paulbjensen

Maybe declining might be a better choice of word than dying.

Threads apparently overtook X for DAUs last year according to SimilarWeb.

Why is this downvoted? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform, but what surprised me here is that longtime platforms like Snapchat, Reddit and even Pinterest get more MAUs than X - and this is more October 2025:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

It would be really interesting to learn if brands and advertisers are seeing the same thing?

I have found that:

- If I ask Claude to go and build a product idea out for me from scratch, it can get quite far, but then I will hit quota limits on the pro plan ($20pm).

- I have not drunk the Kool-aid and tried to indulge in ClaudeMaxxing (Max plan at $200pm). I need to sleep and touch grass from time to time.

- I don't bother with a Claude.md in my projects. I just raw-dog context.

- If I have a big codebase, and I'm very clear about what code changes I want to make Claude do, I can easily get a lot of changes made without getting near my quota. It's like Mr Miyagi making precision edits to that Bonsai Tree in Karate Kid.

My last bit of advice - use the tool, but don't let the tool use you.

…and the Danes will tax it, just like they tax cow farts.

The Twitter social graph was an amazing data asset. I worked at a consumer insights firm and the data on followers/followings was quite powerful.

Using a custom taxonomy of things (celebrities, influencers, magazines, brands, tv shows, films, games, all kinds of things), we could identify groups of people who liked certain things, and when you looked at what those things were, it gave you a way of understanding who those people were.

With that data, you could work out:

- What celebrities/influencers to use in marketing campaigns - Where to advertise, and on which tv/radio channels - What potential brands to collaborate with to expand your customer base - What tone of voice to use in your advertising - In some cases, we educated clients about who their actual customers were, better than they understood themselves.

One scenario, we built a social media feed based on the things that a group of customers following a well-known Deodorant brand in the UK would see.

When we presented that to the client, they said “Why are there so many women in bikinis in this feed?”

The brand had repositioned themselves to a male-grooming focussed target market, but had failed to realise that their existing customer base were the ones that had been looking at their TV adverts of women on beaches chasing a man who happened to spray their Deodorant on them. Their advertising from the past had been very effective.

That was the power of Twitter’s data, and it is an absolute shame that Twitter went the way that it did. Mark Zuckerberg once said that Twitter was like “watching a clown car driven into a gold mine”.

I’m pretty sure he must be delighted with how things have panned out since.

Hello throwaway150 and ThrowawayR2,

I wanted to share the demo to show what's possible with Claude Code in a short window of time (I only started building this on Friday evening, and I've spent probably no more than 6-7 hours in total this weekend on it).

Point taken on not doing a write-up on this. I think I will write a blog post about my approach and learnings and then share later. I'll let you know once it is up.

I thought it might be worth sharing that I'm a fullstack developer with about 20 years of industry experience, but I didn't study CS at university, I studied Management & Systems instead (Business Studies with Maths, learning about Linear Programming, Time-Series Forecasting, Critical Path Analysis, Monte-Carlo Simulations, and Systems Thinking).

I have a GitHub profile here so you can see all the open source software I've written over the years: https://github.com/paulbjensen.

I'm also the author of Manning Publications' "Cross Platform Desktop Applications", a book about Electron and NW.js. https://manning.com/jensen.

I still write code in my day job, but I'm having a lot of fun creating PoCs with Claude Code in my spare time.

And if that description about a category of HN users who only became software developers for the high pay was referring to me, I thought it would be worth mentioning that my friends at university in London back in 2006 went into Investment Banking as that had the high pay, but I took a different route and became a self-taught programmer.

I never did it for the high pay (it didn't exist in London back then). I did it because I grew up around computers (my dad was a software and hardware engineer), and I realised that I love creating things with them.

Yeah it's still a bit buggy on that front, will try and tweak it manually to get it right.

Fun bit, if you hit the ball against the billboard on desktop, it will open the link for the billboard advert and then bounce off.

Yeah I'd like to know too. I presume I should have put "Show HN" beforehand.

