Hacker News: maguay

New comment by maguay in "Picking berries is my meditation"

maguay — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:48:47 +0000

Washing dishes, strangely, hits that for me. One of the reasons I've never found dishwashers to be worth it.

Private Email Is Fine

maguay — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:52:18 +0000

Article URL: https://buttondown.com/blog/hide-your-email

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49282917

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by maguay in "Don't use your phone while you poop"

maguay — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:09:06 +0000

There are dozens of us!

New comment by maguay in "A Sick People"

maguay — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:19:42 +0000

I'm living in Thailand, the self-declared Land of Smiles, and ... it's not very smiley.

I visit Japan, which social media seems to say is a terrible place to work and make friends, and it strikes me as much more friendly and outgoing. Same when I'm in the States, where I find it far easier to strike up a random conversation and enjoy the nods on the sidewalk.

Somehow I think the core differences is wherever you spend the most time, the gilding wears off and there's a core discontent underneath everything everywhere if you stay long enough.

The Economist Problem and AI

maguay — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:45:39 +0000

Article URL: https://pithandpip.com/blog/the-economist-problem-and-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180573

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Bending Spoons is acquiring Airtable for $1.285B

maguay — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:54:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/bending-spoons-makes-first-post-ipo-acquisition-with-13-billion-airtable-deal-2026-08-04/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166340

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

New comment by maguay in "Ask HN: What apps are you building?"

maguay — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 03:55:36 +0000

I'm building a writing app for perfectionists: Reproof (https://reproof.app/)

I've been a writer for over a decade and a half. I'll often rewrite intros and other sections a half-dozen times, or cut quotes and bits that don't quite fit, only later to wonder if an earlier take was better.

I built Reproof to solve this. Every paragraph is versioned, so you can rewrite paragraphs and switch between the takes to see which sounds better. There's a clipping pane on the bottom, to cut things and save them just in case you find a spot to include them later. And there are a bunch of writer-focused features: Write and copy text in either rich text or Markdown, open two documents side-by-side and find/replace between both, selective find/replace to edit only some of the results, command palette to search across everything, daily versioned backups, and more. And lots more to come.

Nearly every other writing app is a digital piece of paper with linear paragraphs. Reproof instead lets you explore the best way to write what you're trying to say.

New comment by maguay in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

maguay — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:43:34 +0000

Ahhh this too. Love flights without WiFi.

New comment by maguay in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

maguay — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:24:53 +0000

Strangely I think it's why I like roadtrips so much. Sitting doing absolutely nothing for even 15 minutes is difficult for me, but I can drive for hours doing nothing but watching the world go by, even without music or podcasts on, and it's fine. And that feels good.

New comment by maguay in "Dupes took over the world"

maguay — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 05:16:57 +0000

And then you have Swatch, making cheaper versions of the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch, as almost a licensed dupe (though since both are owned by the same parent company, it's almost more of an iPhone SE to an iPhone Pro comparison, in a way).

New comment by maguay in "Jim's TrueType QR Code Font"

maguay — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 07:10:59 +0000

This ... means the page could render a QR code for humans while letting bots see the actual URL. That is incredibly cool.

Google Reader was building the wrong future

maguay — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:46:17 +0000

Article URL: https://buttondown.com/blog/google-reader

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48757931

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

The series of tubes filled with enormous amounts of mail, beneath our feet

maguay — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:18:24 +0000

Article URL: https://buttondown.com/blog/pneumatic-email

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716822

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by maguay in "Writing for humans is the only SEO trick left"

maguay — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 04:02:42 +0000

Author here: That is true, and it's true in perhaps an even more nefarious way than Google's Instant Answers that showed direct quotes from your site. Both kill clickthroughs, but the former at least let you speak in your own voice without smoothing out an average answer from multiple sites.

It's an increasingly hard game to win, with diminishing returns in clickthroughs from "winning." Which makes it all the more crucial to write stuff your followers want to read, and to grow that following person by person, even if it's far slower to start than traditional SEO was.

Writing for humans is the only SEO trick left

maguay — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 03:02:50 +0000

Article URL: https://pithandpip.com/blog/the-best-aeo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48594382

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by maguay in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

maguay — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:34:04 +0000

I've always wanted a writing app built around experimentation, where you could write multiple takes on a paragraph then swap them in and out to see how each sounds in context. That, and I wanted a writing app that treated both Markdown and Rich Text as first class citizens, with side-by-side documents for notes alongside a draft, full keyboard control, and more.

And so I built it: https://reproof.app/

It's taken forever (never reinvent the text editor, they say, and they're right) but it's finally at the point where a handful of us are using it for daily writing, and it's just about ready to launch.

The physicists who convinced Fermilab to send Brazil's emails

maguay — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:06:45 +0000

Article URL: https://buttondown.com/blog/brazil-fermilab-email

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219373

Points: 58

# Comments: 17

The best ideas come from the arena

maguay — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:58:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reproof.app/blog/amex-history

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48047089

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by maguay in "Email could have been X.400 times better"

maguay — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 03:15:48 +0000

And yet, when the USPS did deliver email (via paper, no less, with their E-COM system), over half of the message volume was sent by one mass-mailer: https://buttondown.com/blog/the-e-com-story

Afraid the spammers will always be with us.

Email could have been X.400 times better

maguay — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:10:09 +0000

Article URL: https://buttondown.com/blog/x400-vs-smtp-email

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873323

Points: 239

# Comments: 206