Hacker News: axelthegerman

New comment by axelthegerman in "GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released"

axelthegerman — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 01:09:56 +0000

Or maybe the majority of people buying a new damn phone every other week just prefer it'd be a tablet

New comment by axelthegerman in "Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week"

axelthegerman — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 16:16:09 +0000

We really don't. If that finally does happen, people are quick to adapt to change it will use one of the many alternatives, maybe even one that's interoperable or open so we're not in the same mess five years later

New comment by axelthegerman in "Jolla Phone, Over 13 500 units sold"

axelthegerman — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:50:40 +0000

Unfortunately for the foreseeable future you'd need a cheap Android or iOS device for those apps and whatever you want as daily driver.

I don't think you NEED to open your online banking on your phone every day. Just use cash and cards.

2FA should be easily available on any OS

New comment by axelthegerman in "California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash"

axelthegerman — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:21:41 +0000

Also should have been easy to design an OAuth like flow where the government that seems to care so damn much about age verification to attest someone's age in a privacy respecting way - only yes/no if the person is of the desired age.

But then again if it was to protect children, better support for voluntary age control would be so much more useful as most minors use devices managed/owned by their parents.

But then similar to cookie banners it is just about enabling surveillance

New comment by axelthegerman in "Claude.ai down again?"

axelthegerman — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:17:54 +0000

Try writing your own code like it's 2025

New comment by axelthegerman in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

axelthegerman — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:25:07 +0000

Great explanation, very reasonable.

Except that before they did and then they didn't without any proper notification (release notes don't count for significant changes like this).

They should have just added a pop up or at least email or both, given a heads-up and then again when the change actually kicked in

New comment by axelthegerman in "Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead"

axelthegerman — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:59:32 +0000

Works so great on new devices like smartphones. Except not.

And so easy to set up on a home computer. Except it's not always on and doesn't come with backups.

I'm not saying S3 is where it's at but might need a bit more than just Samba. Or maybe you don't but people who need Dropbox do.

New comment by axelthegerman in "Returning to Rails in 2026"

axelthegerman — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:22:47 +0000

And most folks getting stuff done with Rails ain't be filling out surveys to boost their stack - or maybe that's just me.

So everyone just stop worrying what everyone else thinks or seems to think and just use the right tools for you and get on with it

New comment by axelthegerman in "Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter"

axelthegerman — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:33:17 +0000

I hope they'll execute this one well.

Have been waiting for a wallet product from Stripe for a while, but maybe less juicy margins than on top of credit card fees?

New comment by axelthegerman in "Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness"

axelthegerman — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 03:32:41 +0000

And how great it will be to troubleshoot any issues because everyone is basically running a distinct piece of software

New comment by axelthegerman in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

axelthegerman — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:44:56 +0000

Gotta say this is pretty cool. Love some of the nostalgia on the homepage.

Personally not a nextjs fan but finding a modern alternative to WP will pay off for many businesses

New comment by axelthegerman in "Claude Opus 4.6"

axelthegerman — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:59:57 +0000

> Tell it what git commands to explicitly run and in what order

Why don't run the commands yourself then?

New comment by axelthegerman in "Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results"

axelthegerman — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:00:54 +0000

This! Sure you might need a Google account for your android but you don't HAVE to use all their services.

First just don't use Gmail, docs, search, chrome and co. But even better get a Pixel with Graphene and Google's invasive tactics are even more limited.

However it is sad that a company like Apple that used to produce superior hardware with superior UX is falling apart on all fronts - hardware (especially pricing), UX (hello glass design), software (macos just getting worse every release without adding ANYTHING of value)

And now introducing more and more ads while keep selling you "pro" laptops with 512GB SSD :-/

New comment by axelthegerman in "I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year"

axelthegerman — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:42:44 +0000

E2EE is definitely nice, however if you communicate with many people using other email providers your emails still end up there unencrypted

New comment by axelthegerman in "Google is dead. Where do we go now?"

axelthegerman — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 02:01:54 +0000

It never really worked. Most businesses just paid for customers that were going to or already found them anyways.

Not saying ads don't work at all, they definitely increase awareness.

New comment by axelthegerman in "I'm returning my Framework 16"

axelthegerman — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 21:14:46 +0000

I don't see why upgrading a motherboard to one with a newer generation CPU is not valuable. Or why going 16 to 32 GB RAM a few years after buying it first isn't.

Yes full upgradability of each component would be pretty nice but now we have a desktop and factors like compactness and "premium feel" would be even worse

New comment by axelthegerman in "Be Careful with GIDs in Rails"

axelthegerman — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:56:02 +0000

Or more like "be careful with the power you give your LLMs"

New comment by axelthegerman in "Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith"

axelthegerman — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 10:30:32 +0000

> we had to spend time fixing the broken test even if the changes had nothing to do with the initial change. In response to this problem, it was decided to break out the code for each destination into their own repos.

One could also change the way tests are run or selected. Or allow manual overrides to still deploy. Separating repos doesn't sound like the only logical solution

New comment by axelthegerman in "Why frozen test fixtures are a problem on large projects and how to avoid them"

axelthegerman — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 14:20:16 +0000

Right let's add more layers that always solves everything.

No language or abstraction is perfect but if someone prefers pure functional coding, Rails and Django are just not it, don't try to make them. Others like em just as they are

New comment by axelthegerman in "GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches"

axelthegerman — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 17:51:00 +0000

Oh that's one of the best news in the smartphone world in a long time.

It's impossible to escape the Apple/Google duopoly but at least GrapheneOS makes the most out of Android regarding privacy.

I still wish we could get some kind of low resource, stable and mature Android clone instead of Google needlessly increasing complexity but this will over time break app compatibility (Google will make sure of it)

Edit: I do think Pixel devices used to be one of the best but still I'd like to choose my hardware and software separately interoperating via standards