Hacker News: joelwilliamson

New comment by joelwilliamson in "What Async Promised and What It Delivered"

joelwilliamson — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:06:24 +0000

Function colouring, deadlocks, silent exception swallowing, &c aren’t introduced by the higher levels, they are present in the earlier techniques too.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes"

joelwilliamson — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:44:29 +0000

Who calls WWI, stagflation or Covid good old times? Only the post-WWII boom was really a good time.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode"

joelwilliamson — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:14:55 +0000

When did that happen? Did they admit guilt in the big settlement, or was there a different case?

New comment by joelwilliamson in "US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere"

joelwilliamson — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 01:58:05 +0000

I think tourer was arguing that the Nazis were a template for how to use speech restrictions to maintain power.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

joelwilliamson — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:41:21 +0000

GitHub is a poor example of Chinese internet restrictions, since access to it is usually fine from China.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions"

joelwilliamson — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:54:20 +0000

They could open source it and not even have a Github project associated. Just provide a read-only git repo on anthropic.com or drop a source tarball every release.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

joelwilliamson — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 18:44:56 +0000

Give 10 years of copyright for free, then a $1000 fee for the next decade, and make every subsequent decade 100x more expensive.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

joelwilliamson — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 18:40:57 +0000

Even Amazon Prime’s catalogue is only a third the size of what Netflix had 15 years ago.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "GHC now runs in the browser"

joelwilliamson — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 23:26:25 +0000

Have you tried Real World Haskell?

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland"

joelwilliamson — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 13:51:08 +0000

He’d be dead either way, the question is if having those three years were a net improvement to his life

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Restrictions on house sharing by unrelated roommates"

joelwilliamson — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 15:13:11 +0000

The “board” in a boarding house is food. There can be other services as well, but food is definitely required to be a boarding house.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "KDE launches its own distribution"

joelwilliamson — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 11:50:25 +0000

He probably typed BSD, and it got autocorrected to BAD.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Calling your boss a dickhead is not a sackable offence, UK tribunal rules"

joelwilliamson — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:21:14 +0000

She said she wouldn’t care if the hotels were set on fire.

“Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.”

That “for all I care” changes the whole meaning of the sentence.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Colleges see significant drop in international students as fall semester begins"

joelwilliamson — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 19:26:35 +0000

That’s a 2000x increase. 2000% is 21x, so $210,000/a.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "The fish kick may be the fastest subsurface swim stroke yet (2015)"

joelwilliamson — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 15:28:43 +0000

My daughter’s school had a race day to wrap up their swimming lessons, and one of the events involved rolling from front to back every second stroke. It was funny to watch but not very practical.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Honda conducts successful launch and landing of experimental reusable rocket"

joelwilliamson — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 14:36:51 +0000

> SpaceX is the only entity that have recovered and reused any rocket parts after sending payloads orbital

This is not true. Say what you will about the Shuttle, but they definitely recovered and reused rocket parts from both the boosters and the orbiter.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup"

joelwilliamson — Thu, 01 May 2025 14:59:09 +0000

“What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Should more of us be moving to live near friends?"

joelwilliamson — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 23:57:36 +0000

It’s a trend that’s a few centuries old at least. The French and Indian War was partly caused by Americans who didn’t have enough land to farm to support a family moving west, and the British trying to stop that was one cause of the Revolution, and then the whole of 19th century American history is a combination of farmers moving west because the east was full and immigration from Europe largely driven by the farmland of Europe being full. Before that almost everywhere was stuck in a Malthusian equilibrium and if you couldn’t support a family in your home, moving away would just make it harder.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Bill Atkinson doxxed Douglas Adams in 1987"

joelwilliamson — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 10:50:32 +0000

I grew up in Ontario in the 90s, and addresses were in the phonebook.

New comment by joelwilliamson in "Can a Rubik's Cube be brute-forced?"

joelwilliamson — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 20:35:31 +0000

A month of programming can save an hour of planning.