Hacker News: s1mon

New comment by s1mon in "What happens if you put work into the second dimension?"

s1mon — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:34:08 +0000

Any workspace, real or virtual, descends into messy chaos without someone actively organizing or cleaning things up. It's bad enough by yourself, but the minute it's shared with others, it will devolve quickly. Think about any shared file system, data library, workshop, kitchen, etc...

This is why librarians, janitors, lab managers, document controllers etc. are essential to make spaces functional and organized.

New comment by s1mon in "I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words"

s1mon — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:49:14 +0000

Why not just use Google Docs? The history is recorded. There are even plug ins which will play it back so you can see it.

New comment by s1mon in "Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones"

s1mon — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:35:36 +0000

It's always entertaining to try to understand these things from first principles. Color and skin color in particular are very complex things to measure and model. It's not just a physical quantity, it's also a matter of human perception based on lighting and a host of factors.

It seems like some work was done to research existing approaches, but I don't see any reference to Pantone Skin Tones [0]. Without intending to, I've worked on 3 different projects which involved measuring skin tones for makeup applications. The Pantone range is not 100% perfect, but it's pretty well done and easy to understand. There are two axes: a light/dark one, and red-yellow one [1].

[0] https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/skintone

[1] https://cosmeticsbusiness.com/pantone-skintone-guide-80945

New comment by s1mon in "Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified"

s1mon — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 13:12:00 +0000

Yep. On mobile it was basically impossible to read. 2/3 of the page was covered in ads and pop ups. I figure if they don’t care about the readers’ experience then I don’t care to try to read their content.

New comment by s1mon in "The Cold Email"

s1mon — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:47:45 +0000

One key turning point in my life was approaching Red Whittaker, the head of the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon. I knew who he was and had met him briefly before, but this was pretty much a “cold call” even if happened to be in person. I was finishing up my degree at CMU and felt like if was going to stay in Pittsburgh, I wanted to work somewhere that was working on really cool projects. My degree was a BFA in sculpture, but I guess my enthusiasm and interest in novel mechanisms was enough for him to take a chance and make a position for me. I learned a lot from (and with) the team of PhD students and staff. The job had me starting to use parametric CAD at very early point (Pro/E 6.0). After a few years I moved on and eventually left Pittsburgh for SF, but without taking that chance, I really don’t know what path my life would have taken.

New comment by s1mon in "Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings"

s1mon — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:07:42 +0000

He also wasn't bald when he started selling books.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-25-the-m...

New comment by s1mon in "The story behind APC-2"

s1mon — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:31:15 +0000

No price. Ouch. If you have to ask, you can't afford it?

"Teenage Engineering isn’t quoting a price publicly, instead directing interested parties to email the company directly."

https://hiconsumption.com/tech/teenage-engineering-apc-2-rec...

New comment by s1mon in "FreeCAD in the Browser"

s1mon — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 01:30:02 +0000

Onshape is free in the browser as long as you are not doing commercial work. It’s a professional system from the founders of Solidworks that competes with all the top CAD tools.

New comment by s1mon in "F3"

s1mon — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:09:32 +0000

Somehow I assumed that you were linking to this one: https://xkcd.com/927/

New comment by s1mon in "SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible"

s1mon — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 17:33:37 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Motion_Picture_and_...

New comment by s1mon in "Childhood Computing"

s1mon — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:53:59 +0000

I'm old enough and lucky enough to have had my first computing experiences (1978-80) be on a teletype in our elementary school which was connected to a minicomputer that the town owned. The connection was an acoustically coupled modem/analog phone line that ran at 300 baud. The exciting thing was to write very basic BASIC programs and see results on the printout. There was no CRT, everything was via the literal teletype - a keyboard and a clunky printer.

New comment by s1mon in "A Primer on Bézier Curves – So What Makes a Bézier Curve?"

s1mon — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:06:29 +0000

I've had this bookmarked for a while. Fantastic resource. It's been on HN dozens of times since 2017.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191577

New comment by s1mon in "Codex for almost everything"

s1mon — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:17:29 +0000

I'm very used to tools which keep track of connections to documents based on internal IDs, not folder structure. It seems primitive to be so brittle.

It seems even more stupid that it was so hard to get Codex to fix this for me. I managed to get it to solve the problem, but not before it got itself in this crazy loop of restarting the app, wanting to quit, quitting even if I canceled the quit dialog, and restarting over and over. I was able to reboot my machine and it had sorted out the missing references to most of the projects, but wow.

New comment by s1mon in "Codex for almost everything"

s1mon — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:10:07 +0000

I've been using the Codex app for a while (a few months) for a few types of coding projects, and then slowly using it for random organizational/productivity things with local folders on my Mac. Most of that has been successful and very satisfying, however...

Codex is still far from ready for regular people. Simply moving a folder that Codex has been working on confuses the hell out of it. I can't figure out how to fix "Current working directory missing. This chat's working directory no longer exists". I've tried asking it to fix the problem and it tries lots of terminal commands and screws around with SQLite. Something this brittle is not for non-developers.

New comment by s1mon in "Allbirds, Inc. Announces Expansion into AI Compute Infrastructure"

s1mon — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:03:31 +0000

So is it going to be cool again to wear Allbirds, in an ironic way? Or do I need to burn mine?

New comment by s1mon in "Unfolder for Mac – A 3D model unfolding tool for creating papercraft"

s1mon — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:09:08 +0000

https://www.pandafold.app works but https://pandafold.app does not.

New comment by s1mon in "Too Much Color"

s1mon — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:20:58 +0000

This is an amazing deep dive into color difference measurements and how sensitive the math is. The idea that we really need to save characters - bytes - in CSS when we have so many web sites chewing through 49 MB with the enshitification of the web is hard to reconcile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945

New comment by s1mon in "Claude Tips for 3D Work"

s1mon — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:55:10 +0000

I've been using Codex (GPT-5.4 extra high) to code custom FeatureScript in Onshape (3D mechanical CAD software). It's challenging to get it to do TDD that involves any visual reasoning. At the moment I've got tooling through Google Chrome Devtools MCP and Playwright to extract things and control the browser and I use some custom features which help with formatting and controlling debugging outputs (text and visual overlays). Mostly the text debugging outputs are very helpful to Codex. It will often add debugging payloads when we're focused on a particular issue. I do occasionally take screenshots and paste them into Codex and explain the issue that I'm seeing. It seems to understand a certain amount, especially if the issue can be seen in orthogonal views.

New comment by s1mon in "AirPods Max 2"

s1mon — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:34:59 +0000

Yes. Sarcasm.

I have a pair of the first generation AirPods Max. They leave dents in my scalp if I wear them for any real amount of time. I've been an Apple person since the 1980s. This is one of the most disappointing Apple products for me ever, and I really don't want to know how much $$$$$ lifetime customer value I've contributed to Apple's bottom line.

New comment by s1mon in "AirPods Max 2"

s1mon — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 20:49:47 +0000

Might as well be 3862 grams considering how much they hurt to wear for any length of time. I was also hoping this update would improve the ergonomics, but no. Still too heavy and no mention of any improvements to the headband.