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Hammershaft commented on Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups   macrumors.com/2025/08/21/... · Posted by u/greenburger
MagicMoonlight · 3 days ago
I don’t care that developers have to pay 30%, it makes no difference to me. If that fee went away… it would just give them 30% more profit.
Hammershaft · 3 days ago
Grocery stores on average make ~1-4% profit on revenue. Hungary has a sales tax of 27%. Do you think that if Hungary eliminated the sales tax that Hungarian grocery stores would make 28-31% profits?
Hammershaft commented on Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups   macrumors.com/2025/08/21/... · Posted by u/greenburger
nickthegreek · 3 days ago
it’s also incorrect. The barrier to entry tax is 15% of sales and a developers license. 30% is more of a barrier to scale after you take off.
Hammershaft · 3 days ago
If your biz model doesn't work at a ~1/3 cut, there's no reason to start at a %15 cut.
Hammershaft commented on Y Combinator files brief supporting Epic Games, says store fees stifle startups   macrumors.com/2025/08/21/... · Posted by u/greenburger
lloyddobbler · 5 days ago
“A 30% revenue share can easily be the difference between a company that can afford to scale, hire new employees, and reinvest in its product, and one that is perpetually struggling to stay afloat.”

This brought up a fun thought exercise for me. Pretty sure that Y Combinator would argue that giving away 7% of one's company for access to intangible (but beneficial) things like funding, advisors, etc, is completely worth it for a company. Pretty sure that they also fund companies that pay salespeople fairly significant commissions on sales.

Interesting to see them argue that asking a company to give up 30% "commission" on revenue for access to a large market stifles competition and innovation.

Is Y Combinator's forcing companies to give up 7% of their companies for access to advisors and funding stifling innovation and competition? (Spoiler: I don't think so. I think both Y Combinator and apple should be able to capitalize on the access they provide.)

Hammershaft · 3 days ago
Startup founders can choose between many models of funding, VCs, etc. Starups cannot choose between different ways of accessing willing customers over iOS, they have to comply with a %30 cut and a jungle of regulations that act in Apple's interest.

These two examples aren't the same, even just on the basis of market power.

Hammershaft commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears   telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera
SoftTalker · 7 days ago
Nothing would give me a nicer feeling of schadenfreude than to see Meta, Google, and these other frothing-at-the-mouth AI hucksters take a bath on their bets.
Hammershaft · 7 days ago
Can we try to not turn HN into this? I come to this forum to find domain experts with interesting commentary, instead of emotionally charged low effort food fights.
Hammershaft commented on Nobody’s buying homes, nobody’s switching jobs, America’s mobility is stalling   wsj.com/economy/american-... · Posted by u/sandwichsphinx
bsder · 13 days ago
Nobody is switching jobs because if you move you likely have to switch two jobs rather than just one.

Improving mobility means that you have to make a single earner household a viable pathway again. That means bring house prices down and subsidizing childcare.

Which would cost a bunch of billionaires a couple of pennies. So it will never happen.

Hammershaft · 13 days ago
The problem with building more homes and bringing down the cost of housing isn't a couple billionaires as much as a massive geriatric class of NIMBY homeowners.
Hammershaft commented on Nobody’s buying homes, nobody’s switching jobs, America’s mobility is stalling   wsj.com/economy/american-... · Posted by u/sandwichsphinx
daedrdev · 13 days ago
It's basically illegal to build dense homes in most cities. And despite what people say, the vacancy rate is at historic lows so its not just "people are keeping them empty"

Its a disgrace that people deny the supply crunch we are in

Hammershaft · 13 days ago
Housing as an investment creates all kinds of terribly misaligned political incentives for local democracies. A land value tax would've helped by shifting people's nest egg from the value of their homes to their accumulated savings from income.

As it is, NIMBYism is likely the biggest driver of rising costs of living, rising homelessness, rising municipal debt, and generational class divides.

Hammershaft commented on GPT-5   openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd
mrcwinn · 20 days ago
I know HN isn’t the place to go for positive, uplifting commentary or optimism about technology - but I am truly excited for this release and grateful to all the team members who made it possible. What a great time to be alive.
Hammershaft · 20 days ago
I'm personally skeptical that the trajectory of this tech is going to match up to expectations but I agree HN has being feeling very unbalanced lately over it's reactions to these models.
Hammershaft commented on Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome   colton.dev/blog/curing-yo... · Posted by u/coltonv
jcelerier · 22 days ago
Qwen Code is really not representative of the state of the art though. With the right prompt I have no problem getting Claude to output me a complete codebase (e.g. a non trivial library interfacing with multiple hardware devices) with the specs I want, in modern c++ that builds, runs, has documentation and unit tests sourced from data sheets and manufacturer specs from the go
Hammershaft · 22 days ago
That exceeds my expectations! I'm willing to change my mind, do you have any cool examples i should look at?
Hammershaft commented on Show HN: Whittle – A shrinking word game   playwhittle.com/... · Posted by u/babel16
duncancarroll · 22 days ago
Fun! I was a bit confused at the end because there's no "victory" state or indication. I think I was expecting it to give me a new word pair once I got to the end, or tell me "come back tomorrow for another round"
Hammershaft · 22 days ago
You can always get it down to zero letters! The game should remind you how many letters you have left before you can win to make it clear .

u/Hammershaft

KarmaCake day1742February 15, 2019View Original