H
Herman
herman.bearblog.dev · Personal blog · on HN since 2020
Herman, who runs the Bear blogging platform, writes about minimalist software, small businesses, journaling, and running a product slowly.
What HN saysCommenters discuss Bear's no-JavaScript, no-discovery design, with some calling lack of discoverability a feature, and link his post on taking back email.
65HN people shared it
26linked it in comments
138stories submitted
4.0Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2020people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The Bear Manifesto9 people · 16 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 2My product is my garden6 people · 747 points · first shared 2020 · 147 comments on HN
- 3Building software to last forever5 people · 156 points · first shared 2022 · 85 comments on HN
- 4The Great Scrape5 people · 22 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 5I Started Journaling (2019)4 people · 92 points · first shared 2020 · 37 comments on HN
- 6Instead of an MVP, Build an SLC: Simple, Lovable, and Complete4 people · 46 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 7Grow Slowly, Stay Small4 people · 17 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 8Zero to 1000 users in 18 hours – a HN story4 people · 10 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 9The ChatGPT vs. Bear Blog spam war4 people · 8 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 10Becoming a Day Person4 people · 7 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 11The Frustration Loop4 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 12Piracykills3 people · 21 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 13Motherfucking Blog3 people · 12 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Digital Hygiene: Emails3 people · 7 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 15How to Procrastinate3 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
chrismorgan · 2020-05-26
Heads up: it doesn’t have no JavaScript at present, because Cloudflare’s email protection system is in place. (I hate that thing. It mangles non-email addresses all the time if they look even vaguely like an email address, e.g. a package with version number “[email protected]”. Penalising users that disable JavaScript.)
https://herman.bearblog.dev/ contains a “Get in touch” mailto: link that gets ruined, and the following script is added:
<script data-cfasync="false" src="/cdn-cgi/scripts/5c5dd728/cloudflare-static/email-decode.min.js"></script>
woodruffw · 2025-12-22
I believe the Herman in question is the owner/operator of the blog hosting provider that this blog is on[1].
(I was also very confused by this, until I saw the footer and clicked on it.)
[1]: https://herman.bearblog.dev
analogpixel · 2025-09-26
> there is zero discoverability, you can’t even encounter people through conversations.
based on the spam and harassment on most social sites, I'd call this a feature.
If you read something interesting you can email the person with your thoughts , and if they find it interesting they'll follow you. If you are a troll, they'll delete your message and they don't need to use their platform to support your comments. If everyone used this system, trolls wouldn't have a platform anymore.
Here is a great example of discoverability without comments : https://herman.bearblog.dev/misc-updates/
Herman from bear blog posted about a topic, a bunch of people emailed him their thoughts, and he created a follow up post with the best of those thoughts listed out.
This system definitely won't work for people that have FOMO, or need validation through votes on their comments.
ezekg · 2025-09-01
Has the maintainer looked at fair source? [0] I believe it's superior to source-available (and open core), because it eventually becomes fully open source under DOSP [1], which is great for free and paid users, especially for a blog platform like Bear. There's an FCL [2] fair source license, which aligns pretty well with their current Bear Blog License (namely the non-compete and license key bits from the ELv2). All in all, the term "source-available" is pretty meaningless, because there are too many variables. Fair source tries to tighten that up.
It also aligns quite well with Bear's manifesto [3]. Even if Bear PTY LTD ceases to exist, Bear won't. This can be codified under DOSP.
Disclaimer: I'm involved with fair source and helped write the FCL.
[0]: https://fair.io
[1]: https://opensource.org/dosp
[2]: https://fcl.dev
[3]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/
al_borland · 2025-07-15
My Gmail turned into the place where just goes to die long ago. Inspired by a blog post from Herman[0], I decided to try and take back control. As I looked around I stumbled across this feature before I saw it in the news anywhere, though just after I got an email from Proton announcing they have the same thing. What an amazing change. A few short minutes later I was done. I then spent the next several days wondering if I broke my account, as I get very few emails now and it has been very easy to maintain.
[0] https://herman.bearblog.dev/digital-hygiene-emails/
HermanMartinus · 2025-03-26
I literally just published a post on this and how it affects Bear Blog.
https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-great-scrape
hellcow · 2024-10-30
They actually do have analytics, but you need to subscribe (it's a small service, if you can, pay a few bucks to support good people!).
I can see a count of readers per day on each post. It also shows counts of devices, browsers, countries, and referrers. Here's what it looks like: https://herman.bearblog.dev/public-analytics/
snats · 2024-02-06
Love the website! Just beware that by making it completely free without any credit card required you are going to battle a bit of spam. I liked the solution that bearblog[1] implemented. I would love to hear how you solved this problem!
[1] https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-chatgpt-vs-bear-blog-spam-war/
smaudet · 2022-11-21
Could be in part bot activity. I've seen a couple other weird things rise up on here.
