Hacker News: amadeuspagel

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

amadeuspagel — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:48:16 +0000

Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is very different from blaming immigration for not finding a job. Jobs appear almost automatically (if some basic economic conditions are met), apartments have to be built and permitted.

Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is also different from blaming immigrants. Blame has a moral connotation, and certainly no individual deserves blame because he lives in an apartment that you'd like to live in, whether he moved from another country, another place in the same country or another district of the same city, or whether he was born in that apartment. But that doesn't mean that immigration can't make it more difficult to find an apartment if not enough apartments are built.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Canadians told to "Exercise a high degree of caution in Germany""

amadeuspagel — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:03:19 +0000

The map in which the entirety of germany is yellow and the legend says that yellow means "exercise a high degree of caution" while the surrounding countries are gray, is awfully misleading. The map for france looks the same[1], with germany gray. The logic seems to be: This is the page for germany, the image only shows data about germany. In that case, other countries shouldn't be shown at all, rather then in gray.

[1]: https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/france

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

amadeuspagel — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:03:17 +0000

> Like the author is making a big deal that they think scope is more important than type. I may tend to agree, but I think the difference between "fix(compiler)" and "compiler fix" is not exactly a hill I'd be willing to die on.

The big deal is not that scope is more important then type, the big deal is that natural language allows you to formulate things to emphasize whatever you consider important, and by forcing everything into a specific format this information is lost. There's a reason we have formats like markdown and plaintext, not just JSON.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "The death of the brick and mortar toy store"

amadeuspagel — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:58:26 +0000

I walked 20 minutes to a brick and mortar toy store to buy some bouncy balls recently. It was a chain store though. That's not sad to me, because I'm not emotional about whether chain or independent businesses do any better in a given industry.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "When the cheap one is the cool one"

amadeuspagel — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:51:27 +0000

When I think of companies that make cheapness cool I think of IKEA, Primark, Ryanair and Fiat, not Apple and Porsche. The Macbook Neo and the Porsche 968 are cheap only compared to other products by the same brand and they are designed not to cannibalize those other products.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Ubuntu 26.04"

amadeuspagel — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:10:00 +0000

A distro making your project the default doesn't give you any responsibility.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

amadeuspagel — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:36:30 +0000

Life is about habits. The pandemic interrupted many good habits people had--going outside, doing sports, meeting people--and many people haven't restarted these habits, in part due to a collective cold start problem.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft"

amadeuspagel — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:08:49 +0000

Finland doesn't have compulsory military service to help people feel connected to their society. Feeling connected to one's society is not an end in itself, people should be free to choose how connected they want to feel. Finland has compulsory military service because it's a small country that borders Russia. The US is a big country that borders Canada and Mexico.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Show HN: Newsmaps.io a map of how news topics are covered by different countries"

amadeuspagel — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:48:29 +0000

Interesting idea, but you need to improve readability. Try black text on pastel backgrounds.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"

amadeuspagel — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 11:29:58 +0000

This misses the point. Websites are allowed to replace default keyboard shortcuts for a reason. There are only a few exceptions to this, like Ctrl+W. In other words, you can design your website however you want, except to make it more difficult to leave. This is an implementation of the same philosophy.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

amadeuspagel — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:44:43 +0000

> Study and follow HTML/CSS idioms whenever possible. For example, a link should be underlined, colorful, pointer on mouseover, and written as an tag.

Moreover, if you change the color, you should also change the color of visited links, otherwise they will be the same color. And ideally, you should use a shade of blue for links, and purple for visited links.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "The End of Eleventy"

amadeuspagel — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:42:02 +0000

> The truth is, there has been no successful CMS for static-site generators because the only people that give a fuck about creating static sites would much prefer to use a (free and local) IDE and a terminal.

I'm not sure how successful they are, but pinegrow[1] is a thing. It's not worth it to me to pay $99 per year for a personal website (the only static site I want), but there are many people who have static websites that are an essential part of a profitable business and these people don't necessarily want to use the terminal.

[1]: https://pinegrow.com/

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Mario and Earendil"

amadeuspagel — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:21:55 +0000

I see someone accusing someone else of misunderstanding an author who disavowed any allegorical meaning of his novels and said that their only purpose was to create the kind of world that made the language he invented seem real ...

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Untaxed hidden wealth surpasses wealth of the poorest half of humanity"

amadeuspagel — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:15:58 +0000

All statistics of this type are based on substracting debt. If a headline like "Elon Musk is -100 times as wealthy as Jérôme Kerviel"[1] would strike you as absurd, these headlines are no less so.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/meet-th...

New comment by amadeuspagel in "How Costco Won in Japan (2025)"

amadeuspagel — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:35:12 +0000

> To be sure, North America dominates with 85% of Costco’s 910 warehouses all stocking hysterically-oversized tubs of mayo and peanut butter.

Big families are more common in the US. While average fertility isn't that much higher in the US compared to europe, the US has a lot of subcultures where it's much higher. Maybe that's part of Costco's success. These tubs aren't oversized if you have four kids.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)"

amadeuspagel — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:13:48 +0000

Can you name a "zine" or whatever people had in the 90s that experienced a drop in subscribers after it sold out?

New comment by amadeuspagel in "EmDash Feedback"

amadeuspagel — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:35:10 +0000

> That, by the way, I think we’ll be able to fix in the next 18 months with AI. The plugin security only works on Cloudflare.

Hear, hear. I expect the same from app stores, but I haven't seen anyone announce it.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "OpenAI Acquires TBPN"

amadeuspagel — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:32:52 +0000

Genuinely thought this would be an April Fools joke. But this is the kind of tech media we deserve for using paywall bypassers and ad blockers.

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Cursor 3"

amadeuspagel — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:30:32 +0000

I can't tell you how much it pisses me off when on I click on an article on an english-speaking forum and see a german translation, despite having my browser configured to tell websites that I speak both german and english[1].

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

New comment by amadeuspagel in "Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)"

amadeuspagel — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:28:43 +0000

This is also a good reminder that Paul Krugman opposed the Iraq War from the start. The Iraq War is still the most important part of populist narratives about elite untrustworthiness, but populists never ask about exceptions, and if we judge people and institutions by their stand on the Iraq war today, it has to go both ways.