Hacker News: maxibenner

New comment by maxibenner in "MythosWatch: Tracking who has access to Anthropic's Mythos AI"

maxibenner — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:01:57 +0000

This looks like a site I would like to use and trust. On the surface it presents itself as a reliable source, but there is no real information about who runs it, how they collect their data, or what their process is like. I can only assume that this is a vibe coded frontend with a vibe coded scraper behind it, made by a person who doesn't really understand the requirements of the domain.

  "MythosWatch exists because journalists, policymakers, and researchers need a citable record that distinguishes confirmed access from reported access from institutional response — without collapsing those distinctions into a single claim."

I cringe at this quote and I detest the new reality of slop in the guise of quality.

New comment by maxibenner in "Show HN: Pangolin: Open-source identity-based VPN (Twingate/Zscaler alternative)"

maxibenner — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:35:51 +0000

Thank you, great product, can only recommend it! I've been self-hosting it since last year to access my jellyfin home-server from the web. Set up was easy and I never had any issues.

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

maxibenner — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 13:20:51 +0000

I finally got to rework my html form forwarder[1]. I realized how cheap SES is and thought I might as well make the service free.

I hope open sourcing it could be a way for me to get some mentorship from more experienced devs as well. Unfortunately, my work doesn't really do code reviews so I feel like I am not improving much on that front.

[1] https://www.simplecontactform.org

Show HN: Free Contact Form Forwarder

maxibenner — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 20:40:44 +0000

I've seen various versions of this around, but this one is inspired by a model a la goatcounter; free to use with a plea to self host for high usage requirements.

SES is cheap and since this tool just forwards to an email inbox, I would imagine that excessive usage would be rare.

Curious to hear what you all think.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938299

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by maxibenner in "Ask HN: Why don't tech companies provide housing?"

maxibenner — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:06:16 +0000

What would the incentive be? I assume that just paying out the price for an apartment as salary would be easier for the employer and preferred by the employee. Also, apartments in HCOL areas are expensive and the company might not need any additional motivator for employees to join anyway.

Ask HN: Is it ok to like AI cat videos?

maxibenner — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 11:53:08 +0000

I've been trying to wrap my head around this: Recently, I've been receiving AI generated animal videos from people close to me. The videos are of the kind that usually gets its charm from real animals acting in impressive, unexpected, or loving ways. Now they are videos of fake animals acting in impressive, unexpected, or loving ways.

I don't fault anyone for liking these, especially if they don't realize they are generated. However, I'm unsure about how to react to them. Me telling people that they are generated usually dampens their excitement. But some of these videos have evoked genuine belly laughs and I don't want to be the person to ruin that.

But I can't help feeling uneasy about people being fed fake videos that toy with their emotions and their sense of reality; even in this rather innocuous context. This gets even more complicated once there is no way of telling if videos are real or fake from the media alone.

However, in the meantime, I'd be curious to hear from people how they feel and how they handle their loved ones enjoying and sharing those kind of videos, not knowing they were generated.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46704384

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by maxibenner in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

maxibenner — Mon, 26 May 2025 12:40:37 +0000

Nice project, I'd totally set this up for myself as social media replacement. Please let me know once your MVP is ready. My main concern would be to overwhelm recipients if they'd ever get included in multiple people's newsletters.

I've been building on the opposite end of this. It's an open-source form submissions forwarder. I built it mostly because I wanted a service thats transparent, with usage based pricing that I could use economically for my low traffick sites.

Sometime this year I want to add docker-compose to make it easier to self host. Currently it's all manual. https://simplecontactform.org

New comment by maxibenner in "Ask HN: Do your eyes bug you even though your prescription is "correct"?"

maxibenner — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 12:53:24 +0000

Yes. For the past few years I've been feeling like something isn't quite right with my glasses. It feels like the focus never quite aligns, there is an oh so subtle yellow tint, and I generally feel somewhat restrained looking through a frame. Recently, assuming that it might just have to do with low quality lenses, I purchased a larger frame and the highest quality lenses my local optician offers. No improvement. I'm wondering if it might just be a mental thing that I get too caught up in.

New comment by maxibenner in "Show HN: Mailik – Effortlessly Receive Form Responses in Your Inbox"

maxibenner — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 12:12:36 +0000

That makes total sense. I set this up for our agency clients to be able to integrate email sending on a static site without having to manage a server or dive into spam filtering. For them the decreased complexity and time saved alone is usually worth the price.

New comment by maxibenner in "Show HN: Mailik – Effortlessly Receive Form Responses in Your Inbox"

maxibenner — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 16:31:57 +0000

That's what I did here: https://www.simplecontactform.org The presentation isn't fleshed out because we mostly use it for our agency clients but it is the most minimal version I could come up with.

New comment by maxibenner in "Show HN: Mailik – Effortlessly Receive Form Responses in Your Inbox"

maxibenner — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 14:52:31 +0000

That makes sense. Are you currently using something more involved, e.g. Form Spree?

New comment by maxibenner in "Show HN: Mailik – Effortlessly Receive Form Responses in Your Inbox"

maxibenner — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 14:25:01 +0000

Curious to hear if you generally prefer to manage client's forms and billing through your own account or have them create their own and share credentials with you?

New comment by maxibenner in "How to Do Great Work"

maxibenner — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 20:31:23 +0000

I'd imagine that a lot of people who are interested in taking photographs might zone out once I start talking about content-based interpretation and the renewal of artistic language.

New comment by maxibenner in "Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?"

maxibenner — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 11:36:13 +0000

I did a similar thing a while back. https://github.com/maxibenner/cardboard

The goal was to have a platform that ingests the commonly enormous video files from old tapes, automatically cuts them, tags them based on content to make them easily searchable. My focus was on discoverability of scenes hidden in those long video files. The search bar would also randomly suggest tags to search for.

At some point I tried to work with a large video digitization provider and the video splitting ended up being too expensive to be viable for the proposed business model. Now it just auto generates thumbnails and lets you tag videos manually.

The project includes a business dahsboard that allows digitization businesses to send videos directly to customer accounts (deliveries need to be accepted).

Currently, I only use it for my own videos as well as for my MIL.

New comment by maxibenner in "Ask HN: Is 8gb RAM enough for a Linux dev laptop?"

maxibenner — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 17:02:27 +0000

Yes, my machine does swap quite generously. I have never noticed any slowdowns except when working with large video projects. However, I'm coming from an entry level 2015 MacBook Pro, so maybe I just don't know what's fast anymore. I am a little concerned about the SSD lifespan but that's something I'm still looking into.

New comment by maxibenner in "Ask HN: Is 8gb RAM enough for a Linux dev laptop?"

maxibenner — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 13:02:45 +0000

I've been using a Macbook Air M1 with 8gb of ram to run a bunch of Chrome tabs, multiple iOS simulators, docker, an external display, plus the obligatory slack and zoom apps simultaneously and never ran into any issues. I assume most linux distributions would handle this even better than MacOS but anyone correct me if I'm wrong.

Product Photography for Anyone

maxibenner — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 06:50:57 +0000

Article URL: https://fotura.co

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22125421

Points: 1

# Comments: 0