Hacker News: bhickey

New comment by bhickey in "A portentous reunion"

bhickey — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:41:26 +0000

Back in 2006 I cornered Bryan in the CIT elevator and asked him for the BattleTris source. Glad to see some progress being made.

New comment by bhickey in "A History of IDEs at Google"

bhickey — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:48:15 +0000

> and while it was so ahead of its time, it didn't get enough of an uptake to satisfy... certain executives in engineering.

There's more to the story than just that. Jeff might remember the particulars. I don't want to badmouth anyone on second hand information.

New comment by bhickey in "A History of IDEs at Google"

bhickey — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:32:03 +0000

Before cider there was Brightly. My recollection was that it was developed by a team in Atlanta and got cancelled before it reached general availability. People were pissed at the time (ex. "cancelling brightly considered harmful"). That died down when Cider delivered on what Brightly had promised.

The days of using Eclipse were particularly bleak. These days I use Antigravity for the overwhelming majority of my work.

New comment by bhickey in "The One Dollar Counterfeiter"

bhickey — Sun, 10 May 2026 16:56:23 +0000

> I wonder if those refilling them slipped them in?

I recall reading that they were smuggled into the country by organized crime. They'd then sell them for around 60p on the pound to coin heavy businesses (esp. laundry and vending.)

Fake Pound Coin Database

bhickey — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:08:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thefakepoundcoindatabase.co.uk/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083318

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bhickey in "The One Dollar Counterfeiter"

bhickey — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:08:01 +0000

This was pretty common with £1 coins until they moved to bimetallic coinage. The fakes would be rejected by vending machines.

The biggest tells were poor reeding quality and slightly soft detailing. On very low quality fakes, the face and obverse weren't aligned, though I never encountered one of these in the wild.

New comment by bhickey in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

bhickey — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:04:57 +0000

Celtic kings in Ireland were subject to ritualistic sacrifice if, for example, crops failed.

New comment by bhickey in "The Oscars just banned AI from winning acting and writing awards"

bhickey — Sun, 03 May 2026 19:36:52 +0000

There was a comparable controversy with The Exorcist because Linda Blair was dubbed.

New comment by bhickey in "Craig Venter of Human Genome Project Dies at 79"

bhickey — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:04:37 +0000

He was also, in my experience, a bit of a jerk. As an undergrad I asked him "with oligo synthesis improving is there any way we stop bad actors from making recombinant pathogens?" His reply was "we can start by arresting people like you." My advisor worked with him at Celera and a decade on the amount of acrimony towards the public project was palpable.

New comment by bhickey in "New mechanical panoramic film camera from Jeff Bridges"

bhickey — Fri, 01 May 2026 13:09:50 +0000

That's a fair point. I was comparing the claim to rolling vs global shutter rather than "take a photo, rotate, take a photo." You can, however, get a true global shutter single exposure panorama using anamorphic lenses.

New comment by bhickey in "New mechanical panoramic film camera from Jeff Bridges"

bhickey — Fri, 01 May 2026 11:48:25 +0000

The "single exposure" brag is a bit silly. Since it's a swinging lens one side of the frame will be older than the other.

New comment by bhickey in "Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables"

bhickey — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:30:22 +0000

That's only because that chart isn't bookkeeping nuclear as renewable, which is misleading at best.

New comment by bhickey in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

bhickey — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 20:22:11 +0000

This has nothing to do with opposing gambling. It has everything to do with, say, opposing gamblers poisoning horses to win bets.

New comment by bhickey in "The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books"

bhickey — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:11:37 +0000

Bertrand Russell has been dead since 1970. I think he'll be okay. Or no worse off.

New comment by bhickey in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

bhickey — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:21:44 +0000

> they were expecting it to be big, hundreds of millions of users.

No reasonable person shared this expectation. It was Juicero-tier delusion.

New comment by bhickey in "11.8M EU citizens pay taxes to governments they cannot vote for"

bhickey — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:24:54 +0000

> Without that distinction, what is the difference between a long term resident and a citizen?

You fall into an edge case. Irish citizens have special status in the UK as a result of the countries' shared history. In this particular case the biggest difference is that you can't get a UK passport as an Irish citizen.

New comment by bhickey in "Fixing retail with land value capture"

bhickey — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 23:40:55 +0000

> Two thirds of new American homes are in some sort of community association, typically homeowners’ associations, but also co-ops, and condominium associations, and 30 percent of American homes overall. Buyers opt into these associations, pay annual fees in the thousands of dollars, and suffer their annoying restrictions and demands because they create amenities: quiet, cleanliness/tidiness, safety, or things like public pools and parks.

Uh... People "opt-in" to homeowners' associations because two-thirds of new builds impose them. Municipalities don't want to accept new roads, so developers can get things built through privatization.

New comment by bhickey in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

bhickey — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:08:16 +0000

The _state_ isn't alarming, it's the rate of change. The transition is happening on a scale of human lifetimes instead of geological time.

New comment by bhickey in "Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video]"

bhickey — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 02:37:50 +0000

Cambridge, MA.

After the city deactivated the existing cameras, Flock got caught putting more up. The city terminated their contract with Flock for material breach.

New comment by bhickey in "House vote keeps federal "kill switch" vehicle mandate"

bhickey — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:30:09 +0000

They wrote a memo saying they could.