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TobbenTMon Ask HN: Recommended Merchant of Record and Affliate Setup

I'm the founder, so take this with a grain of salt, but depending on _what_ you're selling, https://moonbase.sh may be an option. We built it for selling software specifically, primarily downloadable/installable software, and was annoyed by the difficulties of onboarding affiliates. So revenue sharing is built in, and handled in any way you see fit. Feel free to book a demo if you think this may be a good fit for you.

TobbenTMon DashPane – macOS window switcher, no account, no subscription, pure Swift

What is the benefit of this app over the long-established open-source AltTab? https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos

TobbenTMon The Anatomy of a macOS App

You certainly don't need a hardware token, you can store it in any FIPS 140 Level 2+ stores. This includes stuff like Azure KeyVault and AWS KMS.

Azure Trusted Signing is 100% the best choice, but if for whatever reason you cannot use it, you can still use your own cloud store and hook in the signing tools. I wrote an article on using AWS KMS earlier this year: https://moonbase.sh/articles/signing-windows-binaries-using-...

TLDR: Doing this yourself requires a ~400-500$/year EV cert and miniscule cloud costs

TobbenTMon FoundationDB: From idea to Apple acquisition [video]

The Ladybird project started a similar journey, and indeed they are mainly waiting on Swift 6+ features as documented in their blockers issue: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Hacker Houses in Europe

If you're looking for a co-working space in Amsterdam, you have the https://hackerbuilding.nl/, great vibes with lots of founders around

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2025)

Moonbase AS | https://moonbase.sh | Remote (Europe) | Part-time / co-founder | Lead Commercial Growth

Moonbase is building the ultimate e-commerce platform for indie software developers. We're already trusted by innovative indie studios and growing fast—with zero marketing. Now, we need YOU to take us to the next level.

This is your chance to shape and lead the commercial side of a high-potential startup from the ground up. We're talking strategy, marketing, sales, partnerships — the whole package.

We're a bootstrapped startup, building a lifestyle company, and are looking at bringing on a third founder to help us cover what we don't do well today. So if this appeals to you, get in touch with me at tobias@moonbase.sh or read more here: https://thehub.io/jobs/67a512995a0d1e7c9ade895f

TobbenTMon Ask HN: What do you run instead of Datadog?

Datadog is a monstrosity, they do so many things, most of which you don't know or don't care about, so which ones do you need?

We ended up going for HyperDX, just because I really favour fast log searches and simple alerts straight to Slack, but many of these Clickhouse-powered observability suites like Signoz, BetterStack, etc will do the job. Just depends how much you want to pay.

Also, I hope you're on OTEL already, since it makes changing providers the most easy task ever.

TobbenTMon Keycloak, Angular, and the BFF Pattern

You don’t open up for CSRF attacks if you use same site cookies, which I guess is part of why this pattern is seeing more use now.

TobbenTMon Keycloak, Angular, and the BFF Pattern

I think the main attack vector they are trying to protect against is XSS attacks. If a malicious actor manages to inject client side code, there’s nothing preventing them from exfiltrating tokens and gaining persistent user access. This because there is no Secure Enclave to store tokens in in browsers. The bff pattern can solve this by using HTTP only cookies, keeping all session tokens on the server. For high security scenarios like banks and health it makes sense, but there are so many more attack vectors that it’s not gonna cover it all.

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

It was serverless from the start, although there isn't a whole lot of serverless unique code in it, apart from some event handler bootstrapping to handle SQS triggered Lambdas. Everything else is just standard .Net that would look the same no matter where it's hosted. Huge fan of separating infrastructure concerns from the rest of the app to not lock yourself in so much.

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Small teams and solopreneurs, how are you hosting your apps?

Fully managed so I can spend my time on actually building features. In my case, AWS is my go to cloud, and even with a couple of thousand users, Lambda for compute, DynamoDB for database and SNS+SQS for eventing is costing me less than 5€ per month. Yes, there are risks with serverless if you get DDOSed or whatever, but it’s a risk I’m fine with, and can mitigate with gateways in front if necessary. And Lambdas are not locking me in to AWS since I’m running “full” ASP.Net apps in them, so hosting them on actual compute platforms is an easy switch.

TobbenTMon I'll refrain from providing code that involve concepts as you're under 18

Reminds me of the old Java Zone ad: https://youtu.be/RnqAXuLZlaE?si=Yo6xYRsGWYEu2pF6

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2023)

  Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
  Remote: Prefer on-site, but open to remote
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: C#/.Net, JS/TS, Vue.js, React.js, AWS, Terraform, +++
  Résumé/CV: On request
  LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tobbentm
  Github: https://github.com/TobbenTM
  Email: m@dsen.tv

---

Generalist engineer, with solid experience building stable systems, doing actual fullstack work from infra to frontend. Sharing a lot of knowledge as I go, making sure to upskill the team around me. Open to new opportunities in the near future.

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Why do so many VR games move the camera now?

Purely speculative, but I suspect quite a number of vr players have gotten used to the floating movements. Some vr games are just vastly better using floating movements, especially FPS games. Look at Pavlov VR for example, it's honestly the best movement I've ever used in VR, but it requires the player to overcome the motion sickness introduced by the floating movement. And if players are getting used to it, I'm guessing new games have an easier time utilizing that?

