Hacker News: steve_taylor

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.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Windows native app development is a mess"

steve_taylor — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:32:12 +0000

Lazarus is probably the easiest way to make a lean and fast native Windows app without paying for tooling.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower"

steve_taylor — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:02:03 +0000

I don't agree with this take in the article. One person with Claude Code can replace a team of devs. It resolves many issues, such as the tension between devs wanting to focus and devs wanting their peers to put aside their task to review their pull requests. Claude generates the code and the human reviews it. There's no delay in the back-and-forth unlike in a team of humans. There's no ego and there's no context switching fatigue. Given that code reviewing is a bottleneck, it's feasible that one person can do it by themselves. And Claude can certainly generate working code at least 10x faster than any dev.

New comment by steve_taylor in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

steve_taylor — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:01:53 +0000

The problem with that is that sites/apps will retain the identifier, either to use the Digital ID for login (not just one-time age verification), because they want to retain as much information as possible for later usage or sale, or because a government told them they have to retain it so all their social media activity can be easily linked to them.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use"

steve_taylor — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 14:50:13 +0000

Figma was a completely fresh take on UI design software and it was the best thing available at the time. It made incumbents look lazy.

Vecti looks like a Figma clone if its landing page is anything to go by. You're not going to have an easy time convincing people to migrate from Figma to a clone.

New comment by steve_taylor in "US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private"

steve_taylor — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 16:34:55 +0000

> My money is on the chats being end to end encrypted and separately uploaded to Facebook.

If governments of various countries have compelled Meta to provide a backdoor and also required non-disclosure (e.g. a TCN secretly issued to Meta under Australia's Assistance and Access Act), this is how I imagined they would do it. It technically doesn't break encryption as the receiving device receives the encrypted message.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids"

steve_taylor — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 06:54:54 +0000

When you're a low-tier video streaming company, you look for cost savings such as writing the same app as few times as you can get away with, so typically you end up with the same web app running on Tizen, webOS, VIDAA, PS4, PS5 and quite often Fire TV and even Xbox. Even Amazon's new Vega OS with its React Native way of building apps has a WebView escape hatch.

These TVs typically have really slow SOCs – certainly not fast enough to run a web app the way a typical dev write a web app these days.

New comment by steve_taylor in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

steve_taylor — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 23:31:28 +0000

Focus stealing has been an issue in windowed multi-tasking environments from the beginning. It's certainly been an issue in all macOS/OS X versions I've used since I started in 2011.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

steve_taylor — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:14:19 +0000

So instead of addressing their runners being extremely slow to the point that a reasonable person would think it's deliberate in order to extract more billable minutes, they're charging customers for using an alternative. Makes sense.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Gunmen kill 9 people at Sydney's Bondi Beach"

steve_taylor — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 13:10:02 +0000

It's the worst gun massacre since Australia's strict gun control laws came into effect in 1996 following the Port Arthur massacre.