East not just the EU. Actual EU market is around 7%.

Anyway the point is, Apple lost 0 market share even after they pulled out.

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:32:09 +0000

The Russian market is not tiny, it is literally the largest economy in Europe with the highest GDP per capita for 2025 when adjusted for PPP. It is also has the highest population in Europe.

If they can pull out of Russia and lose nothing why can’t they pull out of the EU?

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:25:18 +0000

Despite Apple’s exit from Russia after the 2022 invasion, StatCounter data shows iOS share actually rose from ~27.5% in Aug 2021 to ~32% in 2025 in Russia.

If Apple left the EU they would lose nothing.

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:20:48 +0000

If we want to see what the actual impact on Apple’s market share would be if they pulled out of the EU market, consider Russia as a case study. Since Apple pulled out of Russia in 2022, the market share of iOS devices has remained steady and even slightly increased. Russia is comparatively poor, Apple would lose nothing if they pulled out of the EU because consumers would simply travel to other countries to buy.

Here’s a comparison of iOS share in Russia (mobile OS) between August 2025 vs August 2021, using StatCounter data:

• August 2025: iOS ~ 31.97 %

• August 2021: In 2021, the iOS share in Russia was about 27.52 % (for mobile OS) per StatCounter’s data.

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:17:18 +0000

Few die hards? We have an actual case study: Russia. Apple does not sell in Russia anymore but market share has increased.

Here’s a comparison of iOS share in Russia (mobile OS) between August 2025 vs August 2023, using StatCounter data: • August 2025: iOS ~ 31.97 % • August 2023: iOS ~ 27 % (approximately) — StatCounter’s historical data shows iOS had around 26-28 % share in Russia in mid-2023

So between August 2023 and August 2025, iOS’s share in Russia appears to have increased by about 4–6 percentage points (from ~27% → ~32%).

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:10:05 +0000

> It's trivial to get the same performance.

It’s literally impossible to build realtime audio apps with ultra low latency on Android. People have been trying for decades. Not trivial at all.

Microsoft and Google and open source devs have tried to build something as good as a MacBook Pro for decades and failed. Because the extremely high performance and polished experience comes from the highly integrated hardware and software stack that only Apple has. Precisely because it is not interoperable. I as an engineer prefer to support fewer devices and make the experience with those few devices better rather than support lots of devices and integrations but crappily.

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:04:20 +0000

Evidence: Open source devs and Google and Microsoft have been trying to build MacBook Pro laptop performance for decades and failed. The entire performance advantage of Apple products is due to their tightly controlled integration of the hardware and software stack.

Apple consumers have come to expect this level of quality from Apple products. It is unreasonable for the EU to demand interoperability with other products when the very thing that makes Apple products work well depends on tight integrations that are not interoperable.

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 18:00:44 +0000

It’s not about ease of implementation. It’s impossible to build Apple Silicon level of quality in power to watt performance or realtime audio apps over public APIs. Just look at how open source devs failed to fix battery issues with Framework Laptops or build realtime audio over Android. You can’t get Apple quality performance over a public api.

New comment by _1tem in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

_1tem — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 17:56:06 +0000

You might not have an emotional connection but lots of Apple consumers love their devices