Hacker News: shabgzer

New comment by shabgzer in "MCP is dead?"

shabgzer — Sat, 30 May 2026 05:24:25 +0000

Resist the urge to nitpick and accept that the poster simply means "a large number of high-profile companies".

New comment by shabgzer in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

shabgzer — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:39:32 +0000

How mind-numbingly lame. Just another dime a dozen meme.

New comment by shabgzer in "France rejects backdoor mandate"

shabgzer — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 03:17:09 +0000

Try German, too. I'm always amazed at the level of German writing, even by regular joes on forums and Discord, compared to for instance Dutch writing.

New comment by shabgzer in "Forget AI – WhatsApp planning a simple feature that could be most useful upgrade"

shabgzer — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 18:39:17 +0000

Oh lord no. That sounds like the way Slack does it, which is a damn mess.

New comment by shabgzer in "The True Costs of Being on YouTube"

shabgzer — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 06:12:08 +0000

I suspect it's from the staff she hired

New comment by shabgzer in "The True Costs of Being on YouTube"

shabgzer — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 04:34:34 +0000

While I appreciate her being so open about the financial side, one has to wonder:

> If we roll with the average Adsense income, here’s the bottom line: $14k going out. $4k coming in. Net loss, month over month: TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. That’s a lot to sink into a channel that is barely moving book sales and not getting me a TV deal. Simply put, it’s completely unsustainable from a business perspective.

Why carry on doing that for so long?

New comment by shabgzer in "I put a Spotify jukebox on my website so you can control what I'm listening to"

shabgzer — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 03:44:54 +0000

What works for me sometimes is to search for other people's playlists by using the keyword of a genre or a particular mood I'm after. Filter out the Spotify-generated ones of course. Usually after 20 results you start getting to the good stuff.

Also I've had some success doing collaborative playlists with random friends / acquaintances. A song I added would give them an idea for a song, and we take turns that way. A lot of it is rubbish, though. :-)

What would work even better is if Spotify had a way to search playlists containing a specific song!

New comment by shabgzer in "I put a Spotify jukebox on my website so you can control what I'm listening to"

shabgzer — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 03:11:57 +0000

This is a great idea for exploring new music. Lately I have had trouble doing that with Spotify -- too much I've already heard, or just stuff that's too mainstream/bland.

New comment by shabgzer in "OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era"

shabgzer — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 06:10:00 +0000

Great effort, love to see that the game preserved in this way.

However, for me, the nostalgia wore off quickly. I no longer have the feeling of immersion I used to have when I was younger; I've become numb to the magic. What I see is pathfinding, a graphics engine, a sound player...

Apple's 1980s iPad concept, built from scratch [video]

shabgzer — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 11:24:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grd_a4oi7qU

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42327090

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Breaking the VStarcam CB73 proprietary encryption protocol [video]

shabgzer — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 11:00:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNhY3L4VXMQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42093742

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

BS-1: Breadboard Synthesizer (2021)

shabgzer — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 02:45:06 +0000

Article URL: https://rastertail.net/blog/bs-1/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783984

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by shabgzer in "Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]"

shabgzer — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 12:37:21 +0000

That it is - it better be.

It's an example of the kind of backwards compatibility WordPress needs to deal with the myriad of crazy content generated by people (and plugins!) over the years. Often this gets very chatty and very inefficient.

Besides backwards compatibility, this codebase grew like a jungle, with people just piling code on, not always with much forethought. Part of it's due to the limitations of PHP in the old days, and of course it's inherent with projects of this size, but there are varying degrees of messiness. WordPress is an example of a project that started out too messy and only became more messy over time.

Just to pile on: the WPDB class is another example of continued messiness. The first thing I do whenever I write a plugin, is to add a little database wrapper that just uses PHP PDO instead. Anything better than to deal with the hopeless, inefficient, inflexible mess that is WPDB. (To whoever wrote it: sorry mate!)

Edit: this guy said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729827

New comment by shabgzer in "Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]"

shabgzer — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 09:19:25 +0000

Have a look at the WordPress core. ;-)

Here's a nice example: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/92d9e70f849c337c...

New comment by shabgzer in "Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]"

shabgzer — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 04:37:56 +0000

I'm wondering what any lawyer here on HN has to say about how much of a claim WP Engine has against them being banned from the WP.org plugins repository. My layman's understanding of the law tells me that they have no claim whatsoever; you can't assert rights from something that's provided for free, let alone something so expensive to run. The only claim they may have is related to it being used as a means to extort them, but that is a separate issue.

New comment by shabgzer in "Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]"

shabgzer — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 03:10:54 +0000

> I used to care about this stuff and thought it meant my opponent was weak

Me too, I'm no longer the grammar nazi I used to be. It still comes across as sloppy though.

> likely a red herring to make the defense think the plaintiff is careless

That's interesting!

New comment by shabgzer in "Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]"

shabgzer — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 02:53:26 +0000

The more I read through the history detailed in the complaint, the more sad I become about the state of affairs. I am still on WP Engine's side because I believe Matt has gone way off track, but on the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that Matt has very selflessly helped grow WordPress into what it is today. The hosting bills for WordPress.org's plugin repository for instance can't be cheap, god knows how they fund it.

New comment by shabgzer in "Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]"

shabgzer — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 02:47:26 +0000

That $1000+/hr apparently does not guarantee great proofreading. Already found two typos and am not even a quarter of the way through:

- Page 12: "wordrpess.org"

- Page 17: "fundamental principal"

New comment by shabgzer in "Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]"

shabgzer — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:59:03 +0000

"What Defendants’ statements and assurances did not disclose is that while they were publicly touting their purported good deed of moving this intellectual property away from a private company, and into the safe hands of a nonprofit, Defendants in fact had quietly transferred irrevocable, exclusive, royalty-free rights in the WordPress trademarks right back to Automattic that very same day in 2010. This meant that far from being “independent of any company” as Defendants had promised, control over the WordPress trademarks effectively never left Automattic’s hands."

Already on the second page, a mind-blowing revelation. This is gold. What a time to be alive.