Hacker News: billbrown

New comment by billbrown in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

billbrown — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:35:27 +0000

Yes, underthinking is rampant. Glancing at "AI" output is not reviewing code: you have to grok it (in the Heinlein sense) in order to treat it as your own.

New comment by billbrown in "Show HN: A native macOS client for Hacker News, built with SwiftUI"

billbrown — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 05:44:45 +0000

One thing that I _love_ with the browser is this extension:

https://github.com/timkuijsten/BoundedBikeshed

It lets me see the top-level comments with some indication of the thread depth. Totally changed my post scanning.

New comment by billbrown in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

billbrown — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:09:57 +0000

Check out Wonderfalls, his first series.

New comment by billbrown in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

billbrown — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:47:26 +0000

And Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies, two of my favorite shows ever.

New comment by billbrown in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

billbrown — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:45:24 +0000

If you like Lee Pace, watch Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies.

New comment by billbrown in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

billbrown — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:44:36 +0000

Dig up Wonderfalls, his first series, and Pushing Daisies. They form the Lee Pace Triumvirate (with Halt and Catch Fire) as far as I'm concerned.

New comment by billbrown in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

billbrown — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:40:46 +0000

It's terrific. Just rewatched it for a third time.

New comment by billbrown in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

billbrown — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:06:22 +0000

Also, if you loved Patriot, the creator has two podcasts stemming from it:

https://www.lgclaret.com/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-techniques-in-mode...

(And he's also done two bands: The Jones Sisters and Hoist the King.)

New comment by billbrown in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

billbrown — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:03:29 +0000

I'll second Patriot and add Perpetual Grace Ltd. from the same creator.

I'd also add the two other legs of the Lee Pace Great Television stool: Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies.

New comment by billbrown in "The Jeff Dean Facts"

billbrown — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:05:36 +0000

He's the Chuck Norris of StackOverflow, maybe.

New comment by billbrown in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

billbrown — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:57:30 +0000

I hate "vibe code" as a verb. May I suggest "prompt" instead? "I was able to prompt the React site…."

New comment by billbrown in "Seeing like a software company"

billbrown — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 07:18:17 +0000

I've heard it said that "work is not done until it's reported done."

New comment by billbrown in "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles"

billbrown — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 19:34:00 +0000

What an odd response! I never mentioned ICE so I suspect you're arguing against someone else.

The 40% "wasted sunlight" doesn't have a cost—sure, yes, kind of besides the point—but it also generates no electricity. That efficiency is further compounded by reductions in incidence by latitude, cloud cover, and time of day. The diminishment thus could be quite serious on any given panel or farm.

New comment by billbrown in "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles"

billbrown — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 14:45:29 +0000

My personal true claim about solar that is generally ignored or unknown is that dust reduces solar efficiency by 40% and that the mitigation is frequent washing of panels, which results in considerable water use in precisely the worst areas for that.

This 2024 paper cites a 2016 paper about clouds and dusts that finds 10.4% reduction in efficiency when the relative humidity was 52.24% after two weeks. (The 2016 study is cited in footnote 184 under clasim 12). That's not a desert condition, I can assure you.

https://sustainenergyres.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s...

New comment by billbrown in "Where did the Smurfs get their hats (2018)"

billbrown — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 18:50:08 +0000

I feel like Kagi's version is better.

https://translate.kagi.com/?from=nl&to=en&text=MiJNHEER%2C+i...

New comment by billbrown in "Experimenting with Local LLMs on macOS"

billbrown — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 15:54:13 +0000

Toyota did this with the EV mania until they lost their nerve and got rid of Toyoda as CEO. I hope Apple doesn't fall into the same trap. (I never thought Toyota would give in either.)

New comment by billbrown in "How we exploited CodeRabbit: From simple PR to RCE and write access on 1M repos"

billbrown — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 15:03:20 +0000

The bunny will often include patches in its replies that the PR author can commit. I've never been clear as to which of us is doing the committing but that could be the need for write access. (I always do it myself but I can see how some might prefer the convenience.)

They should really mass revoke that privilege because I can't see any upside to it. Unless they have a plan for some future state where they will want write access?

New comment by billbrown in "Apple and Amazon will miss AI like Intel missed mobile"

billbrown — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 15:41:57 +0000

They're working—almost done—on a CUDA backend for their Apple Silicon framework:

https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/pull/1983

New comment by billbrown in "Ferrari Status"

billbrown — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 16:07:12 +0000

The oil sheikh with dozens of supercars is what drives the mega rich to aspire to own two supercars and the deka rich to fret about maybe buying their first one.

New comment by billbrown in "HathiTrust Digital Library"

billbrown — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 18:13:15 +0000

This is very helpful context. I have disparaged HathiTrust in my mind for several of these public domain problems and it makes sense that it's actually a Google Books problem.