Hacker News: simmonmt

New comment by simmonmt in "America's Longest Highway Tunnel (2025)"

simmonmt — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:38:59 +0000

The town is pretty wild too. Well, in a not wild sort of way - at least in winter.

It's one thing to read most residents live in the same apartment building. For me what really brought it home was seeing for sale flyers on the bulletin board in the coffee shop: "For sale: a table. Questions see Bob in apt 23".

The sight of an indoor playground complete with swing set was fun too.

New comment by simmonmt in "The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve"

simmonmt — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 10:52:04 +0000

Crude oil is sketchy stuff. All sorts of VOCs, etc evaporate from it. Some valuable, some, flammable, some will merely kill you. Keeping it confined makes all that more manageable.

New comment by simmonmt in "LG says we're fake news [video]"

simmonmt — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:58:36 +0000

It's not entirely the fault of the industry. Consumer preferences are part of this equation too.

https://www.streamtvinsider.com/advertising/roku-vizio-lean-...

If consumers are unwilling to shell out for a TV priced high enough that the manufacturer doesn't need to do things like this to earn a (decent) profit, then what we've got is what you get.

You could certainly argue that the industry should've held the line, but that ignores human nature. One "innovative" manufacturer was always going to break ranks then the rest would follow, especially since the typical consumer appears (judging by the lack of non smart TV's for sale at consumer prices) to prefer lower prices to lack of tracking features. I think people very much like being able to buy a 65" tv for USD399.

If you want to mandate the sales of TVs that don't track, get a law passed. I suspect it'd be deeply unpopular once the resulting price rises were known.

New comment by simmonmt in "Cell-based architecture for resilient payment systems"

simmonmt — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:19:24 +0000

Maybe? If you assume a cell can just disappear at a moment's notice, then I'm guessing you don't even try backing it up. Whatever goes into and out of the cell (request logs and results) gets backed up, and no doubt that's more complicated than a monolithic system, but it may not be so bad assuming the replay systems and global transaction router do their thing?

New comment by simmonmt in "Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust"

simmonmt — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:03:30 +0000

Yep. When did virtual screens come in? My last full time experience with X was with Xsun in the early 2000s under Solaris. There was a shared cursor, I thought you could drag windows between monitors, but I also thought the DISPLAY variable was different for each (though I could be misremembering)

New comment by simmonmt in "Yserver: A modern X11 server written in Rust"

simmonmt — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:50:47 +0000

This is pretty cool - especially that it's at the point where it can be used with a real window manager.

I'm curious why multiple screens is considered legacy baggage and thus out of scope, given how common multiple monitor setups are these days. I also have zero familiarity with X internals, so don't know if multiple monitor support is a horror show that'd be miserable to support.

New comment by simmonmt in "Accenture to acquire Ookla"

simmonmt — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:49:14 +0000

This was one of the reasons given, at the time, for why Netflix created fast.com. It's served by the same infra that does their streaming, and is thus difficult for isps to game. That is, it'd be hard for them to do some hack to make fast.com numbers without also benefiting Netflix streaming performance in the bargain.

New comment by simmonmt in "SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket"

simmonmt — Sat, 23 May 2026 02:20:15 +0000

I mean ... step 1 is probably fixing the part where it lands in the ocean, falls over and explodes. Once they've done that and can get their hands on the tiles I'm guessing they can continue to iterate there until they get a more easily reusable design.

New comment by simmonmt in "Replacing a 3 GB SQLite db with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary"

simmonmt — Sun, 10 May 2026 13:17:30 +0000

It jumped out at me too, but because I wondered what it would look like in the AI version of this story. Having had it build the SQL version do you ... a) miss the leap because you don't understand how it works, don't care to know, and go off to vibe the next thing b) ask it lots of questions because reasons to develop that deep understanding then make the leap or c) rely on it (prompt: "this can't be good enough do better") to go make the leap for you.

(Assuming for the sake of argument that you guided it to the SQL version first)

New comment by simmonmt in "Uber wants to turn its drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies"

simmonmt — Sun, 03 May 2026 01:42:33 +0000

That's true, but the human can do a much better job planning for the journey if they know what to expect along the way.

One example, from the end of the journey: knowing in advance where the actual entrance to the business is, or the specific curb cut that leads to the residence, makes it easier and far less error prone to decide exactly where the journey should end. Even humans have a hard time figuring out the right access point for a business or residence. This is a job for an offline process, fed by as many data sources as possible.

New comment by simmonmt in "Uber wants to turn its drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies"

simmonmt — Sat, 02 May 2026 17:55:57 +0000

> When they want data about a school intersection in SF at a certain time of day, they just... synthetically generate it and simulate

I think it's more about detecting changes to the world. You need boots on the ground, so to speak, to see that new speed limit sign or the new lane paint. The Waymo vehicle can no doubt react to changes in the world when it encounters them, relaying them back to the mothership, but it's better to know about them in advance.

New comment by simmonmt in "Claude Code Routines"

simmonmt — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:08:27 +0000

I think he meant a very small (stub) MEMORY.md whose sole contents are something like "don't write here - write there".

New comment by simmonmt in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

simmonmt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:26:09 +0000

If you consider say elevator music - music that's just there to fill space, rather than to be listened too - then I don't think there's that much difference between using AI to produce it and using AI to produce clip art or boilerplate code.

New comment by simmonmt in "Show HN: CEL by Example"

simmonmt — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:36:01 +0000

That's an anti pattern, at least the way we use it. If you need to add complexity, you define custom functions. If that's not enough, CEL probably isn't the right choice, and you'd be doing yourself no favors banging it into that square hole.

New comment by simmonmt in "iPhone 16 Best-Selling Smartphone in 2025; Apple Takes 7 Spots in Top Models"

simmonmt — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:38:51 +0000

Interesting. I made the same jump and noticed a huge increase in speed and decrease in memory pressure (the likelihood that iOS will kill an app I've switched away from). I miss the physical silent mode button though.

New comment by simmonmt in "Heathrow scraps liquid container limit"

simmonmt — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:48:27 +0000

The alternative is not charging. JFK somehow manages. Yes there's traffic, but it keeps slowly moving.

New comment by simmonmt in "Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far"

simmonmt — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:38:29 +0000

I'm not normally a fan of tips, but this seems like a reasonable use of one to me. The picker isn't paid on the shininess of the apple they bring you -- they're paid to pick as quickly as they can from what's on offer. The potential for a tip incentivises them to go beyond that requirement -- to pick the nicest/freshest rather than the most convenient.

New comment by simmonmt in "All praise to the lunch ladies"

simmonmt — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 03:21:27 +0000

They stopped building B2 bombers 25 years ago.

New comment by simmonmt in "Advent of Code 2025: Number of puzzles reduce from 25 to 12 for the first time"

simmonmt — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 22:46:59 +0000

Fewer challenges, but no more space between them. They still come out daily starting December 1st. They just stop coming sooner.

New comment by simmonmt in "Harnessing America's heat pump moment"

simmonmt — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 01:40:09 +0000

Costs are a big thing, sure, but for me it's electrical reliability. For better or worse our heating oil and natural gas supply are both more reliable than our electricity supply. I don't need the heat going out in the dead of winter when some wind storm drops a bunch of branches on power lines.

I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.