Hacker News: blake8086

New comment by blake8086 in "Show HN: Together, a no-signup chat and universal comment/discussion tool (beta)"

blake8086 — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 19:46:12 +0000

An interesting idea!

New comment by blake8086 in "Show HN: Together, a no-signup chat and universal comment/discussion tool (beta)"

blake8086 — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 19:06:24 +0000

Welp, had to take it down. I'll be back later.

Show HN: Together, a no-signup chat and universal comment/discussion tool (beta)

blake8086 — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:32:15 +0000

Hi HN,

For years I’ve missed the feeling of an always-on chatroom without the silos and social overhead of Discord. So I built Together: a single-room, no-signup group chat that you join with one click. No channels, no rules (yet), no onboarding flow. Everyone lands in the same place and can start talking in under a second.

Why I made it

- Forums and blog comments are great but slow; Discord/Slack feel heavy for casual drop-ins if you aren’t already a member of a community.

- I wanted the simplest possible space where ~100 people could idle, share shower thoughts, and keep the conversation rolling.

- I’m cautiously (naively?) optimistic that a friction-free room can stay civil and interesting without much structure.

Bonus features

- Universal comments: Share any (mostly any) web page link and view it inside the site, with a live comment section.

- Inline comments: Add your comment within the page, and others can join the discussion.

- Share your commentary After you’ve added all your clever snark to some blog post, share with your friends so they can all see how smart you are!

- No sign-up needed: Just start reading, chatting, and commenting. Pick a username if you want.

Looking for feedback on:

1. What would make you leave the tab open all day?

2. Is the UX confusing in any way?

I’ll be in the chat (and here in the comments) all day fixing bugs and answering questions.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45659707

Points: 6

# Comments: 3

YouTube chat is way more complicated than you think

blake8086 — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 16:09:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvOs3IhQKO0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42666779

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by blake8086 in "OpenAI Threatening to Ban Users for Asking Strawberry About Its Reasoning"

blake8086 — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 19:27:07 +0000

Perhaps controlling AI is harder than people thought.

They could "just" make it not reveal its reasoning process, but they don't know how. But, they're pretty sure they can keep AI from doing anything bad, because... well, just because, ok?

The reasons YouTube is slow on Firefox [video]

blake8086 — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 01:46:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or9jSh3uKX0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38388153

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by blake8086 in "Chrome will soon warn you when you might not want to trust an extension"

blake8086 — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 20:02:42 +0000

Looking forward to:

Add "Adblocker"?

Proceed with caution

This extension is not trusted by Enhanced Safe Browsing.

Learn More

New comment by blake8086 in "Text editing hates you too (2019)"

blake8086 — Fri, 21 May 2021 23:31:43 +0000

You're a genius.

New comment by blake8086 in "US central bank payment system down for 'hours'"

blake8086 — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 22:27:20 +0000

How much energy does the US central bank system use in a year?

New comment by blake8086 in "Infinitely zooming botanical floral paradise painting"

blake8086 — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 16:06:37 +0000

Sounds like https://www.ice.org/tiles/

New comment by blake8086 in "Drone Footage of Arecibo Observatory Collapse"

blake8086 — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 18:15:26 +0000

I always think it's funny when people use large planes as a reference for heavy weights, since they're designed to be as light as possible for the volume.

New comment by blake8086 in "Tracking Mixed Bitcoins"

blake8086 — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 16:49:55 +0000

Was it https://news.bitcoin.com/chainalysis-whistleblower-shares-co... ?

So your site has a big form: how to give it great UX without breaking the bank

blake8086 — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 19:21:28 +0000

Article URL: https://uxdesign.substack.com/p/how-to-create-great-ux-for-bbfs-big

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184717

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

How to evaluate candidates for your first UX hire when you don't know UX

blake8086 — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 20:43:02 +0000

Article URL: https://uxdesign.substack.com/p/how-to-evaluate-candidates-for-my

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058273

Points: 18

# Comments: 6

New comment by blake8086 in "South Korea and Sweden are the most innovative countries in the world"

blake8086 — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 17:24:39 +0000

Why aren't I using tons of amazing South Korean and Swedish-designed products in my daily life if this is the case? (or jealous of all the great products they seem to have that I don't have access to?)

New comment by blake8086 in "Automatic categorization of text is a core tool now"

blake8086 — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 16:08:04 +0000

Are there any companies working on personalized text categorization?

New comment by blake8086 in "Novogratz's Crypto Trading Desk Lost $136M in Nine Months"

blake8086 — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 19:45:47 +0000

And dot-coms! And real estate! Hmm.

New comment by blake8086 in "Show HN: Domain-tailored CRDTs for collaboration without server involvement"

blake8086 — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 17:18:59 +0000

I suspect you could build such a thing if you could more rigidly define edit operations on source code files. The way we edit code now is roughly "insert/edit/delete string at position ", which doesn't really carry enough context to auto-merge.

If edits carried all the semantic information of what they were doing to the source: "rename symbol to everywhere" "perform step after step ", then we could probably build a zero-maintenance revision-control system.

New comment by blake8086 in "Parsing: a timeline"

blake8086 — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 22:46:40 +0000

You will probably be interested in this explanation of how xi-editor does it: https://google.github.io/xi-editor/docs/rope_science_11.html

New comment by blake8086 in "Utility poles"

blake8086 — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 06:44:32 +0000

A friend and I have a podcast at https://www.youtube.com/fungineering