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jwr

22,741 karmajoined 18년 전
Founder of PartsBox https://partsbox.com/ — an app that lets you take control of electronic parts inventory and electronics production.

I write software and design hardware.

Programming evolution: C64 BASIC, C64 Assembly, Logo, Pascal, C, C++, Scheme, Perl, Common Lisp, Clojure, ?

My PGP key is at https://jan.rychter.com/0x49248F8CF128664B.txt

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/jwr; my proof: https://keybase.io/jwr/sigs/AuJgDWtCw6Hb3c85XNIg-UZOMQ0jRfm8aVAFDqNls2M ]

jwr.at.hn

comments

jwr
·그저께·discuss
I believe we are talking about the same thing.
jwr
·그저께·discuss
You can't give up the right to sign your work with your name. But you can definitely share rights to reproduce your work etc — although perhaps not in a clickable EULA.
jwr
·3일 전·discuss
This looks very similar to what I do in Emacs, using ghostel, which also has the advantage of using libghostty for excellent quality terminal rendering.
jwr
·3일 전·discuss
Mostly because I have to do way too much clicking to see things in the column view. Columns are usually too narrow. Then you have to scroll horizontally to get to see your files. Search is slow. Open windows are kinda-remembered, but not always, it seems. And I'd like some folders to be sorted by date modified (downloads, anyone?) and most others by name. Then there is no quick "fuzzy find in a subtree" fzf-like functionality. I mean, compared to the Windows garbage this is better, but it has seen little love over the last 20 years or so and it shows.
jwr
·4일 전·discuss
I really, really need a better Finder. I've been using Path Finder for many years, but it was always a so-so replacement and the company wasn't very interested in moving it forward (even fixing bugs took many years). I eventually gave up and stopped paying for it.

I now use the Finder (column view) and it sucks.

At a first glance, I like this app. The problem I have is that I tend to think about the long term: will this app be around in 5 years? There is a plethora of AI-coded apps (this in itself doesn't bother me) where the author loses interest after just a couple of weeks.

And (here come the HN downvotes, because this is really unpopular on HN) the one-time pricing model doesn't lend itself to long-term sustainability, unfortunately. I know people hate to hear that, but ask anyone who tried to run a small or solo-founder business whether it's possible to make ends meet with one-time purchases.
jwr
·5일 전·discuss
HN has such a knee-jerk reaction to subscriptions that it will definitely not enjoy it. See how my comment above was downvoted into oblivion just for mentioning them. Problem is, those HN commenters have not tried to run a sustainable business.

The perspective is very different once you actually try to make ends meet.
jwr
·5일 전·discuss
My arguably rather informative comment based on 10 years of running a sustainable B2B SaaS got downvoted to 0. I realize subscriptions are unpopular (nobody likes paying regularly), but downvoting what you disagree with means that eventually it will become invisible and you will only see what you agree with.

I think I need to take a break from posting on HN.
jwr
·5일 전·discuss
But that's a gamble! That's exactly my point. Someone is betting on something. How long the customer will stay, how long the software will be maintained and available, etc.
jwr
·5일 전·discuss
> you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you

There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions. You can't go to a local bakery and pay $24 for life to get fresh rolls every day.

Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.
jwr
·5일 전·discuss
Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems (all too often).

The difference is that my customers are mostly engineers in small to medium sized businesses. They understand that 1) ongoing development costs money, hence subscriptions, 2) there are no magic wands and things are indeed more complex than they seem.

This is one of the reasons why I don't want to get into B2C. At a first approximation, people just don't want to spend money, hate subscriptions, have zero appreciation for how much ongoing development costs, do not understand that the money has to come from somewhere and that $5 purchase 6 years ago really doesn't cover the costs, and do not understand the complexity of software and product development.

Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.

Incidentally, I thought personal support would be a competitive differentiator, but I don't think it really works that way. Yes, customers do appreciate it a lot, but so what? Business customers don't talk to each other much, you won't get "viral" recommendations. And new potential customers have no idea how your support works, they think it's the same AI chatbot and knowledge base search as anywhere else.
jwr
·6일 전·discuss
As a reminder "EU cookie banners" are not required if you use cookies for site functionality. They are only required if your site uses these to track users.

