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lobsterthief

748 karma · joined May 16, 2018

Designer, developer, tinkerer, https://wednes.day founder.
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lobsterthief··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
I imagine once everything else is tuned with your product you could make a hot-swappable blade assembly that can be quickly swapped out and later cleaned. Like if the entire guard and blade assembly came off, that would be super convenient.

Would add some weight and complexity but if it’s purpose-built it would probably be less stress on the Drone than constantly pulling props off.

lobsterthief··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
My business partner and I are building an AI-powered lead gen platform that allows you to request leads directly from Slack for a variety of roles. Most mature sales orgs have really in-depth CRMs that can serve this purpose (Apollo etc) but smaller teams generally don’t. We’re here to fill that gap.

It’s called Wednesday.

Check it out: https://wednes.day

lobsterthief··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
Have you checked out MUI’s DataGrid component? It works great, but some important-to-some functionality is locked behind the paid versions.
lobsterthief··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
Sounds really cool! Best of luck. Do you have a website or samples/demo yet?
lobsterthief··on Ask HN: What old or outdated software have you never found a replacement for?
Have you tried Whimsical? It’s the only one that’s ever made sense to me. It’s web-based though.
lobsterthief··on MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
I had the same experience working with GQL :)
lobsterthief··on MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
Basically, yes. But with much more enthusiasm!
lobsterthief··on MCP Specification – version 2025-06-18 changes
Agreed. Without standards, we wouldn’t have the rich web-based ecosystem we have now.

As an example, anyone who’s coded email templates will tell you: it’s hard. While the major browsers adopted the W3C specs, email clients (I.e. email renderers) never adopted the spec, or such a W3C email HTML spec didn’t exist. So something that renders correctly in Gmail looks broken in Yahoo mail in Safari on iOS, etc.

lobsterthief··on ChatGPT is my static site generator
Just like websites dying out, I think people back then made them as passion projects they hoped would turn into something more (or not). I remember one I used in the early 2000s called Selida. It had this bug where it would crash randomly on save and I’d lose all of my work. I didn’t know any better and just kept using it. The end result is I had to retype my HTML so many times that it hammered it into my head until I was proficient :) This was a WYSIWYG with a code editor view (like Dreamweaver).
lobsterthief··on OpenAI o3-pro
They will definitely keep the endpoint aliases around for years. No real cost in doing so.
lobsterthief··on Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
This is why UX teams should be data-driven. Do user research and A/B testing to hone your UI.
lobsterthief··on Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc
They’re describing material design, which Google popularized. Skeuomorphism with things that could exist in the real world, avoid breaking the laws of physics, etc. Which then morphed into flat design as things like drop shadows were seen as dated. You are here.
lobsterthief··on Show HN: Ask-human-mcp – zero-config human-in-loop hatch to stop hallucinations
Same here
lobsterthief··on A proposal to restrict sites from accessing a users’ local network
Haha I remember that. The solution at the time for many forum admins was to simply state that anyone found to be doing that would be permabanned. Which was enough to make it stop completely, at least for the forums that I moderated. Different times indeed.
lobsterthief··on Claude Code is now available to Pro plans
We’ve been using it for language translations and it’s been fantastic for that purpose
lobsterthief··on Scientists Consider Leaving the U.S.
Also, generally you want to be a part of the early wave of people moving to said country. An exodus could occur and you don’t want to be caught up in the wave. It’s better to be established in your new country as early as possible.
lobsterthief··on How to live on $432 a month in America
Is this ultimately different than suburbs? Or are you describing a sort of remote kibbutz?
lobsterthief··on US Trade Court finds Trump tariffs illegal
And the brain drain will continue…
lobsterthief··on WeatherStar 4000+: Weather Channel Simulator
Same here. I’ve been doing web design and development for 24 years now so I’ve witnessed the full pivot towards homogenization of interfaces; it’s necessary for commerce and usability at this point. But once in a while I’ll throw together a microsite like this to return to my roots a bit. This is my latest (a basic Trump presidency countdown clock): https://timeleft.now/
lobsterthief··on Reinvent the Wheel
“Never roll your own crypto” is just this year’s “never roll your own date library”. There will always be something. Could I code this? Even if it’s quick, there’s ongoing maintenance cost and you lose out on the FOSS community identifying and fixing vulnerabilities as well as new features that you may need to use. Yes, the library might be large and contain things you don’t need, but that’s the tradeoff. You can mitigate this (depending on the platform and language)—for example, with ESM tree-shaking.

I’d rather install date-fns or moment and let it decide what the fourth Sunday of a given month is in 2046, and also audit for the latest browser attack vectors.

lobsterthief··on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students
No; it’s illegal but he controls the justice department and is attempting to silence the courts. He’s singling them out because they refused to bend the knee. This is not okay. And it is not normal.
lobsterthief··on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students
The percentage of Harvard international students who fall into this category is statistically insignificant. It’s not even worth framing.
lobsterthief··on Only Teslas exempt from new auto tariffs thanks to 85% domestic content rule
Have you read Project 2025? It’s being executed. Here’s a handy tracker someone made: https://www.project2025.observer/
lobsterthief··on DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower
This adds up perfectly to me.

* He could’ve gotten a death note because they suspected he might become a whistleblower, or simply because of what he knew. * This death note could have been the final straw. * Drones fly over my house all the time. If I witnessed what he did and received a death note, I may assign additional significance to it.

None of this is implausible at all.

lobsterthief··on DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower
This is a great take but please don’t even dignify “trump derangement syndrome” by using it in conversation like this. That’s exactly what the people who created the term wanted it to be used for, ironically sowing further division.
lobsterthief··on You wouldn't steal a font
How do you encourage people to continue making new typefaces if anyone could use them immediately? FWIW, it does take significant time to design individual typefaces. It’s not just a set of characters: it’s the character in lowercase and uppercase, how letters appear differently when adjacent to certain other letters, punctuation, etc.

A significant amount of time goes into the process.

lobsterthief··on Pope Francis has died
I believe knowledge is what you know based on facts and experience; wind sensors could gather data and store it in a database without a human touching it beyond initial setup. With enough data, and basic information about where the sensors are located, the computer becomes very knowledgeable about wind in a region without human intervention.

I believe intelligence goes beyond that: knowing that such a system is a solution to an observed problem, architecting said system, using the output to solve a problem, analyzing the results, and deciding where to deploy additional systems.

I think both examples above can be done by AI (if not now, then soon)—but only after being prompted carefully by a human. However, a generalized AI that can do all of the above for any problem in the known universe is likely very far off.

lobsterthief··on The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
iOS added more social network-like functionality to the group chats—like being able to name them, set a photo, etc. To me, this helped cement their popularity since you can create a bespoke “named thing” that makes it easier to return to. You don’t accidentally leave someone off when returning to the convo.
lobsterthief··on Kagi Assistant is now available to all users
There really is no bandwagon to jump onto here—most sites don’t prevent zooming in. Many that do were just misconfigured from the start, and because some popular mobile browsers ignore `maximum-scale=1.0`, the issue isn’t normally identified.

Quick tip: Make sure all of your inputs are at least 16px font size. This will prevent most mobile browsers from “automatically” zooming in when an input is focused ;) Which is a common reason people employ the maximum-scale property.

lobsterthief··on CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract [updated]
It’s a security matter for the US.

It’s a security matter for the EU.

Both countries should pay for the security matter, as they were previously. Stop twisting the other poster’s words.

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