Hacker News: loeber

New comment by loeber in "LittleSnitch for Linux"

loeber — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:43:54 +0000

Same!

New comment by loeber in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

loeber — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:57:24 +0000

It's because we went from the Desktop environment, where rules were well-documented and standardized, to the Web/Mobile environment, where rules had to be reinvented and, for the most part, were not.

We've lost design idioms, which is a huge tax on users everywhere. I've been mad about this for years: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-desig...

New comment by loeber in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

loeber — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:23:21 +0000

If your deathbed is at the hands of an adversary that beat you because you didn't have any weapons, do you think your views might change?

New comment by loeber in "Apple Business"

loeber — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:13:09 +0000

I previously tried buying Apple for Business and it was an endless runaround with terrible signup nterfaces and having to call dumb flunkies. The whole process sucked and was disrespectful to their business customers, who do not have the time to deal with such nonsense.

New comment by loeber in "Migrating to the EU"

loeber — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:29:29 +0000

Can you provide credible examples of each of these?

New comment by loeber in "Migrating to the EU"

loeber — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:35:24 +0000

This stuff strikes me as misguided. Britain's Ofcom is sending censorship/deanonymization requests around the world, Germany prosecutes thousands of its citizens every year for "offensive" things said online... and you think Europe is a bastion of free speech or privacy? You might find that you have greater rights on US soil.

New comment by loeber in "We Have Learned Nothing"

loeber — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 06:58:05 +0000

Interestingly, this suggests that the Lean Startup methodology is basically a suboptimal strategy that produces acceptable outcomes only in the most fruitful circumstances. You can start a Lean Startup that makes a little bit of money, but if you'd really bet big and put your back into it, you would've done 1000x better.

New comment by loeber in "Give Django your time and money, not your tokens"

loeber — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:49:20 +0000

Shameless plug: I wrote an essay a few weeks ago pushing this exact same thesis. https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-t...

Instead of people buying the tokens themselves, they should just donate the money to the core contributors and let those people decide how to spend on tokens.

New comment by loeber in "I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now"

loeber — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:13:20 +0000

This is both (1) not necessarily true -- there's no first-principles reason why being powerful implies being unethical -- and (2) deeply pessimistic and defeatist. You can apply whataboutism and say that everyone's equally bad, but I assure you that there's a pretty big difference, even down to your quality life, between the types of systems you choose to participate in.

New comment by loeber in "OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation"

loeber — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:15:49 +0000

Comparing OpenAI and WeWork is a nonsensical perspective. OpenAI is shipping the most revolutionary product in a generation, with 800 million monthly active users. It's the fastest revenue ramp ever, at incredible scale -- $20B+ ARR. These are real fundamentals. They matter. And the cost of inference is coming down all the time.

WeWork was a short-term/long-term lease arbitrage business. The two are nothing alike.

New comment by loeber in "AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet"

loeber — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 06:28:30 +0000

Because offering to pay people to implement features is very expensive and tends to take a long time, if they do it at all. Often, they can't even find people to pay to implement things.

In the case of companies hiring Linux devs, that is is very, very costly and thereby inaccessible. Scale makes it different from the scenario of paying a few dollars to contribute tokens to fix a bug.

New comment by loeber in "AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet"

loeber — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 01:41:07 +0000

If you don't get it, then you should read the blog post and come back if you have questions.

New comment by loeber in "AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet"

loeber — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 01:40:38 +0000

Because donating to open source projects today has an extremely unclear payoff. For example, I donate to KDE, which is my favorite Linux desktop environment. However, this does not have a measurable impact on my day-to-day usage of KDE. It's very abstract in that I'm making a tiny, opaque contribution to its development, but I have no influence on what gets developed.

More concretely, there are many features that I'd love to see in KDE which don't currently exist. It would be amazing if I could just donate $10, $20, $50 and submit a ticket for a maintainer to consider implementing the feature. If they agree that it's a feature worth having, then my donation easily covers running AI for an hour to get it done. And then I'd be able to use that feature a few days later.

New comment by loeber in "AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet"

loeber — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 01:30:41 +0000

This is a deeply pessimistic take, and I think it's totally incorrect. While I believe that the traditional open source model is going to change, it's probably going to get better than ever.

AI agents mean that dollars can be directly translated into open-source code contributions, and dollars are much less scarce than capable OSS programmer hours. I think we're going to see the world move toward a model by which open source projects gain large numbers of dollar contributions, that the maintainers then responsibly turn into AI-generated code contributions. I think this model is going to work really, really well.

For more detail, I have written my thoughts on my blog just the other day: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-t...

New comment by loeber in "UK Discord users were part of a Peter Thiel-linked data collection experiment"

loeber — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:02:53 +0000

But it's not free. Persona is hugely expensive.

New comment by loeber in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"

loeber — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:01:42 +0000

"Hold to skip tip" was devilish.

New comment by loeber in "Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues"

loeber — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 04:59:14 +0000

MacOS is the "it just works" operating system. As such, I think the moment that you need to declare custom workarounds like this, it kind of loses its legitimacy, and you should already be in Linux land.

New comment by loeber in "Stop using icons in data tables"

loeber — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:06:05 +0000

I wrote about something very similar a long time ago.[0]

The key problem is that most contemporary web design does not follow any idioms. Idioms are conventions of design that are universally understood. Skillful use of idioms makes it much easier to parse what is going on on a given page.

Where we are with most applications is that they try to define their own idioms, i.e. their own icons, their own navigation patterns, etc. But this is very arrogant because they're assuming that the user has the time to build that familiarity with all those idioms. This is never the case.

Every day I use web applications from nominally mature companies, and they have totally different icon sets for the same actions. This is immensely distracting and hard to read. Every company sees an opportunity to define their own icons, when what they should be doing is using the exact same ones as everyone else because that makes it easy to understand.

https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-desig...

New comment by loeber in "A plea for Silicon Valley to enter politics"

loeber — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:17:18 +0000

But that's the point of the article. The state is failing in all of these dimensions, while state tax revenues and budgets have nearly doubled! We have more spending, but it's not fixing the issues. Many Silicon Valley people are upset about the ineffectiveness of this spend.

Now the spend is going to go even higher, driving out Silicon Valley in the process, but it will not achieve any of the objectives. In fact, it may be destructive to California on a whole.

A plea for Silicon Valley to enter politics

loeber — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:32:04 +0000

Article URL: https://loeber.substack.com/p/30-a-plea-for-silicon-valley-to-enter

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592316

Points: 10

# Comments: 11