Hacker News: steve_taylor

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.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

steve_taylor — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:38:04 +0000

The real news is that age verification will be required to use a search engine from the 27th. This has flown completely under the radar because of the social media ban.

Initially, it will only be required if you're logged in. Obviously that won't be effective, so the next logical step would be to require that everyone logs in to use a search engine.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-11/age-verification-sear...

New comment by steve_taylor in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

steve_taylor — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:35:49 +0000

It doesn't have to be that effective. The point was to get the law passed. Now that it's in effect, there will be iterative steps to make it effective. I think it will eventually lead to all social media users in Australia having to authenticate with their Digital ID, which will be made available to private sector integrators in the 2nd half of 2026.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

steve_taylor — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:31:40 +0000

Digital ID is optional by default. Service providers that integrate with the Digital ID can apply for an exemption to make it mandatory. Given the mandatory nature of age verification checks for social media, the fact that social media is typically free to use and ad-supported and the cost of age verification would be prohibitive for smaller apps without significant VC backing, an argument for exemption could be made on the basis that their legal obligation can't otherwise be fulfilled without a prohibitive upfront cost.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

steve_taylor — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 23:28:04 +0000

There has only been one accredited Digital ID that sort of isn't government and that's Australia Post's Digital ID which they're now winding down in favour of the government's. While the Digital ID act does allow for these third-party accredited providers, I think we can realistically expect that the only one that will be in use will be the federal government's.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

steve_taylor — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:28:17 +0000

The most accurate part about this is that HN still hasn't implemented dark mode.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Datacenters in space aren't going to work"

steve_taylor — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 15:03:37 +0000

Regardless of how terrible an idea it is, I wouldn't mind some billionaires funding R&D that advances the state of the art in thermal management in space.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth"

steve_taylor — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 23:25:48 +0000

If we don't wipe ourselves out in the next 1000 years, I think we'll launch manned missions to other star systems that make it to their destination hundreds and even thousands of years into the future, with their original crew still alive.

New comment by steve_taylor in "We Induced Smells With Ultrasound"

steve_taylor — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 06:43:41 +0000

She should be careful what she wishes for.

New comment by steve_taylor in "Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet"

steve_taylor — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 12:50:09 +0000

Part of a Digital ID is an identity provider that implements protocols such as OAuth 2 and OIDC. Once this is in place, the government that owns the Digital ID system can mandate that platforms such as social networks, search engines, email providers, etc. link the users in its jurisdiction to its Digital ID via OAuth/OIDC. As this isn't as onerous as reviewing identity documents, governments can make this a requirement for a large range of platforms, even quite small ones.

Yes, I realise governments already have some powers to view private data, but they have to do a lot of legwork to link data to specific people. They'll always get false positives, false negatives, duplicates, etc. And they'll miss a number of platforms that have data on the person of interest. Digital ID combined with a mandatory identity platform and data retention requirements will make law enforcement far more efficient and give governments unprecedented power over what we see, hear and say online. The government will have a complete list of all the platforms on which you authenticated with their Digital ID.

We're already sleepwalking into this. In Australia, we have the under-16 social media ban taking effect next month. We're also in the process of rolling out our Digital ID, which has an OAuth/OIDC-based identity system. Numerous government departments have already integrated with it. It opens up to private sector integrations in December 2026, just in time for all involved in the under-16 social media ban to realise it's not working effectively and for Digital ID to save the day. The law states that Digital ID is a voluntary means of identification and other methods should always be offered, but the UX of OAuth 2 vs. uploading photos of your ID documents and a selfie, and waiting for it to be reviewed, will make Digital ID the de facto standard for Australians proving their age and, in the process, permanently linking their Digital ID Identifier to all their social media accounts. That includes "anonymous" ones like Reddit. And integrators can apply for an exemption to Digital ID being voluntary on their platform, making the case that the per-user cost of complying with the law without Digital ID is prohibitively expensive.

Once Australia rolls this out to social networks, it will keep expanding until virtually everything is captured.