Hacker News: josters

New comment by josters in "Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS"

josters — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:12:53 +0000

Thanks for letting me know, maybe I need to get back into it. I always enjoyed the speed with which I could prototype new ideas and even get them installed on a phone or tablet.

New comment by josters in "Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS"

josters — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:55:12 +0000

This reminds me of LiveCode[1] (aka Revolution and MetaCard) which I’ve used quite a bit about a decade ago. Was also inspired by HyperCard. Just checked their site again and it seems they’ve discontinued the open source version and have pivoted to an AI-assisted drag and drop UI builder.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode

New comment by josters in "Using self-hosted Umami for iOS app analytics"

josters — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:35:40 +0000

It wouldn't if you own the full chain, i.e. have knowledge of both the on-device salt and hash AND the server salt and hash. However, in the scenario of using a third party like TelemetryDeck you as the developer would not be able to link the device hash to the server hash because you never see the latter.

So, my reading is: if there would be some mechanism (or a third party) which obfuscates the server hash so that you cannot tie it back to the device hash and only tells you "we've seen this device already" it could be anonymous. Of course, it also heavily depends on what other data you associate with that.

New comment by josters in "Using self-hosted Umami for iOS app analytics"

josters — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:01:02 +0000

Nice writeup and I really like the minimal aesthetic of your site!

On unique users: I wonder if there is a way to set this up to work similar to TelemetryDeck's double-hashing anonymization[1]. Did you look into that before deciding to go purely session-based?

[1]: https://telemetrydeck.com/docs/articles/anonymization-how-it...

New comment by josters in "15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test"

josters — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:39:31 +0000

We are giving our dog Fluralaner/Bravecto[1] against ticks which paralyzes and kills them when they bite, drastically reducing potential exposure to Lyme disease. Unfortunately not approved for humans and therefore an interesting inverse: humans can get vaccinated against TBEV but not against Lyme disease whereas dogs can get vaccinated against Lyme disease but not TBEV.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluralaner

New comment by josters in "Show HN: Discover Wikipedia articles popular on Hacker News"

josters — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:49:56 +0000

Nicely done! Would be interesting to sort by upvotes and/or comment count as well.

New comment by josters in "Hengefinder: Finding when the sun aligns with your street"

josters — Sun, 24 May 2026 07:52:36 +0000

This is exactly what I am working on for my city (Berlin). Right now it gives you sun/shade times for outside areas of cafes and restaurants as well as heatmaps for public parks and playgrounds.

The idea is to eventually offer a sun or shadow mode and the app will then surface areas, squares, and streets with more sun or shade and eventually offer walking and biking routes with more or less sun.

New comment by josters in "Claude Composer"

josters — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:45:05 +0000

While the author explicitly wanted Claude to be in the creative lead here, I recently also thought about how LLMs could mirror their coding abilities in music production workflows, leaving the human as the composer and the LLM as the tool-caller.

Especially with Ableton and something like ableton-mcp-extended[1] this can go quite far. After adapting it a bit to use less tokens for tool call outputs I could get decent performance on a local model to tell me what the current device settings on a given track were. Imagine this with a more powerful machine and things like "make the lead less harsh" or "make the bass bounce" set off a chain of automatically added devices with new and interesting parameter combinations to adjust to your taste.

In a way this becomes a bit like the inspiration-inducing setting of listening to a song which is playing in another room with closed doors: by being muffled, certain aspects of the track get highlighted which normally wouldn’t be perceived as prominently.

[1]: https://github.com/uisato/ableton-mcp-extended

New comment by josters in "Two kinds of AI users are emerging"

josters — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 07:22:37 +0000

And, to add to that, how to know when to slow down. Also, having worked at a big company myself, I think the question shifts towards "how to get fast" without compromising security, compliance etc.

New comment by josters in "Eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)"

josters — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 23:54:42 +0000

Do you maybe have sceeenshots of this? Would love to see some more ways of compacting and visualizing this data in a digestible way.

