HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

zoul

2,678 karma · joined December 24, 2010

https://boskovice.social/@zoul
submissionscomments
zoul··on Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
Is this irony? Judging by https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/crime-rate-... it’s not true.
zoul··on Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account
This is Mastodon, and there are instances such as https://ec.social-network.europa.eu.
zoul··on Bluesky Trademarks ATProto
But it’s true in the general idea of Bluesky being highly centralized and dependent on a single for-profit entity.
zoul··on TypeScript 7
Catching bugs in CI is orders of magnitude slower and more expensive than catching them as type errors while writing the code.
zoul··on TypeScript 7
Static type checking greatly affects code design. That’s why converting from JS to TS doesn’t give you full benefits of the type system – the code doesn’t lean into types to model invariants.
zoul··on Road to Elm 1.0
For me the problem wasn’t the cultural change, it was depending on language whose leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about real-world problems the language users face in production. And then being constantly gaslighted about it on the official channels like the language forum.
zoul··on Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise 
They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.
zoul··on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
As a programmer, I don’t feel threatened by the technology itself, but I do feel threatened by the second-degree effects such as what the technology does to our field, especially in the wrong hands.
zoul··on There are no instances in ATProto
This! There is a “Bluesky outage”. There is no “Mastodon outage”.
zoul··on There are no instances in ATProto
I think we are all saying that Mastodon is meaningfully decentralized and there is no single party that could pull the rug from beneath the whole network. This is what instances bring to the table. Bluesky may be architecturally beautiful, but it’s not decentralized in practice. (See https://arewedecentralizedyet.online for example.) And we know what tends to happen to important centralized services.
zoul··on There are no instances in ATProto
New services don’t start with the same userbase because users don’t use protocols, they use apps. And for Bluesky that’s predominantly a single centralized app. If that demotes content from the “competitors” or even switches the protocol completely, you are stuffed. The apps are very much not equal.
zoul··on W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty
On the other hand, the currently overwhelmingly dominant Bluesky app and infrastructure can control what users see, presenting a centralized chokepoint. It’s nice to own your data but if your social circle uses a single centralized app to view it, shrug.
zoul··on The EU Open Source Strategy
Any instance will work I think, just start following someone like https://eupolicy.social/@bert_hubert and you should discover relevant people and hashtags soon enough.
zoul··on The EU Open Source Strategy
Mastodon works fairly well for that I think.
zoul··on Vercel April 2026 security incident
Very nice developer experience. A lot of batteries included, like CDN, incremental page regeneration, image pipeline or observability. Not having to maintain a server.

I’m still planning to move elsewhere though, the vendor lock-in is not worth it and I’d like to keep our infra in the EU.

zoul··on Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
“The vision was always compelling. A social web that no single company controls, where users own their identity and their relationships,” says the new CEO of the single company that can control what millions of Bluesky users see in their apps.
zoul··on Can Europe break free of Visa and Mastercard? MEPs stall digital euro
Well, right now a foreign government can do that to us, so shifting the risk to our own politicians would be an improvement.
zoul··on Obsidian Sync now has a headless client
Is there or do you plan to add some kind of webhook to notify interested parties that a vault has changed? I think it would go together nicely with the headless sync.
zoul··on Pocketbase – open-source realtime back end in 1 file
Yes, you can add an enormous amount of complexity to your app in 3 clicks. Should you? The proverbial night crashes are, in my experience, often much better problem to have than the complexity and cost of AWS.
zoul··on Tiger Style: Coding philosophy (2024)
My argument works just as well if you replace “perfecting” with “improving”.
zoul··on Tiger Style: Coding philosophy (2024)
Would you keep fixing the underlined spelling mistakes on your “watch out for holes in the pavement” sign while people are already walking there?
zoul··on Tiger Style: Coding philosophy (2024)
I would even say that from a project management perspective, zero technical debt is undesirable. It means you have invested resources into perfecting something that, almost by definition, could have waited a while, instead of improving some more important metric such as user experience. (I do understand tech debt makes it harder to work with the codebase, impacting all metrics, I just don’t think zero tech debt is a good target.)
zoul··on UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales
Solar power is very cheap and still getting cheaper:

https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...

zoul··on Where it's at://
In what way is Mastodon a failed experiment? Low number of active users or something else?
zoul··on OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
Believe it or not, many people just don’t care about the stock market. But they may still care about the economy that could crash badly if the AI bubble gets too big before it pops.
zoul··on Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU
Oh yes. As opposed to the “kiss the ring or else” market freedoms of the US.
zoul··on Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion
I hope it’s not that black-and-white, that it’s possible to have a sane social network with algorithmic feed, only we need to design the algorithms around users’ needs first.
zoul··on A cryptography expert on how Web3 started, and how it’s going
It’s arguably much easier to solve the UX issues when you are designing a centralized service, which is what Bluesky is.
zoul··on Static sites enable a good time travel experience
A safe rollback on a Friday afternoon is a nice thing for sure :)
zoul··on Telo MT1
That would get us back to the “bigger is better” hole though.
Page 1 of 18Next →