Hacker News Reader

bndron It used to be hard

I disagree with the article a lot. Solving problems because easier yes, the size of the problems became bigger. What I can do now with an LLM is magnitudes larger than I could've done alone.

bndron New Landing Page for Awesome PaaS

Some links lead to gambling landing pages e.g. backery

bndron Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours, in 2025

Users sign up for my service.

bndron Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours, in 2025

Please elaborate, why exactly is it antisocial? Because Cloudflare decides who can or cant access a users website? When they specifically signed up for my service.

bndron Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours, in 2025

They're mostly non-technical/marketing people, but yes that would be a solution. I try to solve the issue "behind the scenes" so for them it "just works", but that means building all of these extra measures.

bndron Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours, in 2025

I run a small startup called SEOJuice, where I need to crawl a lot of pages all the time, and I can say that the biggest issue with crawling is the blocking part and how much you need to invest to circumvent Cloudflare and similar, just to get access to any website. The bandwith and storage are the smallest cost factor.

Even though, in my case, users add their own domains, it's still took me quite a bit of time to reach 99% chance to crawl a website — with a mix of residential proxies, captcha solvers, rotating user-agents, stealth chrome binaries, otherwise I would get 403 immediately with no HTML being served.

bndron Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

Adding a bit of context as well: This started out as a internal linking tool, but grew into something more based on the customer feedback — the database has now reached about 10TB of data about keywords, pages, AI responses etc, where I know who was ranking where and why.

And I'm trying to offer this "data advantage" to website owners, so they can grow, and also this is something that will be hard to replicate (at least quickly) with AI.

bndron Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

I've been working on the same tool since 2024 where I thought it might be a good time to build a tool for all the people who will build their own tools, eventually they will need to market it.

So I built a SEO/GEO Automation Tool for Small to Mid-Size Businesses who don't have a full-time team for that. [0]

The goal is to provide teams visibility across all the channels — Search and AI and give them the tools needed to outrank their competition. So far so good, the fully bootstrapped venture has grown over the last year and I've built quite a few big features — sophisticated audit system, AI Responses Monitoring, Crawler Analytics, Competitors Monitoring etc.

[0] https://seojuice.io

bndron AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

Oh wow, that was painful to read, I especially liked this analysis part:

> Different naming conventions (DW_OP_* vs DW_op_*)

bndron Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)

Hey HN!

I’m working on SEOJuice [1], an automated tool for internal linking and on-page SEO optimizations. It's designed to make life a little easier for indie founders and small business owners who don’t have time to dig deep into SEO.

So far, I’ve managed to scale it to $3,000 MRR, and recently made the move from the cloud to Hetzner, which has been a game-changer for cost efficiency. We’re running across multiple servers now, and handling everything from link analysis to on-page updates with a bit more control.

The journey’s been a mix of hands-on coding (and a lot of coffee) and constant optimization. It’s been challenging but incredibly fun to see how much can be automated without compromising on quality.

Happy to chat more about the tech stack or any of the growth pains if anyone’s interested!

[1] https://seojuice.io

bndron Generate pip requirements.txt file based on imports of any project

Oh wow, my package on the front page again. Glad that it's still being used.

This was written 10 years ago when I was struggling with pulling and installing projects that didn't have any requirements.txt. It was frustrating and time-consuming to get everything up and running, so I decided to fix it, apparently many other developers had the same issue.

[Update]: Though I do think the package is already at a level where it does one thing and it does it good. I'm still looking for maintainers to improve it and move it forward.

bndron Be Polarizing and Dare to Disagree

Hey everyone, I know HN community is very polarizing, and the discussions here are always great to read through as both sides are always eager to prove the other wrong. I think we need more of that in the community. People not being afraid to disagree.

I'm really curious to hear your thoughts and experiences.

bndron Show HN: I built a tool to boost SEO with internal links automagically

Looking for feedback.