The blogging platform for this one is interesting, if you follow the rabbit hole a bit you'll find e.g. https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-forever/
I don't see that many posts, but it appears to have some interesting traffic on it at present. Worth holding on to perhaps?
https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/
nikodunk · 2022-10-16
Also present in this great piece: https://herman.bearblog.dev/my-product-is-my-garden/
tyingq · 2020-09-23
Working great now. I do appreciate the uncluttered default look, and the discovery feed is interesting. Looks like HN has bombed your site before :) https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-hacker-news-hug/
trescenzi · 2025-11-16
There was an article just yesterday which detailed doing this as not in order to ban but in order to waste time. You can also zip bomb people which is entertaining but probably not super effective.
https://herman.bearblog.dev/messing-with-bots/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935729
rishikeshs · 2025-10-29
Here’s the update by the dev:
https://herman.bearblog.dev/agressive-bots/
jakelazaroff · 2025-09-01
Bear has no VC investors: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/
simianwords · 2025-09-01
https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/
> This is a morbid topic for me to write about: what happens to Bear if something happens to me? I've got that covered too. There's a detailed succession plan in place, including:
Full documentation of all systems and processes Multiple trusted developers with access to the codebase Clear instructions for maintaining the platform So if I were to be incapacitated in any way, the platform will live on.
ApeWithCompiler · 2025-08-23
The following is the best I could collect quickly to provide backup to the statement. Unfortunally it's not the high quality first instance of raw statistics I would have liked.
But from what I have read time to time the crawler acted magnitudes outside of what could have been accepted as just badly configured.
https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-great-scrape/
https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-…
https://lwn.net/Articles/1008897/
https://tecnobits.com/en/AI-crawlers-on-Wikipedia-platform-danger/
https://boston.conman.org/2025/08/21.1
wonger_ · 2025-03-25
Bearblog has a lot of momentum and (anonymous) users, and a committed maintainer: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/
Ofc GitHub is will probably last longer, and so will running your own hosting/deployment
fabianholzer · 2024-04-05
Might be "The Frustration Loop" by Herman, the creator of bearblog? https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-frustration-loop/
subpixel · 2023-11-07
I'd much rather read the daily news as a Bear-style blog, with the addition of categories.
https://herman.bearblog.dev/blog/
One url for the whole day. Oh how I hate the scroll.
Kamq · 2023-07-09
While CDNs are useful, you really shouldn't need them to handle HN traffic.
Someone posted what the otherside of a hug looks like[0], and it's somewhere around a unique visitor every 1-2 seconds, which really shouldn't be too much of a problem for... well anyone. The poster themselves got through it with a $7/month heroku server (albeit not without some manual intervention).
And, y'know, if sometimes a hobby project gets taken down, that's fair. You could end up getting 100 requests in a single second on a server you strung together off blog posts as a learning exercise over a weekend. But any time any professional organization gets taken down by the amount of traffic HN generates, I'm always a little embarrassed for them.
[0] https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-hacker-news-hug/
Ilasky · 2023-06-13
I really like the analogies of SLC (simple, lovable, and complete)[0] and “I’m the only user”[1] to motivate how I finish my projects. Often times I have a project I’m working on and my imaginary perception of what a user needs is steering the development. Whereas, in reality, I just need the thing to work for myself and I can pretty it up how I like.
[0] https://herman.bearblog.dev/mvp-vs-slc/
[1] https://blubsblog.bearblog.dev/i-am-the-only-user/
reustle · 2022-10-28
If you liked this post, you'll also like his post titled:
My Product is my Garden
https://herman.bearblog.dev/my-product-is-my-garden/
I've sent it to many friends over the years.
0-O-0 · 2020-05-27
This looks minimal, but a random page that I've visited [1] duplicates article's text 6 times across different meta tags. Sure something that can be improved.
[1] https://herman.bearblog.dev/why-i-journal/
Tempest1981 · 2020-05-26
Safari on iOS 13.4 crashed loading https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-gods-of-toil/
Not blaming bearblog, but FYI
6510 · 2020-05-26
I sign up but no email was send.
The css should either leave the default colors alone or set both the background and font color.
The source of this page contains much more cruft in meta tags and <!-- Microdata --> than actual content. https://herman.bearblog.dev/markdown-test/
rozab · 2025-09-01
In this case it's kind of unbelievable how quickly the flip happened. Their 'manifesto'[0] was published only at the start of the year, where they vowed to be an incorruptible bastion of stability in a selfish society focused on short-term thinking. They want Bear to be around in 50 years.
Then in the last couple weeks or so[1] it seems they saw a bit of a spike, and immediately pulled up the ladder.
They even criticised this sort of behaviour in their manifesto:
>We've seen our fair share of open-source projects become sour (see the recent Wordpress drama) or abandoned entirely. We've seen OpenAI become ClosedAI. There's a common thread here. Trust isn't just a legal structure, but a social contract.
I am actually totally in favor of source available licenses, but in this case it seems counter to all the boasts the developer has made about their platform.[2]
[0]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/manifesto/ [1]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=bear%2… [2]: https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-forever/