Hacker News Reader

randomstateon Darktable

Ditched Adobe Lightroom 10+ years ago in favour of Darktable and never looked back. It was the first FOSS software, which showed me how green the grass can get.

randomstateon Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

I gave up on trying to set up an company in Germany. Founding is the 1st side of the coin, but the other side of the coin are the complexities of closing your company (which takes at least a year as well) and exit tax (you might get taxed 6-7 figures when moving abroad even if you don't really make reasonable money).

randomstateon Steam Machine launches today

What a sad time to be buying a gaming PC, it seems that my 7yo rig bought for the same price is just as powerful.

randomstateon Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

I'm developing a simple video processing and generation library for Python focusing on short-form videos (think TikTok or Youtube Shorts) and ease of use for humans and AI agents https://github.com/BartWojtowicz/videopython

randomstateon It's the end of observability as we know it (and I feel fine)

Lately I think more and more about the famous IBM quote - "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

I think this also applies to current AI solutions and I think that's precisely why the best workers will be humans who both use AI and will put their accountability at stake.

randomstateon I Built My Own Audio Player

I love it, I was looking for a simple music player like this! FYI Currently the standard bookmark shortcut `cmd + d` changes the theme instead of bookmarking the website :-)

randomstateon Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

AFAIK given Wikipedia spending they have ~1.5years of runway. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

randomstateon What are people doing? Live-ish estimates based on global population dynamics

Not sure how I should understand `Warfare` and `Intimacy` having the exact same numbers ;-)

randomstateon Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety

I think you'd greatly enjoy Undertale, it's a great 4-5h game exploring the combat/pacifist side of RPGs.

randomstateon Functors, Applicatives, and Monads

Coming from non-Haskell background, it took me a good while to undestand that `Just` is a constructor specific to the `Maybe` type. Found this for a quite nice answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18809252

randomstateon My upgrade to 25 Gbit/s Fiber To The Home

It feels surreal that I pay 100PLN/month (~25usd) for my symmetrical 1Gbit/s in Poland.

randomstateon Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed

First, as everyone here said: finish your degree, it will surely help with relocation and job search.

I have a very similar experience to yours (didn't like the analytics side of Data Science) and my advice would be to look into ML engineering roles. ML engineering is heavily SWE-oriented, sort of an intersection between Data Science and Software Engineering. I switched to ML engineer and I totally love it, you get to learn tons of cool SWE stuff (Docker, kubernetes, linux, cloud, ci/cd) and you're still close to newest ML research, which I love :)