<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: brachkow</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brachkow</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:51:13 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=brachkow" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My usual reminder that actually Mozilla has a lot of money (mostly from Google), and, for example, donates six figure numbers to random political organizations not related to browsers and internet (not EFF)<p>Here is a breakdown, which was posted on HN few years ago – <a href="https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla" rel="nofollow">https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:21:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706464</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706464</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706464</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "LittleSnitch for Linux"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>LittleSnitch for Mac is a good looking app.<p>I always thought that ugly UIs on Linux are because of good designers do not intersect well with programming enthusiasts.<p>But looking how ugly same app looks on Linux, I’m starting to think it could be a technical limitation. Can someone elaborate?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:15:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702692</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702692</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702692</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "MuMu Player (NetEase) silently runs 17 reconnaissance commands every 30 minutes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Epic Games partially owned by Tencent and already was caught of including spyware [0][1] in their launcher, but “Tim Sweeney is the anti-corporate robinhood who will dismantle hegemony of Valve and Apple” is very popular narrative on every western tech site<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19394399">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19394399</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_game_store_spyware_tracking_and_you/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:18:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086063</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086063</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086063</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I understand that US has a weird tipping culture which results in such UI.<p>But these UI's are occasionally slipping into a countries where tipping is not expected.<p>This leads to a strange situations like "transaction isn't approved by me because instead of ApplePay and walk away, I need to solve some quiz on a payment terminal or payment will not pass".<p>Every time this happens, it annoys me a lot which affects my wish to visit this place again.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:03:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013537</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013537</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013537</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Have Taken Up Farming"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So, it was a marketing stunt?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:32:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646718</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646718</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646718</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is great because game preservation isn't what game industry shareholders usually interested.<p>CD Project makes great games, but gaming industry is all-or-nothing. They already had colossal flop at their previous release. If another flop happens shutting down GOG is clearly would be on a table as a cost cutting measure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:20:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46422871</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46422871</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46422871</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "I'm returning my Framework 16"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Laptops are compared to other laptops availiable on market. Apple sells a entry line of their premium laptops at 1000$. And these are VERY good laptops.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2025 11:34:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383776</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383776</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383776</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Some Epstein file redactions are being undone"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>pdf is just a computer version of laminated paper</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2025 11:51:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46374774</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46374774</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46374774</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is very important point, that people from US and EU oversee.<p>I live in EU for many years, but due to my birth country being sanctioned I can't use any financial instruments like investing or even simplest savings deposits. Getting mortgage or loan is also much more harder for me, even tho I have much better financial situation than average person in that country. Apart of that I need occasionally go to the bank in person to proof the bank that i'm good person with valid documents under the threat of freezing my funds and closing my accounts.<p>Funniest thing in that is all these sanctions are issued by EU and US, and not by the country I live, where i'm pretty welcomed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:18:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46198404</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46198404</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46198404</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wanted to build something like that. It would be great if I didn’t have to. Any link to follow?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2025 11:28:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45874884</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45874884</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45874884</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe it's not bad. In post soviet countries elderly already watching government endorsed man-hating gibberish on tv all day long.<p>So I would better prefer them playing three-in-row. I think after some time it even would be possible easier to "sell" to them playing some kind of minecraft with grandchildren.<p>Also, I vividly remember parks in Georgia (country!) crowded with elderly loudly playing chess and domino, instead of watching "who deserved to die by our god-chosen almighty army today" crap.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Oct 2025 15:52:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45704798</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45704798</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45704798</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>1) My childhood which coincided with peak of unregulated lootbox-skin markets (around 2013-2015). And I and my CS-playing peers had a happy childhood because of… skins gambling.<p>Most of us were able to earn money to buy a pizza or some additional snack betting on teams, or trading keys. Some exceptionaly lucky or with natural born trading skills were earning serious money — from quater to multiple salaries of an adult.<p>Maybe because casino-tourism in Belarus made people here slightly less prone to gambling, or maybe parents were not used to gift their children micro-transactions — e-sports betting, gambling and trading was financed mostly via in-game drops, returns from these bets and trades, and of course, sometimes, pocket money (which, on average were like 3$ per week).<p>That said, in modern times where micro-transactions are so common that you are ok with giving your kid V-bucks as birthday gift, I want say that anti child gambling narrative is a good thing.<p>2) At that time, and afaik it is true even today — you could use skins as a virtual currency to pay for a real things. It was proto-cryptocurrency/NFT in terms of being KYC and AML free.