Cheers :)

bndron Show HN: I built a tool that does automatic SEO Internal Links with AI

If you see any bugs, please let me know. The product is quite fresh.

bndron Google lays off its Python team

Why not just retrain the python team to another language? I mean, software engineers are not really language specific, they can learn other languages if needed.

bndron Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://vadimkravcenko.com

Mostly I help developers grow — I share my thoughts as a CTO about building digital products, growing teams, scaling development and in general being a good technical founder.

Some of the popular posts are:

- https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/things-they-didnt-teach-yo... - Things they didn't teach you at the university

- https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/project-estimates/ - Rules of thumb for Project Estimations

- https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/contracts-you-should-never... - Contracts you should never sign.

Most of the blog posts have ended up on the Frontpage here, here's the list: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Cheers, Vadim

bndron There's No 'Right Way' in Software Development

Hey there HN! :) Just wanted to share an article I've written about the highly subjective nature of ALL software development practices. With the amount of conflicting best practices out there in the internet — there's no right way, just a way that balances your specific tradeoffs. What seems like 'best practice' to one team could be inconceivable to another.

bndron Ask HN: AI read books, Human also. What's the difference?

I think the main point is — the AI don't really read and understand, they read and remember the patterns of words, which is different from understanding. They see a chain of words often enough that it becomes statistically the next best output based on some input. (with some randomness in-between.)

bndron Product Owner vs. Project Manager: who's in the lead?

Good point.

I made a note in the article to mention that there are a lot of different definitions of the roles, but usually, the definitions are the same, just a different naming convention.

bndron Jira is awful, welcome to AJIR

The more alternatives the better.

We've switched from JIRA to Linear.app more than year ago, and never looked back. With JIRA our team members were getting blocked in the flows quite a bit, now with linear we're much more efficient.

bndron Contracts you should never sign

Hey everyone, author here :) I'm sure most of you have more experience with contracts, so I'd like to hear your thoughts on stuff we, developers, shouldn't sign.

Cheers, Vadim

bndron Apple’s ad business set to boom on the back of its own anti-tracking crackdown

I'm not sure how the anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws work, but isn't it conflict of interest, if you limit others in how they can use your platform, but allow yourself to do the same things you're limiting others in? Or am I wrong?

bndron The silent majority in software

Fixed it. Thank you :) Just took the quote directly from Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority#:~:text=The%20...

bndron I have complicated feelings about TDD

There are three things in my opinion that speak against going with TDD:

1. Many companies are agile, and the requirements constantly change, which makes implementing TDD even harder.

2. TDD does not bring enough value to justify the investment of time (for writing & maintaining the test suites), the benefits are negligible, and the changes are often.

3. Everything is subjective [1], and there's no reason to have such strongly held opinions about the "only right way to write code" when people write software in a way that is efficient for their companies.

[1] https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/software-development-subje...

bndron Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill

Shameless plug, I wrote an article recently on how the hedonic treadmill affects development culture [1].

In my opinion, good approach to avoiding the hedonic treadmill is to think in “processes” rather than “goals.” If you achieve some goal, you get back to the equilibrium and get used to it. But if you’re on a journey, there’s nothing to adapt to as every day is a journey and brings something new. So it's like smaller pendulum swings every day instead of big ones every few months.

Nonetheless, I like the ideas proposed in this article and think they also are quite effective.

[1] https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/hedonic-treadmill/

bndron Show HN: I built a tool to generate social covers on-the-fly

Thanks for the feedback! I'll improve the landing page to make it clearer :)

bndron Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://vadimkravcenko.com

I write mostly about how I build digital agency into millions of revenue, advice for early stage startups and scaling development to 100s of devs.

bndron It's impossible to sign up for GCP in 2022 (Twitter thread)

Accepting Prepaid Cards is stupid in this case, not the other way around.

bndron Ask HN: Great Blogs by Programmers

I mean, shameless plug, but you can read some of my stuff, I don't mind: https://vadimkravcenko.com

I mostly write about scaling early stage startups

bndron Lessons learned from becoming CTO of a small startup (2018)

So I wrote this back in the day when I was leading a small startup, I think the advice is still valid and can help others. Cheers! :)