HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mads_quist

237 karma · joined August 14, 2022

Founder of All Quiet, an incident management app.

https://allquiet.app

Feel free to get in touch: mads@allquiet.app

submissionscomments
mads_quist··on Does anybody like React?
Why does the blog prompts me to install it as an app?
mads_quist··on If I could make my own GitHub
Very nice thoughts that I've not thought of before. I especially like the fact to have PRs and issues offline. That was a nice read having my first of May beer.
mads_quist··on Forcing an inversion of control on the SaaS stack
Although I absolutely understand the frustration expressed by the author, I find the notion that SaaS companies are somehow 'evil' because they optimize for the 80/20 rule a bit arrogant. Anyone working in SaaS - or really in any business- understands that you need to prioritize. In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits. And that's absolutely OK.
mads_quist··on Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it
Nice.
mads_quist··on Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it
Sure, it's really basic of course.
mads_quist··on Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it
You add "hidden" inputs to your HTML form that are named like "First Name" or "Family Name". Bots will fill them out. You will either expect them to be empty or you fill by JavaScript with sth you expect. It's of course reverse-engineerable, but does the trick.
mads_quist··on Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it
A good old Honey Pot helped us at All Quiet "a lot" with those attacks. Basically all attacks are remediated by this. No need for Cloudflare etc.
mads_quist··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2026)
I am not hiring but I wanted to say that I stopped scrolling down your page on your website when I saw this "perspective" thing you do. It's weird, but in a good way so now I am writing this comment.
mads_quist··on We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
I mean, great, but which CTO gave greenlight to such a weird architectural choice. Sorry for the rant!
mads_quist··on Migrating to the EU
If you need an on-call / incident management platform like PagerDuty or incident.io All Quiet offers EU based Hosting and is operated from Germany:

→ https://allquiet.app

mads_quist··on No, your six-year-old cannot paint this
Abstract art and LLMs
mads_quist··on AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
AI made programming A LOT MORE FUN for me.

What I never enjoyed was looking up the cumbersome details of a framework, a programming language or an API. It's really BORING to figure out that tool X calls paging params page and pageSize while Y offset and limit. Many other examples can be added. For me, I feel at home in so many new programming languages and frameworks that I can really ship ideas. AI really helps with all the boring stuff.

mads_quist··on AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder
Yes
mads_quist··on Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)
Jesus, this piece reads like it's from 2024. Oh, it's from 2024.
mads_quist··on Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
What else is there to say than that xCode is a f... nightmare. Android studio is not really better though.

Native app development is an evil necessity.

mads_quist··on ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering
I want to do game programming again like it's 1999. No more `npm i` or "accept all cookies" :/ rant off :)
mads_quist··on US Tech Force
Is this backed by YC?
mads_quist··on DNS
GoDaddy has acknowledged the issue. https://status.godaddy.com/
mads_quist··on Why Startups Die
Haha, yes. I never understood why startups don't achieve PMF
mads_quist··on We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
Sure, I am not against Hetzner, it's great. I just find that running sth in HA mode is important for any service that is vital to customers. I am not saying that you need HA for a website. Also, I run many applications NOT in HA mode but those are single customer applications where it's totally fine to do maintenance at night or on the weekend. But for SaaS this is probably not a very good idea.
mads_quist··on We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
You'll have planned downtime just for upgrading MongoDB version or rebooting the instance. I don't think that this is sth you'd want to have. Running MongoDB in a replica set is really easy and much easier than running postgres or MySQL in an HA setup.

No need for SREs. Just add 2 more Hetzner servers.

mads_quist··on We cut our Mongo DB costs by 90% by moving to Hetzner
OK guys, running on a single instance is REALLY a BAD IDEA for non-pet-projects. Really bad! Change it as fast as you can.

I love Hetzner for what they offer but you will run into huge outages pretty soon. At least you need two different network zones on Hetzner and three servers.

It's not hard to setup, but you need to do it.

mads_quist··on Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste
Unpopular opinion here probably but: Tinkering is also a great habit to be disappointed and unhappy. I love software and programming, but the apologetic requirements that can come from users mean adding a lot of complexity to software, that leads to many bugs and very slow programs. Everything has a cost attached.
mads_quist··on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous
Yep. Still I feel bad for them.
mads_quist··on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous
Never host your test environments as Subdomains of your actual production domain. You'll also run into email reputation as well as cookie hell. You can get a lot of cookies from the production env if not managed well.
mads_quist··on AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
Our strategy has always been to use as little higher abstractions from cloud providers as possible. Glad we went this way, saved us quite a bunch of SLA breaches today! I am confident to say that it's "best of both worlds". We get great availability zone redundancy by AWS without having to rely on and pay for all those PaaS stuff the cloud giants offer. Also, we can "fairly easy" migrate to any other cloud provider because we only need Debian instances running.
mads_quist··on AWS outage shows internet users 'at mercy' of too few providers, experts say
No, we run on US East 1 but only EC2. Everything was running smoothly!
mads_quist··on Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break the law
Yes, they use apps to break the law. But, still, regulation - when in doubt - should be avoided. Did you know that in Germany, you need to send your employees to a specialised training if they use a ladder in their day to day work? You don't need to regulate what's common sense.
mads_quist··on A case study in bad hiring practice and how to fix it
Who of you have ever been on the hiring side? I will tell you that it is frustrating in the very same way at it is for applicants.

How can you tell as a recruiter if a resume is good? People can put anything on it. Did I work with SAP 20 years ago? Yes, for two weeks! And I can simply put that on my CV. Candidates do that with every piece of technology.

Ok, how to test this then, that they actually master the technology?

Real interview of 2h with maybe a coding challenge. "This does not respect my time and anyway I cannot code under stress" will some people complain.

OK, then maybe some automated offline/online task? "Why do I need to solve some algorithmic nonsense without ever speaking to a person? They don't respect me as a person"

Hm ok, then maybe a real interview in house. But with how many candidates when I get 100+ applications for a position. I CANNOT talk to all of them...

So in the end it's again statistics... Filter out those where the probability is high that they are fast learners and dedicated. What is a good indicator of this? Well, high school and uni grades....

mads_quist··on Show HN: Draw A Fish and watch it swim with the others
Very nice work. You could improve the tank rendering performance though...
Page 1 of 2Next →