Hacker News: TrevorFSmith

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool"

TrevorFSmith — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:07:42 +0000

This is a vibe coded app and isn't what I'd want but still, it's interesting to consider what a good implementation of "Figma for TUIs" could be, especially if it avoids the trap of simply treating the console as a crude raster instead of taking advantage of text and keyboards. IMO we don't need WIMP GUI shoved into terminal emulators.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026"

TrevorFSmith — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:11:22 +0000

The correct title is "Don't host your own transactional business email, use a transactional email provider."

Hosting your own personal mail isn't for everyone but it's not impossible. It is, however, something you'll need to maintain so be ready to pick up a new hobby.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Vim-pencil: Rethinking Vim as a tool for writing"

TrevorFSmith — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:04:23 +0000

I saw this headline and excitedly clicked through expecting to find an attempt to make a modal drawing canvas made using lessons from and the ethos of vim. It isn't that. It's a vim plugin for writers. Which is fine, just not what I hoped for.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Oat – Ultra-lightweight, zero dependency, semantic HTML, CSS, JS UI library"

TrevorFSmith — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 12:49:23 +0000

If nothing else, it's refreshing to see nicely modern CSS and JS formatted and laid out in a legible manner. https://github.com/knadh/oat/tree/master/src

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "All my new code will be closed-source from now on"

TrevorFSmith — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 15:07:34 +0000

The essence of free software is and always has been charity. Some people attempt to interface with capitalism via "open source" but that game is rigged to make previous winners continue to win so you missed the boat. It's a mistake to link coding to how you get food, shelter, safety, etc. Do it for fun or not at all.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "The year of the 3D printed miniature and other lies we tell ourselves"

TrevorFSmith — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:10:11 +0000

I 3D print items that aren't mass produced, either because I'm one of few people who wants them so there's no market or I'm the only person who wants them because they're customized for me. Most reasonable 3D printer users don't believe they'll replace mass production. They use them for parts you can't buy.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "The entire New Yorker archive is now digitized"

TrevorFSmith — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 19:23:12 +0000

I am a subscriber but still would love a tarball of PDFs of each issue.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo"

TrevorFSmith — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:14:20 +0000

If AI feature are on by default then no thanks!

This is how to burn what little trust remains: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off."

It has to be opt-in or you're not worthy of trust.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Ford kills the All-Electric F-150"

TrevorFSmith — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:46:48 +0000

It's a shame they didn't ship an EV that fit the uses the F-150 serves. The Lightening is a luxury item. The F-150 is a tool, regardless of whether it's ICE or EV. I hope this puts more people in the market for the Slate truck. It won't serve everyone with an ICE F-150 but I suspect a bunch of farm and ranch vehicles that don't do many highway miles could be Slates.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Orion 1.0"

TrevorFSmith — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 23:47:49 +0000

I'm a happy Kagi subscriber and look forward to Orion on Linux. Every well supported browser other than Chrome is a win. I'd love Kagi to fund people working full time on web standards in the W3C and WHATNG, too.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay"

TrevorFSmith — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 21:36:43 +0000

A similar result can be found by reading coverage of events you witnessed or topics you know well.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Show HN: Glide, an extensible, keyboard-focused web browser"

TrevorFSmith — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 22:32:21 +0000

That's a sweet idea and I'm glad to see your comment about maintaining it as a patch on top of Firefox sources so you can roll in their security fixes.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Samsung confirms its smart fridges will start showing you ads"

TrevorFSmith — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:05:09 +0000

This reminds me of gas station pumps that play ads on sub-par displays and tiny crackly speakers. I'm already paying for gas and now you think you can force crap ads on me? If an ad starts I immediately stop pumping and go to a different gas station. The fridges in people's homes. Expensive fridges! That's a hard pass.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "A cryptography expert on how Web3 started, and how it’s going"

TrevorFSmith — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 18:23:06 +0000

I would really love for new projects to find their own name instead of calling themselves the next version of something they don't like. "Web3" has never been a new version of the web, just a way to inject undeserved clout into a (IMHO fundamentally flawed) experiment. There are so many great unused names! Please pick one.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again"

TrevorFSmith — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 16:25:30 +0000

I don't know why people gave you that advice but it's pretty easy to tell when a designer hasn't spent enough (or any!) time defining their target market and then spending time with those people to listen instead of force fitting a technology. Without that up front work we're all just rolling the dice. That said, building stuff is fun by itself so it doesn't always need to be about money and growth. Just know it's a hobby.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Subreply – An open source text-only social network"

TrevorFSmith — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 03:26:38 +0000

I would love for everyone designing a new social app to start by deciding how to handle the issues every social app will have. Abuse, hate speech, brigading, etc. We've known about these for decades. They can't be ignored. I'm not dictating how they should be handled (variety is great!) but decisions should be made and declared up front before the first spec or line of code. Otherwise the app is DOA IMHO.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "Shutting Down Clear Linux OS"

TrevorFSmith — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 01:36:27 +0000

A good start would be to distrust anything made by a VC funded start-up or a once-great tech co. If you do want to use something they made, create a hard fork and pretend they already ditched the project as they inevitably will.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs"

TrevorFSmith — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 22:54:38 +0000

So, we want incredibly profitable companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple to take their software development costs and subtract that from their tax bill? These are the same companies that file patents so nobody else can use the ideas that they developed at the expense of public services. How about making it a tax break only for small and medium sized companies?

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "I just got an ad in VS Code"

TrevorFSmith — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 15:30:42 +0000

I see folks suggesting emacs and others saying that they must use VSCode (or forks) because of the ecosystem of plugins. Folks, we made this mistake with Eclipse and many other IDEs. The root problem is binding the build and instrumentation tools to the editor. Here's how to solve the problem once and for all: Use a programmer's editor that's great at manipulating text and run all tools on the command line. Never mix them. All else is folly.

New comment by TrevorFSmith in "How Google Is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers – and Why"

TrevorFSmith — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 10:36:37 +0000

Kagi downranks sites with many ads and also with many tracking scripts. It's not perfect but it is, in my experience, a better search service.