TobbenTMon Ryujinx: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#

Rider is pretty good as an IDE, and .Net works on both M1/2 ARM as well as X64 macOS.

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

This was the first year I've been with them, and pre-paid for a year of dedicated servers.

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

(Anecdotal evidence) While I've been happy with OVH over the last year, literally last night they suspended my servers because they weren't able to charge my card.

No warning that they would charge it, no pre-authorization, no grace period to rectify the problem, just shut down the servers at 2AM in the night.

Not happy to say the least.

TobbenTMon A large collection of fraudulent web stores

Some countries do _kinda_ have this, for registering `.no` domains you need to be a Norwegian citizen or do it through a Norwegian company. Not sure how much that actually helps tho?

TobbenTMon Poll: Contractors, what is your hourly rate

For my full-stack AWS/Node/.Net/React/Vue.js contracts I usually charge 90-150€ depending on clients. 7 years of professional experience.

TobbenTMon Dell XPS 13 Plus developer edition: Now available with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Dell's have so many issues that make me hesitant to ever get one again.

Ranging from warranty being voided for placing them in a bag: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952

To having to _buy_ access to drivers; Dell support told me I had to pay to get access to the Windows 7 drivers of a Dell laptop I explicitly bought because of the Windows 7 compatibility.

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Have You Left Kubernetes?

Vendor lock-in is always omni-present, even if you are using Kubernetes. The only difference is that the vendor lock-in you get when you run Kubernetes is mainly with the infrastructure layer hosting the code, instead of the code entrypoints.

Not to mention any managed services you want to use, which also will lock you in. So I don't do anything extreme to avoid vendor lock-in, other than making my code general enough to only have a small surface area for the lambda entry point. As a practical example, all of my APIs hosted on Lambdas are ordinary ASP.Net apps that would work identically if hosted in Docker containers.

Pricing so far is one of the biggest benefits of doing serverless approaches. I'm down to paying a couple of dollars per month for something that I'd pay tenfold for if doing Kubernetes. Both the monetary sum of only paying for what you're using, and also not having to worry about cluster maintenance, scaling and management is a godsend.

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Have You Left Kubernetes?

Terraform only for me, have not experienced anything better.

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Have You Left Kubernetes?

Kind of?

For my new projects nowadays, I'm pushing mainly serverless approaches using AWS Lambdas (behind API Gateways for stuff that needs to be reachable by HTTP).

I think this shifts the complexity from managing Kubernetes and its accompanying ten-thousand-yaml-files to infrastructure-as-code and the complexities of dealing with AWS. And I happen to prefer the latter, even though it's not infinitely better by any margin.

For the few things that needs to be always-online, or 3rd party self-hosted apps, I'm still on Kubernetes, or pure Docker if possible.

TobbenTMon Docusaurus 2.0

If you hit the print button, the print layout is pretty good, pretty much ready to print to PDF if you ask me!

TobbenTMon Diagram as Code 2.0 [video]

While I totally agree with the sentiment, it's hard to produce diagrams using code-to-diagram tools that convey as much meaning and story. I'd welcome anyone to challenge me on this, but the styling options you have for tools like PlantUML, Mermaid, and so on (excluding expensive online-only tools here) are just too limited.

Yeah, you can argue that simple is better (I really loved https://www.simplediagrams.com/), but you still need _some_ ways to produce diagrams people will actually find pleasing. Diagrams to tell a story, with blocks that make sense in terms of looks, colors, and orientation. I want an open-source code-to-diagrams that can output as pretty diagrams as I make with LucidChart!

TobbenTMon How to get the most out of your 1:1s

Is it really forced tho?

People are busy, you some times don't get the chance to sit down and just talk about anything on your mind. Something else than the current backlog or whatever.

By scheduling regular meetings, it doesn't mean you _have to_ spend an hour talking about whatever, it's a block in your calendar where _you can_. In my experience, these are never forced, but rather an opportunity any party can use to chat, if none get the chance outside of it.

TobbenTMon Types of events in event-driven systems

Martin Fowler talks about the same kind of events, using terminology I've heard much more often: https://martinfowler.com/articles/201701-event-driven.html

TobbenTMon Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

You might have misread the issue at hand, this is not discriminating on country of birth, but country of residence. You can choose not to continue living in the above mentioned countries, and this would no longer be a problem it seems.

TobbenTMon Ask HN: What are good resources to learn about distributed systems?

While not directly about distributed systems, Designing Data-Intensive Applications explains much of the context for why we'd want them, and some examples of them: https://dataintensive.net/

TobbenTMon Ask HN: Why isn't the Hacker News site accessible?

Google Lighthouse do use the standards that we have to follow as a baseline though, which makes the suggestions bear weight.

More concretely, WCAG 2.0 [1] requires a contrast for 4.5:1 for text, and hacker news with it's #F6F6EF background and #828282 has a contrast of 3.54:1, quite far below the WCAG treshold.

This would result in a fine for situations where you are bound by law to follow the WCAG standard.

1: https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-cont...