Hacker News: simonbw

New comment by simonbw in "Big Tech's thirst for water is sparking a global resistance"

simonbw — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:45:41 +0000

A large consumer coming in, driving up demand for water, and being willing to pay for it would be like the textbook example of competing over the water supply.

> "Unless the water providers are selling water too cheaply, what's the problem?"

Do you really not understand how coming in and making a bunch of people's water more expensive isn't popular with those people? You think the problem was that they had it too good with their cheap water and this is fixing that problem?

New comment by simonbw in "Tsc-ts: TypeScript written in TypeScript"

simonbw — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 19:19:56 +0000

Now someone's gotta port this version to rust.

New comment by simonbw in "Tsc-ts: TypeScript written in TypeScript"

simonbw — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 19:19:40 +0000

Now someone's gotta port this to rust.

New comment by simonbw in "The Helicopter with Radioactive Blades"

simonbw — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 03:26:24 +0000

I can just imagine the conversation when they came up with that:

Boss: we need to transmit 1 bit of information indicating pressure loss from a spinning rotor blade to the main body of the helicopter. The blade spins too fast for electronics to work properly.

Engineer: What if we make the blades radioactive when they depressurize, then point a Geiger counter at them to detect if that happens.

Boss: ... where did you say you got your degree from?

New comment by simonbw in "The Helicopter with Radioactive Blades"

simonbw — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 03:10:52 +0000

> is so elegant it’s still being used today

I think it's the "so elegant" part that's wrong. It's not still being used today because it's so elegant. It's still being used today because the old helicopters haven't replaced it.

New comment by simonbw in "Show HN: Corporate Mind Games – logic puzzles with a sarcastic corporate theme"

simonbw — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 20:12:01 +0000

The puzzle pages also give pretty strong AI vibes to me. I think it just reminds me what I've gotten from Claude when I let it decide on design.

Some of the specifics that come to mind:

- the use of emojis instead of icons

- the text content largely sounds like it's written by Claude. This is a big one and it's everywhere: the names of the games, the descriptions, the status texts, basically every single piece of text that I've read.

- the fact that text is being used for some things at all feels a bit Claude-y, like the "Today's result: pending" status or "Vibes are perfected. Well done."

- a lot of the color scheme feels AI somehow. It's interesting, because it's not like the colors are wrong or anything, they somehow just feel like "default" LLM colors

- same thing with the typography

New comment by simonbw in "Storm Summoner, a MIDI controller for effects pedals"

simonbw — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:43:24 +0000

Does anyone have more context on how this would be used? Is this like an alternative to using a midi keyboard to control synths? Is the appeal of it that it is small and meant to be played one handed while your other hand does something else?

New comment by simonbw in "TypeScript 7.0 RC"

simonbw — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:00:34 +0000

They've had a preview version of this available as ts-go for a while now, and I've been really happy using it on my projects. I just installed it and changed "tsc" to "tsgo" in a couple places and it just worked. I don't remember exact numbers, but I think an approximately 10x speed up is a reasonable estimate for my build times. They went from noticable-but-not-bad to imperceptibly-fast.

New comment by simonbw in "Kirkland Roundabouts"

simonbw — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:35:09 +0000

I did not understand why all the commentary in the game was about giant peanuts until I read your comment. Thank you!

New comment by simonbw in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

simonbw — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:37:08 +0000

You could do some sort of adaptive quality where you spend time incrementally improving fidelity until your frame budget is up. In practice I think that might be trickier than it sounds, but I feel like theoretically there's something there that could get you the best graphics your rig can handle without dropping frames. I've been considering doing something like this when I've been building a game/engine lately.

New comment by simonbw in "'Backrooms' Stuns with $81M Debut"

simonbw — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:11:05 +0000

You might be right. I think the other thing is that there are a ton of free things for me to watch on various streaming platforms.

New comment by simonbw in "'Backrooms' Stuns with $81M Debut"

simonbw — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:17:36 +0000

People are saying that you can buy movies online, but I think they're missing the key point of putting lots of movies on massive discounts and promoting the movies that are currently discounted. Like sure you can buy basically any movie on Amazon or Apple's store or wherever, but I know that wherever I go, it's going to cost $4 to rent a movie, except every once in a while when it's on sale and I get it for $3, and buying it is going to be some higher amount that is almost certainly not worth it. When steam has sales, I might browse and buy quite a few games that I'm not gonna play right away. Or I buy things in bundles because it just seems like such a good deal. If movies were usually $10 to buy, but the Amazon store had a very visible section of movies that were $5 or less, but for a limited time, I'd be way more likely to buy multiple movies that I'm not intending to watch right now.

New comment by simonbw in "A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking"

simonbw — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:32:57 +0000

It seems like they know I have an iPhone with dark mode enabled, that I speak English, and that I'm in the USA (but wrong city wrong state). I am kinda unimpressed, I'm pretty sure they can get a lot more info than that.

New comment by simonbw in "Inkscape 1.4.4"

simonbw — Thu, 07 May 2026 02:15:37 +0000

There is actually one tool I've dealt with that works nicely with hand-crafted SVG's: https://boxy-svg.com/

New comment by simonbw in "The bottleneck was never the code"

simonbw — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:40:01 +0000

In most real-world use of the term, a paradox isn't something that's impossible, it's just something that intuitively seems wrong when you first think about it.

"I got a Prius so now I am spending more money on gas" sounds ridiculous, but it would be an instance of this paradox.

New comment by simonbw in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

simonbw — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:32:27 +0000

There's plenty of non-critical code that I would trust non-technical people with good AI tooling to touch. As long as their access is segregated from the actual critical stuff. But let them write marketing pages or help and documentation pages. Let them write internal reporting code or build tools to use themselves.

New comment by simonbw in "Slop Cop"

simonbw — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:27:55 +0000

> I realized my predilection for verbosity was actually a symptom of my own insecurity, emotionalism, and indecisiveness.

Ok, Mr. Milchick.

New comment by simonbw in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

simonbw — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:11:00 +0000

I've been thinking of just using sandpaper stuck to a block of wood, though I imagine that might be slower.

Heck, a little part of me is tempted to try the smallest radius round-over router bit I have in a trim router, but the odds of that going horribly wrong are just way too high.

New comment by simonbw in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

simonbw — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:04:07 +0000

I have thought about filing/sanding my MacBook forever and getting a case to solve the problem never even occurred to me. I feel a little silly now because it does seem obvious, but also to me just filing it down sounds like less work than picking out a case.

New comment by simonbw in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

simonbw — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:00:42 +0000

I've been meaning to do this forever and think this game me the push I've needed to do it tonight when I get home. Probably not as rounded as OP, but it's reassuring to know I could go that rounded and it wouldn't fall apart.