Hacker News: zoul

New comment by zoul in "Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras"

zoul — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 05:13:52 +0000

Is this irony? Judging by https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/crime-rate-... it’s not true.

New comment by zoul in "Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account"

zoul — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 05:19:08 +0000

This is Mastodon, and there are instances such as https://ec.social-network.europa.eu.

New comment by zoul in "Bluesky Trademarks ATProto"

zoul — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 05:10:09 +0000

But it’s true in the general idea of Bluesky being highly centralized and dependent on a single for-profit entity.

New comment by zoul in "TypeScript 7"

zoul — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 03:48:57 +0000

Catching bugs in CI is orders of magnitude slower and more expensive than catching them as type errors while writing the code.

New comment by zoul in "TypeScript 7"

zoul — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 03:46:52 +0000

Static type checking greatly affects code design. That’s why converting from JS to TS doesn’t give you full benefits of the type system – the code doesn’t lean into types to model invariants.

New comment by zoul in "Road to Elm 1.0"

zoul — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:09:14 +0000

For me the problem wasn’t the cultural change, it was depending on language whose leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about real-world problems the language users face in production. And then being constantly gaslighted about it on the official channels like the language forum.

New comment by zoul in "Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise "

zoul — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 03:44:37 +0000

They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.

New comment by zoul in "I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI"

zoul — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:05:33 +0000

As a programmer, I don’t feel threatened by the technology itself, but I do feel threatened by the second-degree effects such as what the technology does to our field, especially in the wrong hands.

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

zoul — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 07:30:52 +0000

This! There is a “Bluesky outage”. There is no “Mastodon outage”.

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

zoul — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 05:48:54 +0000

I think we are all saying that Mastodon is meaningfully decentralized and there is no single party that could pull the rug from beneath the whole network. This is what instances bring to the table. Bluesky may be architecturally beautiful, but it’s not decentralized in practice. (See https://arewedecentralizedyet.online for example.) And we know what tends to happen to important centralized services.

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”.