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kingofspain

980 karma · joined June 20, 2010

n@pitbot.net
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kingofspain··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
Thank you, the Android version should be out imminently but Google takes 2 weeks to review and then rejects it because I implied “the news” had endorsed it. Fingers crossed early in the week!
kingofspain··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
I made a little game about popping animals (mankind’s oldest enemy?) and when you fail, a seagull is sick. The animals you pop go into your menagerie so they are ok (they also aren’t real). Right now it has footballs and such to play along with a current tournament but don’t mention the real name or Apple will reject it again. See: https://animalpopper.com
kingofspain··on Show HN: The HN Arcade
Does it have to be submitted to HN before? I made Multi-Animal Spree Popper - game about popping animals for iOS (https://maspgame.com/) but never posted here for fear of being seen as spam. I ofc am considering rewriting in Rust to make it more palatable.
kingofspain··on Show HN: I made a fireplace for your wrist (and widgets)
Excellent! Glad you like it.
kingofspain··on Show HN: I made a fireplace for your wrist (and widgets)
Ha, no but logs are to come soon
kingofspain··on Show HN: I made a fireplace for your wrist (and widgets)
If you promise not to sue, I’ll get right on it
kingofspain··on Show HN: I made a fireplace for your wrist (and widgets)
Hadn’t really thought about it tbh, maybe. Depends how fussy Android widgets and the watch stuff (which is the challenge. iOS widgets are a pain and doing any dev pairing with Xcode and a watch… lets just say I’m glad it’s all on fire…)
kingofspain··on Show HN: I made a fireplace for your wrist (and widgets)
I love this
kingofspain··on Show HN: I made a fireplace for your wrist (and widgets)
Weird, I posted this last week and it got a couple of views but I assumed just wasn’t popular enough and now it’s back?!

Anyway I’ve made a few little updates since this, the main one being you can share fireplaces with friends and enemies (both static and animated).

Thanks for checking it out!

kingofspain··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
A mobile game!

https://maspgame.com

Made with Godot and Swift, a casual manic arcade thing where you pop animals in increasingly exotic/banal locations.

kingofspain··on Why Jony Ive left Apple to the ‘accountants’
The same is true of Bovril
kingofspain··on Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies: A story from hell
Oof. I’ve had the user account one before from Play for an app that had no user accounts. Apple isn’t much better though - currently trying to argue that asking for user location (when a user clicks ‘use my location’) for a real estate app is reasonable. They are insistent it’s not a valid feature and won’t accept it til it’s removed.
kingofspain··on It’s not still the early days of blockchain
Not too dissimilar to getting your bank card and PIN in separate letters. Just much, much quicker.
kingofspain··on How NFTs will change hiring
This has got to be a bit, though looking at his bio he has gone all-in on it. Tremendous stuff!
kingofspain··on We Will Do Anything to Get You to Work for Us Except Pay You Enough [McSweeneys]
If an employer offered me a 5k paycut so they could ply me with coffee and snacks that’s not a deal I would take. So in reverse, I’d like the 5k please.
kingofspain··on The smart home is flailing as a concept
Yeah I feel the plugs are a good enough thing for now. If they are duff in ten years? So what - it was a £7 plug and I’ll get some more with a hopefully open standard by then. I’d never go all-in the way things currently are.
kingofspain··on The smart home is flailing as a concept
I have a semi-smart home in that I’ve got a few smart plugs connected with Alexa and it’s useful to turn on/off a bunch of lights at once - or have them come on in the evening while away. Other than that I’m not really sure what more I’d want. Maybe some kind of instant-disco lighting so I can rock out to Dire Straits?
kingofspain··on The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)
I'm in Bridport all the time and I've still never been so I think I'll stop by there next week.
kingofspain··on Why Monzo's bank transfers weren't working on the 30th of May
Recently updated the iOS app and it's definitely got quite laggy, especially on the pots screen (I only have about 5 pots too). Used to be so nippy as well.
kingofspain··on Techcrunch Redesign
Looks like it’s reverted to some default WP theme.
kingofspain··on Ask HN: Developers with small AWS clusters, what are your monthly costs?
For a client of mine: couple of large DB instances + some smaller, several EC2, several TB in S3, Elasticsearch and elasticache + some misc bits. Was coming in around $2000/mo before we snagged some free credits. A good 50%+ was RDS costs though.
kingofspain··on Ask HN: Do you think PHP has improved with PHP 7?
Can't speak to it myself just yet but I'll be moving a big web app from 5.6 to 7 in the new year and I'm hoping the good news I've heard so far holds true. I think there was a recent post from Slack(?) who mentioned some nice improvements.
kingofspain··on Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
Oh, this a million times. In fact I have a huge pile of cash waiting for someone to fix this.

Right now I'm only pulling from a couple of different RETS services but already it's hellish. Regular short term schema changes, terrible lag in pulling data (10+ minutes to pull 30 listings!), low API limits (cut off for pulling image URL's too fast but they won't give a limit - just saying "if we feel it's too much", so pulling images lags for hours as I have to be extra careful. Also no option to pay extra to speed up). That's before you get to matching up fields across multiple MLS's or dealing with weird crossover effects (MLS X cannot be shown in Y from RETS #1 - buts that fine in RETS #2).

In fact, I will give you all my money right now anyway, I'm going to go live in the hills far away from it all.

kingofspain··on I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas
I'm with them for personal and the app is great (website also pretty good but it has an unusually strict timeout on entering indentity codes that makes me sit there with the app poised, so I can enter it within 3 seconds!)

Santander's mobile app is awful though. It kind of works but it's a chunky pre-iOS 7 hybrid monstrosity. Web access is pretty smooth however.

Co-op who I was previously are a crap beast on all counts.

kingofspain··on I quit my job, bought an army truck, and spent 19 months circumnavigating Africa
Last year I was mugged away from Las Ramblas, guy ran up to me, pushed me from behind and got my phone while I was on the floor. I had my hand on the damn thing at the time too! This was on a busy street around 1am. So while perhaps not typical it does happen.

Bastard ran up £3k in premium rate calls by the time I got back to the hotel to cancel it. Luckily I was refunded for those!

kingofspain··on The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
At least one is still going strong (I worked there at the time they bought in).
kingofspain··on I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas
I started a Ltd a couple of months ago and applied online for a Santander business account, I had my card and account set up within 7 days or so (I was away from home so it could've been quicker). I got a company credit card 2(!) days after applying online to Barclays. No phone calls, no visits to a branch for either.
kingofspain··on Scammed By A Silicon Valley Startup
It's a good thing you didn't go for the 50% haircut. I did that once many years ago & it backfired horribly. I got around 40% in the end - dragged out over 8 months - and the MD used my 'willingness' to take the haircut as a sign that I knew that I didn't deserve the full amount and hadn't really earned it. He's still merrily scamming away all these years later I hear as well.
kingofspain··on Ask HN: Appcelerator's pros, cons and alternatives?
I've used it for several years and done a lot with it. Most of the niggles have been ironed out over time, though Android does tend to lag behind with things a little.

Most recently they introduced Hyperloop (not that one!) which allows direct access to native API's, use of cocoapods etc directly from JS. That would be fantastic if it didn't require a team licence of $1200/seat upfront to even use. With React Native taking off and Nativescript also offering native API access, I can only see it withering behind the massive paywall now which is a shame.

Personally, most of my new projects will now be React Native as I'm confident it'll be around and well supported for longer.

kingofspain··on Ask HN: Appcelerator's pros, cons and alternatives?
Appcelerator is JS rather than C# (Xamarin does use C#)
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