brachkow (u/brachkow)

brachkow commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

In recent months I changed views and shifted from the desilluioned "this is a casino" mindset that is described in this article to a "we need this now" one. An example in this article [1], the US can now unilateraly decide to prevent an individual anywhere in the world from having a functioning financial life and this because of the quasi (western) duopoly that is Visa and Mastercard. Nothing against the US in general, this is simply too much power to put in a single decisional entity, whatever/wherever it is. The "crypto" related systems now seem like a needed extra option to the current payment system (the same way cash is almost always an alternative to credit/debit card payment and vice versa)

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...

brachkow · 7 days ago

This is very important point, that people from US and EU oversee.

I live in EU for many years, but due to my birth country being sanctioned I can't use any financial instruments like investing or even simplest savings deposits. Getting mortgage or loan is also much more harder for me, even tho I have much better financial situation than average person in that country. Apart of that I need occasionally go to the bank in person to proof the bank that i'm good person with valid documents under the threat of freezing my funds and closing my accounts.

Funniest thing in that is all these sanctions are issued by EU and US, and not by the country I live, where i'm pretty welcomed.

brachkow commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025) · Posted by u/david927

timothevs · a month ago

Built a local-first Kanban board with Tauri (Rust + Svelte) after getting frustrated with SaaS tools and basic offline options. Stores data in JSON files you control, full keyboard-first UX, parent/child tasks, release management, and it's blazingly fast with localStorage + background sync. No telemetry, purely local. Curious what others prioritize in personal task tools. Seems like there's a gap between "todo.txt" simplicity and Jira complexity.

brachkow · a month ago

I wanted to build something like that. It would be great if I didn’t have to. Any link to follow?

brachkow commented on Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly economist.com/internation... · Posted by u/johntfella

brachkow · 2 months ago

Maybe it's not bad. In post soviet countries elderly already watching government endorsed man-hating gibberish on tv all day long.

So I would better prefer them playing three-in-row. I think after some time it even would be possible easier to "sell" to them playing some kind of minecraft with grandchildren.

Also, I vividly remember parks in Georgia (country!) crowded with elderly loudly playing chess and domino, instead of watching "who deserved to die by our god-chosen almighty army today" crap.

brachkow commented on Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall polygon.com/counter-strik... · Posted by u/perihelions

brachkow · 2 months ago

1) My childhood which coincided with peak of unregulated lootbox-skin markets (around 2013-2015). And I and my CS-playing peers had a happy childhood because of… skins gambling.

Most of us were able to earn money to buy a pizza or some additional snack betting on teams, or trading keys. Some exceptionaly lucky or with natural born trading skills were earning serious money — from quater to multiple salaries of an adult.

Maybe because casino-tourism in Belarus made people here slightly less prone to gambling, or maybe parents were not used to gift their children micro-transactions — e-sports betting, gambling and trading was financed mostly via in-game drops, returns from these bets and trades, and of course, sometimes, pocket money (which, on average were like 3$ per week).

That said, in modern times where micro-transactions are so common that you are ok with giving your kid V-bucks as birthday gift, I want say that anti child gambling narrative is a good thing.

2) At that time, and afaik it is true even today — you could use skins as a virtual currency to pay for a real things. It was proto-cryptocurrency/NFT in terms of being KYC and AML free.

This is really big market. There are aritcles on NYT about real life terrorists buying real guns for skins.

But without US-centric sensationalism, I beleive you can still pay for VPN or ChatGPT in very sanctioned Russia in CS skins. This can be also done with crypto (and mostly done now), but crypto has learning curve and you already playing CS.

brachkow commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025) · Posted by u/david927

brachkow · 2 months ago

I’m still working on turning a wishlist app that I built for my friends into a real product — it’s called https://thingstohave.app. I wrote a comment about it in summer, and these are the updates:

1. I shared the app with the small audience I have and received some feedback in very unexpected places. First, it was hard to understand how lists work because putting things into lists was an unobvious process. I fixed that by adding DnD that works well both with mouse and touch (turned out it’s two separate APIs). Second, users thought that the screenshot on the quite minimal landing page was the real app, and they clicked on it. The problem was so frequent and surprising that I decided to add something funny for people who do that, as I’m not willing to contribute a lot of time to the landing right now.

2. I underestimated how bad discoverability on the internet is. My expectation was that I would make my site fully server-side rendered, add a basic sitemap to Search Console, and have a few dozen organic users during the pre-holiday season when users are filling their wishlists. In reality, I got zero — not even users, but even visits. So I started actually working on SEO, no black magic but just adding slightly more complex sitemaps, micro-markup, and other stuff which I thought only products competing for the first page would need.

My next steps are to work on getting some minimal organic inflow of users and improving stuff related to auth and user management, which is the most time-consuming part of the work right now.

brachkow commented on The RSS feed reader landscape lighthouseapp.io/blog/fee... · Posted by u/domysee

brachkow · 2 months ago

I have tried most of the RSS on the market, and for last three years i'm staying on BazQux.

I try to read everything on the internet via my reader so it is important to me that it:

1. can discover not so obvious feeds like youtube or reddit 2. makes rss feeds for non rss services — in the past it had feeds for twitter, vk and instagram that didn't provide feed. Sadly this is no longer a thing I beleive as such thing as social media public api dissappeared 3. can retreive full text of article

That said I believe you need to think of choosing of RSS reader as about choosing a mighty backend for the feeds. There is nothing difficult in rendering nice text from XML. Real difficulty is in making RSS avaliable on sites that are hostile to RSS (and will became more hostile in future).

And for the chosen backend, you can choose any frontend — just look at RSS apps in app store for your platform. Most of them will support using other backends. Reeder for Apple devices is nice.

brachkow commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025) · Posted by u/david927

brachkow · 5 months ago

I'm making a public wishlist platform — https://thingstohave.app. I started it for my friends, but now have intentions to bring it to public.

I procrastinate on my plans to making it into true public-facing product. I can't make myself doing any marketing, have very vague monetization plans, miss some feature that people for some reason want a lot, and occasionally put crap into prod!

That said enjoy building it, learned a lot of backend stuff, felt in love with svelte, and, most important, me and my friends enjoy using it.

To balance enjoyment and pressure i'm trying have some small wins constantly, even if they are very low effort. For example current landing page was procrastinated for six month and built in 30 minutes. It's not fancy and good but it's better than 0!

brachkow commented on Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot support.mozilla.org/en-US... · Posted by u/phantomathkg

brachkow · 7 months ago

Release starts by aggressively stating that

> Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire

but they acquired Pocket in 2017 [1] and neither this app was growing (despite market for such apps was in very good shape few years ago) or it was delightful addition to browser experience

that said what annoys me about Mozilla, is that while they are position themselves poor and underfunded, they still act like they are backed by billionaire: they buy random apps for no reason or donating tons of money to not tech-related political organizations [2]

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/mozilla-acquires-po...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37015592

brachkow commented on I still like Sublime Text ohdoylerules.com/workflow... · Posted by u/james2doyle

brachkow · a year ago

Few years ago I wrote a guide about turning Sublime Text into IDE which will be on-par with IDE features of VSCode while retaining performance benefits of ST — https://www.brachkow.com/notes/sublime-text/.

Sadly, I almost stopped using Sublime Text around a half year ago. Development of AI coding tools made flexible UI plugins support a must. Right now when I'm using ST as main editor I feel like 0.5x developer compared to myself and my colleagues with Cursor, because of being limited to very lazy and limited Copilot suggestions passed via LSP.