Hacker News: s1mon

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.

New comment by s1mon in "The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product"

s1mon — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:52:50 +0000

Yep. As much as the rest of it resonated with LLM coding experiences I'm having, the NFT thing is unfortunate.

New comment by s1mon in "Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art"

s1mon — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 04:56:03 +0000

This reminds me of the articles I occasionally see in the local newspaper about a restaurant that is closing down. So often it’s one that I’ve never heard of before that. To me, that’s the number one issue. If your likely customer base (or at least an audience member who reads a lot about the industry/market) hasn’t heard about your product, how are you going to have a successful business?

New comment by s1mon in "Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries"

s1mon — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:06:28 +0000

I'd really love to see the prompt(s) you used with Claude. The way the article was written I mistakenly thought you would expand upon that in a footnote or sidebar.

New comment by s1mon in "Claude Code Remote Control"

s1mon — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:48:42 +0000

Yep. Came to say the same thing. I'd only used Codex in VSCode and in the Codex app, and at least those have the same history, but my understanding is that the cloud and CLI versions have this hierarchy of 'visibility' [0]. Perhaps they'll need to change this design decision?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cczkDMmmrEE

New comment by s1mon in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

s1mon — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:53:24 +0000

Many have predicted the singularity, and I found this to be a useful take. I do note that Hans Moravec predicted in 1988's "Mind Children" that "computers suitable for humanlike robots will appear in the 2020s", which is not completely wrong.

He also argued that computing power would continue growing exponentially and that machines would reach roughly human-level intelligence around the early to mid-21st century, often interpreted as around 2030–2040. He estimated that once computers achieved processing capacity comparable to the human brain (on the order of 10¹⁴–10¹⁵ operations per second), they could match and then quickly surpass human cognitive abilities.

New comment by s1mon in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

s1mon — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:51:04 +0000

I would also argue that even people who I like a lot and have known for many years can be very different "people" online than in person. It's sometimes shocking the dichotomy. I try to remind myself and others to ignore some of the online weirdness and focus on the in person interaction.

New comment by s1mon in "I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it"

s1mon — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:42:27 +0000

As someone who's been doing mechanical product engineering for 30+ years, doing this as a first project is way more than jumping off the deep end. Impressive.

New comment by s1mon in "All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)"

s1mon — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:55:23 +0000

All? Yes, there's a lot of garbage and outright dangerous, malicious stuff out there, but there's also moving art. It may take a while to drown out the stupid and evil stuff, but there are examples that amaze me:

https://www.youtube.com/@kellyeld2323/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@alffx123/videos

New comment by s1mon in "Reverse Engineering US Airline's PNR System and Accessing All Reservations"

s1mon — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 23:41:22 +0000

Agreed. I read the headline as "... US Airlines' ..." not "... US Airline's ..." and it seemed much more concerning. Instead it's a single airline I've never heard of. Looking them up, they are more established than I might have guessed (started as Casino Express Airlines 38 years ago, but current incarnation is only 4 years old), but also pretty small - roughly 1/100 the staff and 1/50 the fleet of United.

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

New comment by s1mon in "The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora"

s1mon — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 15:58:03 +0000

That was my first thought. When I saw 'Disney' and 'OpenAI' in a headline together I assumed the money was flowing the other way around. Certainly other rights holders like the NYTimes are looking for the cash to flow the opposite direction (they're suing because of allegations that OpenAI trained on copyrighted material which can be reproduced through prompting). Unless this investment somehow is structured so that Disney gets stock which will potentially be worth orders of magnitude more later...