Perhaps this isn't the place to post demos of what is possible with tech nowadays.

Thanks for your comment, game creator here.

Some background. I'm a 20-year software full-stack developer (started with Ruby on Rails, then moved to Node.js. These days doing a lot of Next.js/React, and some Svelte in my spare time) - as well as Astro.

I'm the author of Manning's "Cross Platform Desktop Applications" - http://manning.com/jensen.

And this is my GitHub profile: https://github.com/paulbjensen

I run a 1-man web product studio: https://anephenix.com

So, last year after finishing a contract at Volvo Cars, I took some downtime and dabbled with learning Svelte, and managed to recreate a silly little prank I made when I was working at a web agency called New Bamboo many years ago. That little prank then got iterated on, and is now the music editor app at https://lets-make-sweet-music.com.

After that, I created a simple ball-table game using Svelte and Threlte, which is a wrapper around the excellent ThreeJS library. Once I realised that Threlte had support for Rapier physics, I realised that I could make a game, so I made this: https://3d-garden.vercel.app

Usually when you hit a blocking issue, you'd google around and probably end up on Stack Overflow. But last year I increasingly found myself using ChatGPT (I have a $20pm subscription) to ask questions and copy/paste snippets of code for suggestions on how to resolve a blocker.

That process turned out to yield some good results, so I was able to iterate on my ideas and get quite far. My only real limitation is that I have a tendency to lose interest in projects and end up jumping from one project to the next. I also started looking at making a LLM-bot interface to try and create a cyclical loop of bots making other bots do things and implementing the feedback loop.

I also managed to implement an isometric game engine based on an example I'd made using Löve2D (a game engine in Lua), but this time written in TypeScript and using HTML5 canvas. I managed to work on that for quite a bit, but as usual ran out of passion.

In theory, if I can resurrect my passion on it, then I could get it to the stage where it would be possible to play a SimCity-2000/3000 like game entirely in the web browser.

You can see it here http://babsland.com

Based on the work across those side projects, I managed to extract out a library for emitting events http://github.com/anephenix/event-emitter - the purpose being to easily decouple Svelte components and make the logic within those components more modular.

I took up the opportunity to work with a former boss at an e-commerce company based in Sweden, so I recently moved here. It was during that time that I learned that the team had been dabbling with Claude Code, which I hadn't used at all.

I then decided one weekend to have a go at trying to build a pixel editor for Babsland, but rather than do it by hand, I decided to try out Claude Code with the Zed Editor (I needed to switch from VS Code because my apartment didn't have electricity for the 1st week, so I relied on charging devices at work and a great hotel - Scandic Centralen in Gothenburg). I realised that VS Code being an Electron app (after all I wrote a book on Electron and Nw.js) was using a lot of battery, so I switched to Zed.

In a couple of hours at the hotel, I managed to build the beginnings of a pixel editor - which is now https://www.babspixel.com. It was a revelation of an experience.

I wrote about it on a LinkedIn post here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7419056...

Since then, I then tried it out on Let's Make Sweet Music, and added a whole bunch of features and instruments:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7425600...

You can see an example of dragging and dropping a MIDI file of Guns 'n Roses Welcome to the Jungle and playing it with the guitar instrument.

I also managed to code up a silly little game called "Mr Spanky's Meatballs" where you lob meatballs are characters and try to survive for as long as you can, again built in a few hours with Claude Code.

The golf game was an idea I joked with making with my former colleagues from New Bamboo (we keep in touch online to this day, a testament to how good that group of developers were). I then started coding it with Claude Code on Friday evening, and posted about it less than a day later.

I'm using the Claude Code Pro subscription ($20pm), not the Max subscription, so I regularly run into the session quota limits, but that's fine because that allows me to sleep and have a normal work/hobbies/life balance.

As someone who I guess you could describe as a creative developer, I'm so excited by what is possible with these AI tools, and I think that in terms of the software industry, the genie is out of the bottle - I think the biggest challenge is going to be ensuring that the quality of the output improves and meets the threshold we expect - for example, that game has various bugs which others in the comments have noted.