This needs repeating, it's a common misconception (deliberately spread by many, too) that the EU requires cookie banners for all cookies.
jwr
·6일 전·discuss
The black PR has been very effective. I own an EV and the first question I always get from non-EV people when they find out is "…but what about the range, isn't that a problem?", while the second one is invariably "but what about the battery, I heard it only lasts a year or two and it's so expensive to replace!".

The myths are now strong and it will indeed take a long time to dispel them.
jwr
·8일 전·discuss
Also, spel (https://github.com/Blockether/spel) for persistent browser sessions (through a daemon) and Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit engines.
jwr
·8일 전·discuss
Exactly! I can't stop wondering: are these executives just not thinking, or are they blindly repeating what they were told to? If I get into a rental car, do they seriously think I want to spend the next 30 minutes logging into Spotify, mapping apps, Overcast and anything else that I want to use but that needs to know me? And then worry about logging out of all that stuff once I return the rental?
jwr
·9일 전·discuss
I am so tired of people repeating this. Usually, this results from conflating two uses of MCP: local, which can indeed be replaced by CLI (and you can argue which one is better), and remote, which is entirely different, and there is no way to replace it with a CLI (note that you are making an implicit assumption that a CLI tool can be used at all, which is not always the case).

Please don't repeat this. It's like saying that apples are dead and oranges are the future.
jwr
·9일 전·discuss
I also wish we brought back interesting discussions in a medium that is not corporate-controlled, but I do not long for those crappy forums. I always thought they were a major regression. We had Usenet, and it had easily filterable threaded conversations with a plethora of good readers. The only thing it lacked was good inline image support, but that could have been bolted on. Instead, we started implementing those terrible forums. The necessity to bookmark multiple forums if you wanted to participate in multiple discussions. Bugs, captchas... There were a ton of difficulties with accessing those. And, of course, you had to register for each one with a username and a password.

The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will.
jwr
·11일 전·discuss
Well, I can tell you how my thinking goes: 1) I don't buy my computer just to run LLMs and there are many scenarios where I benefit from both a decent GPU and from a large amount of RAM, 2) I run a solo-founder business which owns exactly one computer in the entire company so it might as well be a good one, and 3) I don't need a new car, so comparing pricing this way is irrelevant.

In other words, yes, buying this kind of machine only to run an LLM locally doesn't make sense, because local LLMs generally still suck for serious programming work (they work great for spam filtering though!). But more generally this machine makes sense for a lot of people.
jwr
·11일 전·discuss
If these kinds of breaches were actually costly, then people would indeed treat PII as toxic. But they aren't. The media brouhaha blows over within a week or so, and things are fine again.

Leaking PII should be very, very expensive, and then this idiocy would stop.
jwr
·15일 전·discuss
There is a second point of view: imagine a Ukrainian living in a Western European country. They moved there because Russian missiles and bombs were falling on their heads and killing their family. They regularly send money to their country to defend against the agressor.

Their neighbor holds a Russian passport. He works at an IT company and earns a nice salary. It's a good life. He complains about being discriminated against. He "doesn't support the aggression". This "not supporting" does not take any material form, he doesn't send money anywhere nor perform any other actions. In the past, he has done absolutely jack squat about the rise of Putin to power (back when doing something was still possible), because he "is apolitical". When the war ends and things blow over, the neighbor will use his Russian passport to go back to Russia, live a good life there using money earned while abroad, and participate in rebuilding the economy, until the next Putin appears on the horizon. He will do absolutely jack squat about the next Putin, because he "is apolitical".

As you can see, it's all upside for the Russian neighbor.

I don't know about others, but something irks me about this common scenario. Sure, there are many subtleties and many ways in which life is complicated. But I see this scenario play out regularly and I can't help thinking that there should be some accountability for the passport you hold.
jwr
·15일 전·discuss
I expected this kind of reply, which is why I specifically mentioned that I actually use pulse.

This attitude of "Emacs already has this" is not helpful and limits the development and evolution of Emacs. Have you seen how the Ghostty shaders work and how specifically the cursor highlighting one works? It is way better than what Emacs does today.