Hacker News: daanlo

New comment by daanlo in "Stripe withheld $85k from our EU platform"

daanlo — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:12:54 +0000

Hey, you should try their tech discord group. https://discord.com/invite/stripe That has helped me resolve issues in the past.

New comment by daanlo in "$300B Evaporated. The SaaS -Pocalypse Has Begun"

daanlo — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 19:13:01 +0000

Thanks for the insights.

FWIW, building your own tools/workflows on top of a standard software typically dramatically increase the lock-in in my experience. It is typically non-trivial to port this functionality to a new system. So it would be in favor of existing SaaS vendors.

New comment by daanlo in "EVs are depreciating faster than gas-powered cars"

daanlo — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 10:02:00 +0000

Comparing re-sale price of Tesla to Ford is absurd. Elon Musk alienated most of Tesla‘s potential customers. I would assume more of the price drop comes from that than from anything inherent about EVs.

New comment by daanlo in "The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes"

daanlo — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 15:41:34 +0000

You still do from operating the software. You see what problems users have using it, which types of problems they tackle with it. By the end of running the software for a month you will have typically learned a boat load.

New comment by daanlo in "Why I don't discuss politics with friends"

daanlo — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:19:34 +0000

Imho opinion, what you are describing are republicans of the past. As parent says, there used to be shared values. Two of the shared valued were peaceful transition of power and respect for the rule of law / division of power between executive, legislative and judiciary.

Imho the values of MAGA republicans are clearly distinct from GWB republicans (even if it may be precisely the same voters). Specifically the two values described above are no longer shared values.

I believe there are more, but for the two values above we have irrevocable proof.

New comment by daanlo in "ICE arrests Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia protests, lawyer says"

daanlo — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 23:49:12 +0000

If you are based in the US, you should protest this hard.

In Germany, they came for the communists first.

https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin...

New comment by daanlo in "Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road"

daanlo — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 19:52:06 +0000

Afaik that was already the rule 25-30 years ago when Armstrong was cycling. I can remember track and field athletes being banned when they didn‘t show up for surprise tests. So either cycling was more lenient or he got a bonus treatment because he was famous.

On a side note: much harder today to not be available/found than it was 30 odd years ago.

New comment by daanlo in "Asking your customers what they want doesn't work"

daanlo — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 10:44:43 +0000

I sometimes sum this up as: Don‘t listen to your customer. Watch your customer.

Obviously needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but seeing how users behave is often more insightful than asking them what they want. You just need to setup the environment for watching in a way that you learn what you want to learn.

New comment by daanlo in "Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?"

daanlo — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 22:58:28 +0000

It is survivorship bias. Because the companies get to a point where unimportant things are important and you spend years in that second phase, the learnings are upside down. „If only we would have solved technical problem X from day 1 we would have so much less hassle in the years to come.“ Except that solving problem X on day 1 instead of shipping what the company did might have killed the company. I see this in a lot of second time founders, where startup 1 was successful - „this time I‘ll really avoid my mistake X.“

New comment by daanlo in "Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking"

daanlo — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 20:24:04 +0000

Why? Climate science works with quantative models and makes concrete predictions. So if the predictions don‘t come true the model is false. E.g. this random blog I found googling compares IPCC predictions with actual outcomes: https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/the-1990-ipc... [the link is just supposed to show how climate science is falsifiable. I have no idea whether the numbers in this specific source are trustworthy]

New comment by daanlo in "Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned"

daanlo — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 09:45:43 +0000

Great article!

New comment by daanlo in "Milan Kundera has died"

daanlo — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 15:23:44 +0000

Such a great quote. Thanks for reminding me :)

New comment by daanlo in "What’s the point of tech conferences?"

daanlo — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 14:37:53 +0000

My experience: Skip most of the talks (maybe only 1-2 per day). Spend time drinking coffee and bumping into random strangers. Then spend more time with people you found nice/interesting.

New comment by daanlo in "Avoiding Errors in Demo Day Fundraising"

daanlo — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 10:58:30 +0000

Thank you!

New comment by daanlo in "Avoiding Errors in Demo Day Fundraising"

daanlo — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 20:30:36 +0000

Thanks. Great post! How would you divide a seed and/or A round between angels and VCs? Is there a perfect mix in your opinion or something you would be opportunistic about, depending on who is interested?

New comment by daanlo in "Why construction projects always go over budget"

daanlo — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 20:24:28 +0000

A close relative is an architect. The way construction projects are managed is waterfall.

It is made worse by the fact that you typically have 1) a large number of different expert firms involved, creating huge dependencies (imagine instead of FE & BE, having 8 different types of engineers, that can only work in a certain pre-defined order and have very limited availability (so if you are late and miss a slot, they may only be available again a few weeks or months later) 2) communication is either physical meeting of principles (bosses/managers) - rarely actual workers, email or paper print outs. It is not uncommon for on premise workers to work with month old plans that have since been changed.

Buildings are one of the few purchasable objects that have gotten more expensive over the last decades (compared to pretty much every consumer goods item).

New comment by daanlo in "Monocle: A pocket sized open-source AR device"

daanlo — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 11:03:12 +0000

The dystopian use case of this is: See the name of someone + how they voted last time. Then you can „engage“ them to convince them of your „truth“.

New comment by daanlo in "Distributor cancelled an order and we need to move 30k bags of coffee [updated]"

daanlo — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 18:40:50 +0000

In the case of food retailers you also need to consider the time on shelf. To take the coffee example. If any average shop buys 4 cases of coffee (24 bags) and on average sells 2 bags per week, then the last bags will sell after 12 weeks. On avg. it will be 6 weeks (42 days). Product will also spend 1-2 days in transit and might not be unpacked on the floor until 1-2 working days later (so maybe 2-3 days). We can assume payments take 1 day to process. So 46-48 days in total. So 50 day payment terms means they are more or less cash flow neutral. Numbers are made up, but roughly align with my experience of selling other durable food to grocery retailers.

New comment by daanlo in "Links mentioning Mastodon flagged as sensitive on Twitter?"

daanlo — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 21:37:26 +0000

For me the tweet is hidden behind a message that I need to change my settings to see sensitive content.

New comment by daanlo in "If PHP Were British (2011)"

daanlo — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 12:33:31 +0000

Fun fact(1): The German word Kekse is a Germanization of the term "cakes". Although a biscuit isn't exactly a cake :)

(1) - At least I think it's funny :)