Zak

It's more expensive to use GLM 5.2 paying z.ai or Opencode Zen API rates than it is to use Opus on a subscription plan. Both of those providers offer subscriptions priced favorably relative to their API rates, but only in what are effectively trial sizes.

The problem is building software to those standards of reliability is expensive and slow. Consumer software never justifies it. Business software rarely does. If you want me to accept liability for the consequences of bugs in code I write, I'm giving you a schedule five times as long and a price twenty times as high.

Guestbooks, contact forms, signup pages, and the like started receiving automated abuse approximately five minutes after they were invented. It didn't take long after that for people to start including a question they expected to be easy for a person and hard to automate with a script.

What's relatively new is CAPTCHAs merely to browse a site. There are few faster ways to get me to close your site, and maybe send you an unfriendly email.

A construction company that pockets ten million dollars and doesn't build anything probably can't shield its owner this way, but a single-developer software consultancy that pockets ten thousand dollars and delivers buggy code can.

Those do exist in other countries. An LLC in the USA does not generally need to have a certain amount of assets. Such a company is more or less without liability until it has some assets; the worst case for its owners when it comes to a routine business debt is shutting down the company. Exceptions are possible in case of serious misconduct of course.

Of course a company like that will find it difficult to borrow money, but it's not rare for its last bills to go unpaid when it goes out of business.

Whether those should exist or not doesn't have a clear answer. Culturally, Germans tend to be pretty uncomfortable with "sometimes shit happens and debts go unpaid", while Americans tend to find a moderate rate of that sort of thing tolerable, especially if it makes starting a new business viable for a greater fraction of the population.

The current system still doesn't sit right with me. Someone sufficiently wealthy has effectively unlimited access. Someone sufficiently poor with a lot of time on their hands might also have unlimited access. Everyone in the middle has a bottleneck.

It may be reasonable to put limits on free public access to records where there's a privacy concern.

Cars are quieter, and hearing other vehicles is more likely. If anyone shouldn't listen to music, it's car drivers, not motorcyclists.

I should probably qualify that by saying that a product that looks to be amazing but costs way too much, is impossible to get because of manufacturing issues, or requires a third-party ecosystem that doesn't exist does not actually solve the consumer problem.

> Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do:

feels like an idea from a time when many people were encountering UIs on screens for the very first time as adults. I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.

About the only time it doesn't work is when the game uses an anticheat system that intentionally blocks Linux. I can even see where the game devs are coming from when it comes to competitive games; cheating ruins the game for other players, and there's no way to prevent certain kinds of cheating without trusting the client to a degree.

I can't see any reasonable and user-respecting place VW could be coming from intentionally blocking access from open systems.

There are only bad reasons for them to do that. End users don't get compromised that way in reality, but it does mean they might convince the app to do something that's bad for profits.

Firefox for Android syncs with Firefox desktop so there's a shared history and I can easily send tabs from one to the other. It's also easy to copy proper URLs instead of shady shortlinks that often contain affiliate codes and trip spam filters. Finally, I don't want to give Amazon a foothold on my devices; the browser has a stronger sandbox than native apps do.

That said, I'm curious as to why someone with enough technical sophistication to be posting on HN browses Amazon with a native mobile app instead of a web browser.

Unless your car's design is particularly evil (a real possibility), changing a headlight bulb is usually easy to do yourself, and approved, incandescent headlight bulbs are easy to source most places.

I can once again write Clojure apps for my phone, which is fun to do by hand, unlike more conventional tools for writing Android apps.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/business/technology-a-saf...

Beyond the usual rudeness of spam, that's a little creepy.

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Clojure, Ruby (sometimes on Rails), PostgreSQL, Javascript, Python. Some experience with Rust, Lua, C, C++, Haskell, Scheme, Racket, Common Lisp.

In 2026, I probably need to say I can code without an LLM. I can also code with one and I have a decent grasp of context engineering.

Github: https://github.com/zakwilson/

Email: hn@goodanser.com

Demanding that people disable Bluetooth does not seem reasonable. If there's an actual bomber, tipping them off that you're reacting to their threat might lead them to set off the bomb early. Similarly, demanding that someone shut off the "Free Palestine, F Zionists" WiFi network or the flight crew will call the FBI is counterproductive; if that's cause to call the FBI, just call them. A warning lets the person cover their tracks.

For the record, "BOMB" is probably cause to call the FBI and "Free Palestine, F Zionists" by itself almost certainly isn't, but is something to mention when calling them about "BOMB".

It annoys me that these are such a draw. There are a dozen other viable messaging and video call apps, but there's always someone who feels like spending two minutes to install and activate one is a major imposition.

Direct price comparisons get tricky because different buyers care about different details. I really like the Thinkpad's Trackpoint, for example, but I also like the Framework's 3:2 aspect ratio. I'd have a hard time choosing.