Hacker News: cowboy_henk

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Zed 1.0"

cowboy_henk — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:12:41 +0000

Agreed, this is the main reason why I keep switching back to other editors.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "SpaceX files to go public"

cowboy_henk — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:51:23 +0000

Isn't it much simpler than that? Dividends and profits are taxed. Reinvesting to grow revenue isn't. That's why you see companies doing stock buybacks; prevents them from paying taxes, prevents their shareholders from paying taxes.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering"

cowboy_henk — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:09:56 +0000

This only holds if you understand what's in the tests, and the tests are realistic. The moment you let the LLM write the tests without understanding them, you may as well just let it write the code directly.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why we don't use Yjs"

cowboy_henk — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:42:58 +0000

> sorry if this was not clear

It's easy to make that mistake reading your post because of sentences like

> I want to convince you that all of these things (except true master-less p2p architecture) are easily doable without CRDTs

> But what if you’re using CRDTs? Well, all these problems are 100x harder, and none of these mitigations are available to you.

It sure sounds a lot like you're calling CRDTs in general needlessly complex, not just the yjs-prosemirror integration.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?"

cowboy_henk — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 13:30:38 +0000

That's a cynical take, but a more positive interpretation is that pivots are needed if your company isn't actually solving a problem. Otherwise people would pay for it, and the founders would be getting rich. So you need to pivot until you actually create a solution to a problem that people will pay for.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "SoundCloud has banned VPN access"

cowboy_henk — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 16:08:48 +0000

If Apple started routing all iPhone/Mac traffic through some anonymizing VPN by default, services that block it would absolutely lose lots of customers.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

cowboy_henk — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 12:49:29 +0000

But wallets aren't associated with a real person by default, unless it's created through some service that does KYC. If you can get anonymous tokens in an anonymous wallet, who cares if the transactions are public?

Show HN: Browser Based Softbody Physics

cowboy_henk — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 22:22:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.maanraket.nl/experiments/peachy-keen/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46091357

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by cowboy_henk in "A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition"

cowboy_henk — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:52:17 +0000

UIs made in the HyperText Markup Language are, in fact, text.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity"

cowboy_henk — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 16:14:35 +0000

* only in the middle of the day, when the real price of that electricity may be negative, so it's still sold at a profit

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Cloudflare tells U.S. govt that foreign site blocking efforts are trade barriers"

cowboy_henk — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 16:02:36 +0000

That's a bit rich coming from Cloudflare, a company that routinely blocks access to important and legitimate websites to huge parts of the world. A huge part of Cloudflare's customers use them specifically to block users' access to websites.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Living Dangerously with Claude"

cowboy_henk — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:52:07 +0000

You're right to be concerned. OPs method is how you get pwned through prompt injection.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance"

cowboy_henk — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 11:26:38 +0000

Asking for more information than required will cause people to stop using the website, hurting revenue.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance"

cowboy_henk — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:55:02 +0000

BankID seems quite different. Importantly the Dutch system is not tied to banks in any way; no commercial parties required for it to function.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Detect Electron apps on Mac that hasn't been updated to fix the system wide lag"

cowboy_henk — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 14:11:59 +0000

If they're not supposed to be used, why can they be used? Hyrum's law strikes again!

With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. (https://www.hyrumslaw.com/)

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Claude Sonnet 4.5"

cowboy_henk — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:44:45 +0000

Interestingly the internet is full of "slack clone" dev tutorials. I used to work for a company that provides chat backend/frontend components as a service. It was one of their go-to examples, and the same is true for their competitors.

While it's impressive that you can now just have an llm build this, I wouldn't be surprised if the result of these 30 hours is essentially just a re-hash of one of those example Slack clones. Especially since all of these models have internet access nowadays; I honestly think 30 hours isn't even that fast for something like this, where you can realistically follow a tutorial and have it done.

In fact, I just did a quick google search and found this 15 hour course about building a slack clone: https://www.codewithantonio.com/projects/slack-clone

New comment by cowboy_henk in "UK Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards"

cowboy_henk — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 09:02:51 +0000

Currently enforcement is expensive, because in order to prove that somebody is/isn't allowed to work, you need to first identify them. Without any way of identifying workers, how could the government make the case that a company is employing people illegally? Generally crime incidence is higher when chances of getting caught are low, so as long as the government cannot practically enforce these kinds of laws, employers are more likely to continue breaking them.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK"

cowboy_henk — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 09:28:35 +0000

This assumes that "the best of the best" all want to move halfway across the world to attend university. There are many reasons (proximity to family, friends, cultural differences, and increasingly the uncertainty caused by government policies changing) why students wouldn't want to do that. Even if they are smart enough to get in.

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Ask HN: What's the best implementation of Conway's Game of Life?"

cowboy_henk — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 12:20:23 +0000

Here's a nice continuous version that has multiple colors and parameters you can tweak. And it works in webgl: https://smooth-life.netlify.app/

New comment by cowboy_henk in "Patterns for Building Realtime Features"

cowboy_henk — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 14:23:20 +0000

The wikipedia page on real-time seems to agree with OP that this would be a soft real-time system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing

In particular

> Soft real-time systems are typically used to solve issues of concurrent access and the need to keep a number of connected systems up-to-date through changing situations

That's exactly what this post is about. "Real-time" on the web often just means an app that allows multiple users to concurrently make updates to some piece of state, and for the changes to that state to be broadcast to all users so that all clients are kept consistent within a reasonable time frame, preferably as quickly as possible.

While the deadlines aren't as hard as in e.g. audio programming, "real-time multiplayer" apps can be said to be broken if there is a very large noticeable delay between a user editing something and the other users seeing that edit reflected in their local client.