Top all-time · #11695
Ben Wiser
Personal blog · benwiser.com/blogprogrammingweb
Ben Wiser's personal blog at benwiser.com covers programming and web. Since 2020, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “I just spent £700 to have my own app on my iPhone (2022)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked in threads about the Web Environment Integrity spec, whose author is Ben Wiser. Commenters cite posts on his blog about a Google Docs-generated site and spending £700 on an iPhone app.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- I just spent £700 to have my own app on my iPhone (2022)2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-07-26
- I just spent £700 to have my own app on my iPhone2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-03-04
What Hacker News says?
This isn't directly related to the post but the root of this website is hilarious: https://benwiser.com/
Comment linking /
on “My blog is now generated by Google Docs”Submitted My blog is now generated by Google Docs as a story · 398 points
HN discussionFrom the spec author, in 2022 [0]: > I decided to make this an app in the end. This is where my costs started wracking up. I had to pay for a second hand macbook pro to build an iOS app. Apple’s strategy with this is obvious, and it clearly works, but it still greatly upsets me that I couldn’t just build an app with my linux laptop. If I want the app to persist for longer than a month, and to make it easy for friend…
Comment linking /blog/I-just-spent-%C2%A3700-to-have-my-own-app-on-my-iPhone.html
on “Google is already pushing WEI (web DRM) into Chromium”Submitted Making game engines is a waste of time – I probably won’t stop making them as a story · 76 points
HN discussionAlso worth noting that this locks reactions (thumbs up, hearts, etc.) - providing plausible deniability that "only a small number of people raised concerns about specificTopicX." Journalists should be more aware of this! On a separate note, for journalists and others who wish to communicate with the spec's author directly, his public website (which lists a personal email) is one of the other repos on the Github prof…
Comment linking /blog/I-just-spent-%C2%A3700-to-have-my-own-app-on-my-iPhone.html
on “Google is already pushing WEI (web DRM) into Chromium”Submitted Writing my first Gameboy Emulator as a story · 55 points
HN discussionYoav Weiss is closing concern threads, calling them "spam." Ben Wiser ( https://benwiser.com ) turned off comments altogether.
Comment linking /
on “Google is already pushing WEI (web DRM) into Chromium”Submitted I think I’ve accidentally created a fully encrypted social media app as a story · 8 points
HN discussionWhat's strange to me is that the main author of the spec -- Ben Wiser -- seems to be against closed, wall-garden paradigms as he has written in a blog post "I just spent £700 to have my own app on my iPhone" [1]. In the post, he laments the state of the App Store monopoly on iOS and ponders returning to Android for the app installation freedom. How can he reconciliate these views with this spec, which he is the main…
Comment linking /blog/I-just-spent-%C2%A3700-to-have-my-own-app-on-my-iPhone.html
on “Web Environment Integrity API”Submitted I just spent £700 to have my own app on my iPhone (2022) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAnd speaking of user-hostile, locked-down phones... a galactic irony that Ben Wiser, the Googler who posted this proposal, has a blog where his most recent post is a rant about how he's being unfairly restricted and can't freely run the software he wants on his own device. https://benwiser.com/blog/I-just-spent-%C2%A3700-to-have-my-... https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity
Comment linking /blog/I-just-spent-%C2%A3700-to-have-my-own-app-on-my-iPhone.html
on “Unpacking Google’s Web Environment Integrity specification”Submitted Saving Todos to My Calendar as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building web apps without a SPA – A case study as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted I just spent £700 to have my own app on my iPhone as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Show HN: Unu – canvas based pattern matching versus game as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Vibe Coding the Port – I gave up waiting for engine exports as a story · 1 points
HN discussion