Hacker News: simonbw

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.

New comment by simonbw in "Show HN: Sycamore – next gen Rust web UI library using fine-grained reactivity"

simonbw — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:12:55 +0000

The first sentence of this page says it:

> Sycamore is a next gen Rust *web* UI library powered by fine-grained reactivity.

New comment by simonbw in "We rewrote our Rust WASM parser in TypeScript and it got faster"

simonbw — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 03:03:16 +0000

Yeah if you're serializing and deserializing data across the JS-WASM boundary (or actually between web workers in general whether they're WASM or not) the data marshaling costs can add up. There is a way of sharing memory across the boundary though without any marshaling: TypedArrays and SharedArrayBuffers. TypedArrays let you transfer ownership of the underlying memory from one worker (or the main thread) to another without any copying. SharedArrayBuffers allow multiple workers to read and write to the same contiguous chunk of memory. The downside is that you lose all the niceties of any JavaScript types and you're basically stuck working with raw bytes.

You still do get some latency from the event loop, because postMessage gets queued as a MacroTask, which is probably on the order of 10μs. But this is the price you have to pay if you want to run some code in a non-blocking way.

New comment by simonbw in "North Korean's 100k fake IT workers net $500M a year for Kim"

simonbw — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:28:16 +0000

I mean, if the North Korean employees are doing good work, the companies employing them aren't exactly incentivized to find out that they're really North Koreans, cuz then they have an obligation to fire their actually productive employee.

New comment by simonbw in "North Korean's 100k fake IT workers net $500M a year for Kim"

simonbw — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:24:23 +0000

The point is that there are legit American citizens who are in on the con. They have real SSNs and an actual presence in the US. They run proxy servers out of their house to make it seem like that's where their web traffic is coming from. From the company's perspective, everything seems like a regular remote employee.

New comment by simonbw in "The pleasures of poor product design"

simonbw — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:56:15 +0000

I actually don't think her reasoning has to do with other people at all. I think it's that given she wants to make an image of a poorly designed object, she knows she could either do it herself, or she could do something that takes 99% less effort but produces a result that's 90% as good. Her brain says "the easier way is obviously more efficient, clearly that's what you should do". But using AI isn't actually a satisfying process so even though it's way easier, she doesn't have a desire to do it. Of course the option to do it the way she's always done it is still there and would be just as satisfying in the end. The difficulty is that now there's a little part of her brain that would be going "you're acting inefficiently/irrationally", which just makes the process less pleasant and harder to convince herself to continue with. To me it seems like

I know I have experienced this, and I bet a lot of people here have experienced this, with writing code by hand vs having Claude do it. I genuinely enjoy writing code, but now to get that joy, I have to commit to writing code _for the sake of writing code_, since it's no longer necessary to do it to achieve the end goal I have.

New comment by simonbw in "Get free Claude max 20x for open-source maintainers"

simonbw — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:43:47 +0000

Surely the easiest way is something like a PayPal/venmo link, no? I know a lot more people who use those than crypto.

New comment by simonbw in "Fastest Front End Tooling for Humans and AI"

simonbw — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:38:13 +0000

Are your frontend builds actually so slow that you're not seeing them live? I've gotten used to most frontend builds being single digit seconds or less for what feels like a decade now.

New comment by simonbw in "My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker"

simonbw — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:29:44 +0000

Ok, obviously unethical to do it, but this sounds like you've got the power to create some sci-fi shared dreaming device, where you can read people's brainwaves and send signals to other people's masks based on those signals. Or send signals to everyone at the same time and suddenly people all across the world experience some change in their dream simultaneously.

Like, don't actually do it, but I feel like there's inspiration for a sci-fi novel or short story there.

New comment by simonbw in "There is an AI code review bubble"

simonbw — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:11:39 +0000

Yes it is. I've really oijed those convention at places I've worked. It probably wouldn't be too hard to instruct AI's to use this format too.

New comment by simonbw in "STFU"

simonbw — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:56:40 +0000

It seems harder to justify telling someone to fuck off for doing literally the exact same thing you're currently doing.

New comment by simonbw in "Roam 50GB is now Roam 100GB"

simonbw — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:58:59 +0000

I second this! I switched to mint recently. They are offering unlimited data including hotspot for $15/mo for up to a year if you prepay. I think then it goes to their standard rate which is $30/mo for unlimited, or $15/mo for 5gb.

Not sponsored or anything, just a happy customer.

New comment by simonbw in "Blender 5.0"

simonbw — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:56:08 +0000

I tried it for the first time the other day after having heard how much better it's gotten recently, and it made me really wonder how bad was the UX _before_ all these recent improvements. I don't want to bash on it too hard, because it's clear that a ton of hard work has gone into it, but it was really a struggle for me to get some pretty basic things done. The only feedback for a lot of things I tried to do was some not-very helpful error messages in the console, or just the whole program crashing. After trying hard for quite a few hours, reading lots of docs and watching tutorials, I ended up giving up and going back to Fusion 360.

New comment by simonbw in "Carice TC2 – A non-digital electric car"

simonbw — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 20:11:46 +0000

I actually thought the backup cam was required by law now. I wonder how they get around that.

EDIT: Ah, it's not sold for the US market, so that's how.

New comment by simonbw in "$912 energy independence without red tape"

simonbw — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 23:35:47 +0000

I've been living in a rental for a while, and I have a woodshop in the garage. I've been really wanting to have a 220V outlet to run some bigger power tools, but if figured doing that would require hiring an electrician to come do some work in the breaker box. This has me curious if I can do something like this just to power some stuff in my garage, and also potentially charge an electric car.

New comment by simonbw in "Effective context engineering for AI agents"

simonbw — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 18:34:01 +0000

> We can't really do much with the information that x amount is reserved for MCP, tool calling or the system prompt.

I actually think this is pretty useful information. It helps you evaluate whether an MCP server is worth the context cost. Similar for getting a feel for how much context certain tool uses use up. I feel like there's a way you can change the system prompt, and so that helps you evaluate if what you've got there is worth it also.

New comment by simonbw in "Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO"

simonbw — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 18:43:26 +0000

There are driver's licenses and learner's permits. This could be the flying equivalent.

New comment by simonbw in "Semantic Line Breaks (2017)"

simonbw — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 16:53:07 +0000

I think it's about optimizing for different types of reading. When you're reading the final text, you're reading to absorb the content. When you're reading the source text, you're reading to find edits you want to make. Using more line breaks is a way of making the document easier to scan if you're familiar with the "shape" of it.