New comment by josters in "Build Software. Build Users"

josters — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:24:02 +0000

They may not understand it but they may very well be able to reproduce aspects of feedback and comments on similar pieces of software.

I agree that the approach shouldn’t be done unsupervised but I can imagine it being useful to gain valuable insights for improving the product before real users even interact with it.

New comment by josters in "The Global Book Map"

josters — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 22:48:13 +0000

Looks like a really nice project! Would love the ability to „subscribe“ to a place or area and get a mail or notification once there is a new book added for that location. Another nice addition would be a heatmap layer for the lower zoom levels.

New comment by josters in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

josters — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 17:08:21 +0000

Working on updating my Your-Age-in-Days app[1] for iOS 26. The main motivation was to have the days I've lived always available on the lock screen with a more native feel than the workaround I had before (nightly Shortcut which updates the background image and adds the current number as an overlay to it).

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/days-of-life-milestones/id6738...

New comment by josters in "Ask HN: How to noise cancel out a specific annoying sound?"

josters — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 09:06:24 +0000

Does this happen at a specific time of day (e.g., start/end of shift) or randomly? The quickest way would be to wear ANC headphones during the most noisy times. Then, if possible and allowed, you could look into soundproofing your windows. Maybe reach out to the garage owner as well and tell them about your situation.

New comment by josters in "Show HN: I built an AI that scans 10k Reddit comments to find 'Blue Ocean' ideas"

josters — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 08:55:11 +0000

Quick heads-up: I clicked through several links on your blog and website (Integrations, Guide, API) and they don’t seem to go anywhere specific yet, or just link back to the top of the page. This makes it harder to evaluate and find out more about your product.

New comment by josters in "Map of all the buildings in the world"

josters — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 13:41:46 +0000

Are you referring to the outside seating polygons? Wouldn’t these stereo images still have a lot of noise (trees, cars, trucks, smaller non-building structures) obstructing the target areas?

New comment by josters in "My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)"

josters — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 22:07:12 +0000

I have circled back to using the apps that are already on my phone, especially the Apple Reminders app which I am currently trying out as my main notes and ideas system.

I have placed it as one of the two bottom widgets on the lock screen which gives me immediate access to everything I need to capture a thought: a main note, the list where I want to store it (e.g., work or personal), the notes field if more context is needed, and I can flag it or schedule a reminder. The app then also has an optional auto-categorize feature which works quite well. Add to that reliable sync across devices and except for a good way to bulk export lists, this has everything I want from a quick draft and capture system.

New comment by josters in "Map of all the buildings in the world"

josters — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 08:38:30 +0000

Currently building something like this for my city. One major challenge I've come across so far is that most APIs will give you coordinates for an address of a place within a building but none of the free, paid or crowdsourced options have reliable information on outside seating polygons. Of course, you could always display the places around you with live shadow data on a map, leaving it up to the user to zoom in and decide based on the satellite image whether the restaurant or café offers outside seating. But to plot the route and then suggest nearby sun/shadow seating options to the user, you would need this information.

New comment by josters in "Ask HN: Anyone Else Noticed This?"

josters — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:41:40 +0000

It’s likely a mix of availability bias and pattern-seeking/apophenia: a few recent outages stand out and the rise of LLMs in recent years is also ever present. This increases the chance to assume a link between both even without evidence that outage frequency actually changed.

Also, I don’t think the switch is as binary: these industry shifts tend to be more gradual where more experienced programmers adopt LLM tools to suit their workflow and newer developers still learn fundamentals because real-world engineering of complex systems quickly exposes a lack of understanding.

New comment by josters in "Periodic Spaces"

josters — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 08:58:16 +0000

This seems to be the article's author's own language Bauble[1], "a toy for composing signed distance functions in a high-level language (Janet), compiling them to GLSL, and rendering them via WebGL"[2].

[1]: https://ianthehenry.com/posts/bauble/building-bauble/ [2]: https://github.com/ianthehenry/bauble