Hacker News: zoul

New comment by zoul in "There are no instances in ATProto"

zoul — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:05:49 +0000

New services don’t start with the same userbase because users don’t use protocols, they use apps. And for Bluesky that’s predominantly a single centralized app. If that demotes content from the “competitors” or even switches the protocol completely, you are stuffed. The apps are very much not equal.

New comment by zoul in "W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty"

zoul — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 04:43:41 +0000

On the other hand, the currently overwhelmingly dominant Bluesky app and infrastructure can control what users see, presenting a centralized chokepoint. It’s nice to own your data but if your social circle uses a single centralized app to view it, shrug.

New comment by zoul in "The EU Open Source Strategy"

zoul — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:34:59 +0000

Any instance will work I think, just start following someone like https://eupolicy.social/@bert_hubert and you should discover relevant people and hashtags soon enough.

New comment by zoul in "The EU Open Source Strategy"

zoul — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:34:30 +0000

Mastodon works fairly well for that I think.

New comment by zoul in "Vercel April 2026 security incident"

zoul — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 17:24:39 +0000

Very nice developer experience. A lot of batteries included, like CDN, incremental page regeneration, image pipeline or observability. Not having to maintain a server.

I’m still planning to move elsewhere though, the vendor lock-in is not worth it and I’d like to keep our infra in the EU.

New comment by zoul in "Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down"

zoul — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:43:23 +0000

“The vision was always compelling. A social web that no single company controls, where users own their identity and their relationships,” says the new CEO of the single company that can control what millions of Bluesky users see in their apps.

New comment by zoul in "Can Europe break free of Visa and Mastercard? MEPs stall digital euro"

zoul — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:18:39 +0000

Well, right now a foreign government can do that to us, so shifting the risk to our own politicians would be an improvement.

New comment by zoul in "Obsidian Sync now has a headless client"

zoul — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 10:49:55 +0000

Is there or do you plan to add some kind of webhook to notify interested parties that a vault has changed? I think it would go together nicely with the headless sync.

New comment by zoul in "Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file"

zoul — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 07:12:36 +0000

Yes, you can add an enormous amount of complexity to your app in 3 clicks. Should you? The proverbial night crashes are, in my experience, often much better problem to have than the complexity and cost of AWS.

New comment by zoul in "Tiger Style: Coding philosophy (2024)"

zoul — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 10:06:55 +0000

My argument works just as well if you replace “perfecting” with “improving”.

New comment by zoul in "Tiger Style: Coding philosophy (2024)"

zoul — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 08:52:10 +0000

Would you keep fixing the underlined spelling mistakes on your “watch out for holes in the pavement” sign while people are already walking there?

New comment by zoul in "Tiger Style: Coding philosophy (2024)"

zoul — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 07:03:23 +0000

I would even say that from a project management perspective, zero technical debt is undesirable. It means you have invested resources into perfecting something that, almost by definition, could have waited a while, instead of improving some more important metric such as user experience. (I do understand tech debt makes it harder to work with the codebase, impacting all metrics, I just don’t think zero tech debt is a good target.)

New comment by zoul in "UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales"

zoul — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 15:09:54 +0000

Solar power is very cheap and still getting cheaper:

https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...

New comment by zoul in "Where it's at://"

zoul — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 05:51:39 +0000

In what way is Mastodon a failed experiment? Low number of active users or something else?

New comment by zoul in "OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss"

zoul — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 05:34:43 +0000

Believe it or not, many people just don’t care about the stock market. But they may still care about the economy that could crash badly if the AI bubble gets too big before it pops.

New comment by zoul in "Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU"

zoul — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 17:21:03 +0000

Oh yes. As opposed to the “kiss the ring or else” market freedoms of the US.

New comment by zoul in "Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion"

zoul — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 15:50:12 +0000

I hope it’s not that black-and-white, that it’s possible to have a sane social network with algorithmic feed, only we need to design the algorithms around users’ needs first.

New comment by zoul in "A cryptography expert on how Web3 started, and how it’s going"

zoul — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 20:07:30 +0000

It’s arguably much easier to solve the UX issues when you are designing a centralized service, which is what Bluesky is.

New comment by zoul in "Static sites enable a good time travel experience"

zoul — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:06:44 +0000

A safe rollback on a Friday afternoon is a nice thing for sure :)

New comment by zoul in "Telo MT1"

zoul — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 12:14:12 +0000

That would get us back to the “bigger is better” hole though.