Hacker News: bshimmin

New comment by bshimmin in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

bshimmin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:04:27 +0000

It always reminds me of how how Apple write the copy for their landing pages. (A couple of examples from the current MacBook Neo page include "Silver, Blush, Citrus, and Indigo. Four stunning colors. One durable design" and "macOS. Easy to use. Runs all your go-to apps. Puts the fun in functional".) It's quite similar to a rhetorical device called the ascending tricolon, and it's definitely not normally how people speak or write unless they're making a deliberate effort to achieve this effect.

New comment by bshimmin in "Schedule tasks on the web"

bshimmin — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:36:45 +0000

Honestly, you just need cron (and Ruby/Python/bash/whatever) on an EC2. It's not very fashionable, but it works, will continue to work forever, and costs hardly anything.

New comment by bshimmin in "Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley (1962)"

bshimmin — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 18:12:46 +0000

Not to worry, though: his grandson, Louis, is in charge of Palantir in the UK. Definitely nothing concerning about that!

New comment by bshimmin in "I Found David Lynch's Lost 'Dune II' Script"

bshimmin — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 14:46:26 +0000

So many of the negative comments about Villeneuve's Dune in this thread are astonishing to me, but I will just pick this one: surely scale is something that Villeneuve does so brilliantly! From Arrival, though Blade Runner 2049, to his Dune, he has an amazing ability to make things seem vast (space ships, buildings, cities...) - it's almost a trademark of his work, to me, so colour me baffled that you would single this out for criticism.

(For context, I read and enjoyed the Dune books as a child, I've seen the Lynch film several times and find it broadly comical, I love Twin Peaks, and I think Villeneuve is arguably one of the best mainstream directors working right now.)

New comment by bshimmin in "Millennium Bridge workers hang straw bales after ancient bylaw triggered"

bshimmin — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 11:11:50 +0000

Here's the charity responsible for this bridge and several others in London: https://www.citybridgefoundation.org.uk/about/history Founded in 1122, which is quite something!

New comment by bshimmin in "How would you say “She said goodbye too many times before.” in Latin?"

bshimmin — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 14:21:08 +0000

Great comment! For anyone looking to learn a bit more about this, the "crossing" technique described above is called "chiasmus": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus

Another famous example is "Vivāmus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus" from Catullus 5 (there are several instances of it in this poem, in fact).

New comment by bshimmin in "This time, it feels different"

bshimmin — Sat, 13 May 2023 13:35:51 +0000

Yahoo ("once the most popular web site in the U.S.", according to Wikipedia)?

New comment by bshimmin in "Majority of gig economy workers are earning below minimum wage: research"

bshimmin — Thu, 11 May 2023 15:08:59 +0000

They are considered to be self-employed. If they're earning more than £1000 a year, then they need to file a self-assessment tax return with HMRC, and if they're earning more than a certain amount, perhaps £12500 a year, they will need to pay income tax on those earnings (plus national insurance).

Do most gig workers actually do these things? I have no idea.

New comment by bshimmin in "Kchat: Persistent group chat in <50 lines using kdb+/k/q web sockets, JavaScript"

bshimmin — Tue, 09 May 2023 08:57:49 +0000

This is such a helpful comment - what looks, to the uninitiated, like line noise actually starts to make some sense now!

New comment by bshimmin in "CoffeeScript for TypeScript"

bshimmin — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 11:27:03 +0000

I'm slightly surprised no one has commented on the custom infix operators. I think if I encountered the example in the wild, I'd understand it was a clamp function based purely on the names, but if it were used for anything else I'd have to spend quite a lot of time puzzling over it. Perhaps they make more sense to Haskell people, though!

New comment by bshimmin in "Pangram"

bshimmin — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 21:52:39 +0000

You are right, I did - sorry. I wrote something similar in Ruby to check!

New comment by bshimmin in "Silurian Hypothesis"

bshimmin — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 21:51:19 +0000

A word of warning: a few years ago, the related page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-place_artifact took me down one of the worst Wikipedia procrastination rabbit holes I've ever lost myself in.

New comment by bshimmin in "Pangram"

bshimmin — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 21:43:38 +0000

There's a "b" in "about", but there's no "k" or "m".

New comment by bshimmin in "Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata"

bshimmin — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 12:53:13 +0000

Thank you for posting this! I gave myself a pat on the back for being able to get through the first chapter unaided thanks to my A-Level in Greek mumble years ago...

New comment by bshimmin in "The HTML5 Shiv (2011)"

bshimmin — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 08:20:08 +0000

I like how they've misspelt "misspelling" there - I wonder if that was deliberate! (I also like how there's even an open pull request to fix the same...)

New comment by bshimmin in "Cool HTML elements nobody uses"

bshimmin — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 18:52:07 +0000

I only bothered to check `details`, but that one dates back to at least the 2008 working draft of the HTML5 spec, which makes it ~14 years old - not absolutely ancient, but far from recent!

New comment by bshimmin in "Amazon spending $465M on season 1 of The Lord of the Rings series"

bshimmin — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 13:05:04 +0000

I wouldn't say there's a big name star in there, but I've seen Peter Mullan in quite a few things, Nazanin Boniardi is moderately famous, Lenny Henry is definitely famous in the UK, and Morfydd Clark was tremendous recently in Saint Maud.

As others have said, this doesn't necessarily matter too much.

New comment by bshimmin in "Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?"

bshimmin — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 13:56:54 +0000

Not the OP, but if you search for "random country generator" you will indeed find a few similar sites which do definitely have a lot of ads.

New comment by bshimmin in "Cryptocurrency scam: Man swindled out of pension and life savings"

bshimmin — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 15:20:02 +0000

Indeed. "Crypto" has very much gone the way of "hashtag" (which is, amongst non-technical people I know, overwhelmingly used to refer to the hash symbol).

New comment by bshimmin in "Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform"

bshimmin — Wed, 04 May 2022 07:18:26 +0000

I actually have quite happy memories of working with Backbone and jQuery - there were obviously all manner of problems, but everything was quite easy to understand and a lot less magical. Apparently this was in 2012 - how time flies! - so I imagine rose-tinted spectacles must be in full effect here!