For games and fun side-projects, I'm happy to delegate the coding to AI tools and perform a manual feedback loop of asking it to make one feature/fix at a time, reviewing the output, and either iterating on that, or moving onto the next feature/fix to do.

As for work, I'm not yet confident enough to use AI tools the way I have been using them with side projects. In fact the first thing we're doing with our new project is putting E2E tests in using Cucumber and Playwright so that we can verify that the application (the combo of backend, frontend, databases and other services) works and that we can have confidence in deploying it when those E2E tests pass.

I think that we are in a major transition phases in our industry, and that there is still work to be done to yield the results we want from AI (in terms of quality, accuracy, not hallucinating libraries or API calls that do not exist).

I also want to say that having spent years working with React, I really love the developer experience of using Svelte, and I choose to use it for my side projects now.

If you want to kill some (down)time, checkout https://www.mr-spankys-meatballs.com - a FPS built with Svelte and ThreeJS.

I completely get where this person is coming from (being interested in lots of things, diving down rabbit holes and then losing passion and moving onto the next interesting thing).

It feels like minimising distractions is one piece of the puzzle, but the other is having something that is going to help you to stay focussed and complete the goal/task that is right in front of you.

I can relate exactly to what he's described. This decade (the 2020's) has definitely thrown a lot of curveballs.

This is a work of art. Thank you for sharing.

HBO's Silicon Valley was on point - they did their homework on nailing some of the absurdities of the industry.

If Ruby pays your bills, then I think calling it a not serious language is a bit of a stretch. Just look at Mike Perham's Sidekiq - he made a living out of selling a RubyGem.

In theory you can change the licence and hope that those that use the software respect the licence terms, but that depends on trusting others.

I think of the case of the Russian programmer who was arrested and jailed for stealing proprietary code from Goldman Sachs. During the trial it was revealed that Goldman Sachs would use open source software and replace the software licence with their own:

"Open source was an idea that depended on collaboration and sharing, and Serge had a long history of contributing to it. He didn’t fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them. “You don’t create intellectual property,” he said. “You create a program that does something.” But from then on, on instructions from Schlesinger, he treated everything on Goldman Sachs’s servers, even if it had just been transferred there from open source, as Goldman Sachs’s property. (At Serge’s trial Kevin Marino, his lawyer, flashed two pages of computer code: the original, with its open-source license on top, and a replica, with the open-source license stripped off and replaced by the Goldman Sachs license.)"

From: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma...

I got rung in the UK I think a month ago from someone claiming to be from Coinbase. I told them I only had about £5 of Bitcoin cash in my account (which was true), and they immediately lost interest and said a forthcoming email would handle the matter.

They also asked if I had cold storage. I told them I had a fridge (also true).

One reason I wouldn't trust Tesla's FSD: Sun glare: https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaFSD/comments/1huzgtu/tesla_fsd...

Drivers have tackled this problem by wearing polaroid sunglasses.

I really hope someone asks Tesla how they plan to solve the Sun glare issue.

I think the scepticism around whether the AI firms can provide the return on investment for their capital expenditure plan is completely understandable.

It reminds me of a mini-story within Michael Lewis' Flash Boys - there was a massive project to drill through the solid granite of Pennsylvania mountains in order to lay a new fiber-optic cable so that High-Frequency-trading firms could use it to get their data quicker between Chicago and New York. It was done at huge cost, I think around $300m. The Fiber-optic cable could transmit data between the locations in around 13.1ms - 13.5ms.

However, an alternative option of Microwave towers was setup and installed to transmit data between the same locations. The Microwave Tower could do the same, but around 8.5ms-9ms, ~30% faster. And it didn't cost anywhere near as much.

I worry that not only are those current capital expenditure plans wildly unaffordable, but also that the risk of an innovation rendering all that infrastructure obsolete can't be ruled out. It's a massive gamble.