<p>This is really big market. There are aritcles on NYT about real life terrorists buying real guns for skins.<p>But without US-centric sensationalism, I beleive you can still pay for VPN or ChatGPT in very sanctioned Russia in CS skins. This can be also done with crypto (and mostly done now), but crypto has learning curve and you already playing CS.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:27:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45694405</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45694405</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45694405</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’m still working on turning a wishlist app that I built for my friends into a real product — it’s called <a href="https://thingstohave.app" rel="nofollow">https://thingstohave.app</a>. I wrote a comment about it in summer, and these are the updates:<p>1. I shared the app with the small audience I have and received some feedback in very unexpected places. First, it was hard to understand how lists work because putting things into lists was an unobvious process. I fixed that by adding DnD that works well both with mouse and touch (turned out it’s two separate APIs). Second, users thought that the screenshot on the quite minimal landing page was the real app, and they clicked on it. The problem was so frequent and surprising that I decided to add something funny for people who do that, as I’m not willing to contribute a lot of time to the landing right now.<p>2. I underestimated how bad discoverability on the internet is. My expectation was that I would make my site fully server-side rendered, add a basic sitemap to Search Console, and have a few dozen organic users during the pre-holiday season when users are filling their wishlists. In reality, I got zero — not even users, but even visits. So I started actually working on SEO, no black magic but just adding slightly more complex sitemaps, micro-markup, and other stuff which I thought only products competing for the first page would need.<p>My next steps are to work on getting some minimal organic inflow of users and improving stuff related to auth and user management, which is the most time-consuming part of the work right now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2025 09:23:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566430</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566430</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45566430</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "The RSS feed reader landscape"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have tried most of the RSS on the market, and for last three years i'm staying on BazQux.<p>I try to read everything on the internet via my reader so it is important to me that it:<p>1. can discover not so obvious feeds like youtube or reddit
2. makes rss feeds for non rss services — in the past it had feeds for twitter, vk and instagram that didn't provide feed. Sadly this is no longer a thing I beleive as such thing as social media public api dissappeared
3. can retreive full text of article<p>That said I believe you need to think of choosing of RSS reader as about choosing a mighty backend for the feeds. There is nothing difficult in rendering nice text from XML. Real difficulty is in making RSS avaliable on sites that are hostile to RSS (and will became more hostile in future).<p>And for the chosen backend, you can choose any frontend — just look at RSS apps in app store for your platform. Most of them will support using other backends. Reeder for Apple devices is nice.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Oct 2025 13:32:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45527469</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45527469</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45527469</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm making a public wishlist platform — <a href="https://thingstohave.app" rel="nofollow">https://thingstohave.app</a>. I started it for my friends, but now have intentions to bring it to public.<p>I procrastinate on my plans to making it into true public-facing product. I can't make myself doing any marketing, have very vague monetization plans, miss some feature that people for some reason want a lot, and occasionally put crap into prod!<p>That said enjoy building it, learned a lot of backend stuff, felt in love with svelte, and, most important, me and my friends enjoy using it.<p>To balance enjoyment and pressure i'm trying have some small wins constantly, even if they are very low effort. For example current landing page was procrastinated for six month and built in 30 minutes. It's not fancy and good but it's better than 0!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 13:00:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44433481</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44433481</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44433481</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Release starts by aggressively stating that<p>> Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire<p>but they acquired Pocket in 2017 [1] and neither this app was growing (despite market for such apps was in very good shape few years ago) or it was delightful addition to browser experience<p>that said what annoys me about Mozilla, is that while they are position themselves poor and underfunded, they still act like they are backed by billionaire: they buy random apps for no reason or donating tons of money to not tech-related political organizations [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/mozilla-acquires-pocket/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/mozilla-acquires-po...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015592">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015592</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 May 2025 08:19:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070956</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070956</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44070956</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "I still like Sublime Text"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Few years ago I wrote a guide about turning Sublime Text into IDE which will be on-par with IDE features of VSCode while retaining performance benefits of ST — <a href="https://www.brachkow.com/notes/sublime-text/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brachkow.com/notes/sublime-text/</a>.<p>Sadly, I almost stopped using Sublime Text around a half year ago. Development of AI coding tools made flexible UI plugins support a must. Right now when I'm using ST as main editor I feel like 0.5x developer compared to myself and my colleagues with Cursor, because of being limited to very lazy and limited Copilot suggestions passed via LSP.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:56:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867638</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867638</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42867638</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brachkow in "Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My favorite usecase for ChatGPT right now is generating code in obscure languages like Security Rules in Firebase, bash scripts, ffmpeg and Image Magick manipulations</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Mar 2023 20:02:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306680</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306680</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306680</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Ask HN: What are the proven solutions for jamstack e-commerce?]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I want to build a store with jamstack, but i have zero experience at e-commerce so i don't know what should i use to handle content-management, order-management and inventory-tracking.<p>Are there any proven solutions for that?<p>(Shopify isn't avalible in my country)</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26100876">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26100876</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 2</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Feb 2021 12:46:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26100876</link><dc:creator>brachkow</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26100876</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26100876</guid></item></channel></rss>