Hacker News: steve_taylor

New comment by steve_taylor in "US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search"

steve_taylor — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 02:29:28 +0000

It reminds me of tax law in many countries. You can follow the letter of the law, but if the vibes are off, you can still be found to be in breach of a vague catch-all provision (e.g. economic substance doctorine in the US, GAAR in Canada/UK, Part IVA in Australia, etc).

New comment by steve_taylor in "Claude Opus 5"

steve_taylor — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:40:50 +0000

You're absolutely right. Your belt-and-braces are earning their keep.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com"

steve_taylor — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 01:35:05 +0000

The only time I use Reddit is when I land there via a Google search. Posts get flagged as mature at the drop of a hat, so my go-to has always been to replace www with old. Now that it's gone, I'll just skip Reddit links.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

steve_taylor — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:07:50 +0000

It was closed-book. Take-home, closed-book seems like an oxymoron anyway.

A lot of the cheating students would have concluded that other students are going to cheat and get a much better result, so they might as well do the same.

The fault lies squarely with the professor.

New comment by steve_taylor in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

steve_taylor — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:03:10 +0000

> including the half ass Australian solution.

It was designed to be half-arsed so Digital ID can come along and save the day. Australia's Digital ID opens up to the private sector on 30 November.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Minecraft: Java Edition 26.2, the first version with Vulkan 1.2"

steve_taylor — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:41:34 +0000

The defining aspect of Bedrock is C++, not DirectX. Bedrock runs on numerous platforms where DirectX isn't available.

Minecraft isn't exactly be the type of game to showcase a 3D API's supremacy.

New comment by steve_taylor in "The Australian Government to Require SMS/MMS Sender ID Registraion"

steve_taylor — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:10:55 +0000

The Australian one will label them as Unverified.

Personally, I'd prefer them to be blocked. If it's important and legitimate, they'll register.

New comment by steve_taylor in "The Australian Government to Require SMS/MMS Sender ID Registraion"

steve_taylor — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:07:17 +0000

As an Australian, I'm happy to hear this, but also annoyed that a lot of legitimate SMS from companies don't use branded sender ID. I'm not sure why, but my guess is that SMS gateways charge more for it and businesses don't want to pay the extra cent or two.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

steve_taylor — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:56:20 +0000

AI has a way of exposing people. In this example, students who are there to get a degree from a prestigious institution, rather than to learn, are prone to take perceived shortcuts and proceed to come unstuck when their AI isn't there to do their work for them, such as in an exam.

New comment by steve_taylor in "It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12"

steve_taylor — Sat, 30 May 2026 09:14:46 +0000

> But there's one performance-related area where the Framework pulls ahead—a little—and that's sustained performance. When running a heavy workload like HPL (a FP64 HPC task, that taxes the CPU and RAM constantly for many minutes), the Framework's fans allow it to throttle less than the Neo.

People are seeing big gains in sustained performance on MacBook Neo with a simple thermal pad mod. The disadvantage is the underside of the Neo can get hot, but that's not an issue if it's sitting on a desk instead of your lap.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Does anybody like React?"

steve_taylor — Tue, 26 May 2026 02:33:09 +0000

I was all in on Svelte and SvelteKit until I started encountering CSS weirdness caused by a bug that the Svelte developers said is "by design", namely that components' CSS isn't removed from the document after the last instance of that component is no longer rendered. This resulted in a situation in which styles became dependent on the navigation path the user takes, leading to weird an unpredictable layout issues. I couldn't stomach solving this by using Tailwind.

Then Svelte 5 came along and made Svelte more like React. At first, there were just a few simple runes, but then the runes started proliferating like crazy to solve other runes' problems. At that point, Svelte was dead to me and I went back to React/Next.

The right path for Svelte to take would have been to continue to refine Svelte 4.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller"

steve_taylor — Sun, 17 May 2026 02:37:23 +0000

I love how I can see the HTML being streamed onto the page in real time, like the good old days of dialup when images gradually rendered from top-to-bottom.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Googlebook"

steve_taylor — Wed, 13 May 2026 11:44:25 +0000

It's for Google.

New comment by steve_taylor in "UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage (2025)"

steve_taylor — Tue, 12 May 2026 01:08:36 +0000

Perhaps, but I think that by the time we're that far advanced, strokes will be entirely preventable.

New comment by steve_taylor in "The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism"

steve_taylor — Sat, 09 May 2026 17:27:31 +0000

There's nothing stopping you from setting up your free (as in freedom) slice of cyberspace for you and your friends, for now.

Looking at all the new and proposed laws coming through, I don't think we'll have those basic freedoms all that much longer.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games"

steve_taylor — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 17:29:41 +0000

Taking a brief look at wizball.asm, it actually used 200 Hz interrupts on both PAL and NTSC. The timings are shown from line 39.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Soul Player C64 – A real transformer running on a 1 MHz Commodore 64"

steve_taylor — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 04:07:47 +0000

RAM can be increased to 16 MB and CPU speed to 48 GHz.

New comment by steve_taylor in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

steve_taylor — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 03:39:58 +0000

It's a stealth subscription product. People are losing those things all the time.

New comment by steve_taylor in "The 1987 game “The Last Ninja” was 40 kilobytes"

steve_taylor — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:21:26 +0000

The C64 does have a couple of bitmap modes. The Last Ninja uses mode 3, which is multicolor bitmap mode. It occupies 9000 bytes including pixels (8000 bytes) and color RAM (1000 bytes).

New comment by steve_taylor in "Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor"

steve_taylor — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:19:24 +0000

Only a few years ago, there was a study showing that regular caffeine use reduces blood flow to the brain by up to 30%, leading to lower brain volume and increased risk of dementia.