Oh my word Riak - I haven't seen that DB mentioned for years!

I totally get the point it makes. I remember many years ago we announced SocketStream at a HackerNews meet-up and it went straight to #1. The traffic was incredible but none of us were DevOps pros so I ended up restarting the Node.js process manually via SSH from a pub in London every time the Node.js process crashed.

If only I'd known about upstart on Ubuntu then I'd have saved some trouble for that night at least.

I think the other thing is worrying about SPOF and knowing how to respond if services go down for any reason (e.g. server runs out of disk space - perhaps log rotation hasn't been setup, or has a hardware failure of some kind, or the data center has an outage - I remember Linode would have a few in their London datacenter that just happened to occur at the worst possible time).

If you're building a side project I can see the appeal of not going overboard and setting up a Kubernetes cluster from the get-go, but when it is things that are more serious and critical (like digital infrastructure for supporting car services like remotely turning on climate controls in a car), then you design the system like your life depends on it.

Really cool, especially when I realised you could rotate the terrain and do some zooming as well.

I recently used git bisect to help find the root cause of a bug in a fun little jam of mine (a music player/recorder written in Svelte - https://lets-make-sweet-music.com).

My scenario with the project was:

- no unit/E2E tests - no error occurring, either from Sentry tracking or in the developer tools console. - Many git commits to check through as GitHub's dependabot alerts had been busy in the meantime.

I would say git bisect was a lifesaver - I managed to trace the error to my attempt to replace a file I had with the library I extracted for what it did (http://github.com/anephenix/event-emitter).

It turns out that the file had implemented a feature that I hadn't ported to the library (to be able to attach multiple event names to call the same function).

I think the other thing that helps is to keep git commits small, so that when you do discover the commit that breaks the app, you can easily find the root cause among the small number of files/code that changed.

Where it becomes more complex is when the root cause of the error requires evaluating not just one component that can change (in my case a frontend SPA), but also other components like the backend API, as well as the data in the database.

Looking at the portfolio of businesses that Bending Spoons has, it's like a who's-who of 2010s startups.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with AOL. That business itself was an amalgamation of other businesses over time, so they may find a mirror image of themselves once they start to dig into the weeds.

I watched this documentary:

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-ruin-ftx-documentary...

The way CZ managed to tie up FTX in a knot was a masterclass. (about 59min in).

I watched this Dutch documentary series (Planet Finance by VPRO) and one of the episodes covered a thing called Catastrophe Bonds (CAT Bonds):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEwYDl5tl-s&list=PLuECoz9_QT...

There is a good write up in the Chicago Fed about them and how they work

https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2...

And the FT did a recent piece on it too: https://www.ft.com/video/b3e44987-107d-49cd-b2b4-397a10bc3af...

I expect that this will become more common in the future.

If they had just increased the blur and made it contrast more.

Also I now have this instinctive feeling that every time I upgrade iOS on my devices, the battery is going to get hammered a bit more.

I would love it if they did for iOS what they did for Mac OS Snow Leopard - no new features, just performance improvements on the existing software.

Of course it might cannibalise iOS device sales, but maybe (just maybe), it would result in improved customer loyalty and commitment to Apple - not just for their hardware but also their software. A case of long-term gains over short-term targets.

It reminds me of a Transavia flight from Girona to Rotterdam that had to be diverted to Amsterdam back in 2015 (1 attempt at Rotterdam, decided to divert to Amsterdam, then 2 attempts in Amsterdam).

It was a particularly stormy weekend and it turns out from the article that they had 992kg of fuel left:

https://avherald.com/h?article=489d4c3f

Massive respect for pilots and the job they do.

I saw that Robin Williams setup a deed to prevent his image or likeness being used for film or publicity that covers a period of up to 25 years after his death.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/31/robin-williams-...

I don't know if it could be extended further, but I feel like there is merit for it to be considered in this case.

In Denmark people own the copyright to their own voice, imagery and likeness:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes...

I think that it is probably the right way to go.