<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: stevesimmons</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stevesimmons</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:10:09 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=stevesimmons" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Record wind and solar saved UK from gas imports worth £1B in March 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's only true for spot pricing, right? Longer term supply contracts can embody more "strategic" criteria.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:15:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677572</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677572</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677572</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Has electricity decoupled from gas prices in Germany?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>... because you may have signed a longer term contract that might in turn guarantee offtake from you rather than the other farmer?<p>This marginal price is only for the spot market right? So the key question is more what % of the mix is spot vs longer term. And thus what the overall impact is on total blended price.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:13:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676645</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676645</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676645</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Standard for a UK layout keyboard. shift-3 is £</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:57:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676437</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676437</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676437</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "NHS staff refusing to use FDP over Palantir ethical concerns"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There have been recent articles in the FT about a man (who surname, funnily enough, sounds like swindle) who was an advisor to Palantir while also being chair of 4 NHS Trusts and pushing the trusts to put more of their data into Palantir.<p>Definitely not a conflict of interest...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:54:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625643</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625643</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625643</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Harold and George Destroy the World"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Surely it's a bit early to declare "astonishing success of ... destroying Iran's capability to wage future wars".<p>As far as I can see, the US has managed to replace an older Ayatollah Khomeini with a younger Ayatollah Khomeini with even more reasons to seek vengeance against the US and obtain nuclear weapons.<p>> If you're actually at war, winning should be objective not PR optics.<p>Which of course is why a former TV host is clearly the most qualified person to be Secretary of Defense, sorry War.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:38:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389059</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389059</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389059</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not majority of trips, it's by distance travelled.<p>Basically in the Netherlands, if you're within 5-10km, you go by bike. If public transport is reasonable, which it mostly is in urban areas, you take it. You'd almost never choose car within a major city, unless it's on the outskirts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:51:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47158462</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47158462</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47158462</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>- me, also in 2010, when a junior colleague ("what would he know?") spent his bonus on bitcoin.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Feb 2026 18:18:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47103216</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47103216</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47103216</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Hamming Distance for Hybrid Search in SQLite"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>USearch has a sqlite extension that supports various metrics on including Hamming distance on standard sqlite BLOB columns. It gets similar performance and is very convenient.<p>(There's also an indexed variant that does faster lookups, but it uses a special virtual table layout that constrains the types of the other columns in the table.)<p>See <a href="https://github.com/unum-cloud/USearch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/unum-cloud/USearch</a>. pip-installable for Python users.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:25:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049261</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049261</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049261</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How exactly does GDPR prevent you from complying with cybersecurity laws?<p>For instance, one of GDPR's 6 lawful bases for processing data is in order to comply with legal obligations.<p>If you're going to make strong claims like that, the onus really is on you to give specific examples.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:35:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836105</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836105</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836105</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Data is the only moat"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We totally found this doing financial document analysis. It's so quick to do an LLM-based "put this document into this schema" proof-of-concept.<p>Then you run it on 100,000 real documents.<p>And so you find there actually are so, so many exceptions and special cases. And so begins the journey of constructing layers of heuristics and codified special cases needed to turn ~80% raw accuracy to something asymptotically close to 100%.<p>That's the moat. At least where high accuracy is the key requirement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:17:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646069</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646069</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646069</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Only for those inputs that are compressible.<p>If a compressor can compress every input of length N bits into fewer than N bits, then at least 2 of the 2^N possible inputs have the same output. Thus there cannot exist a universal compressor.<p>Modify as desired for fractional bits. The essential argument is the same.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 21 Dec 2025 21:31:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46348719</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46348719</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46348719</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can also use the =LET(...) formula to define named variables:<p><pre><code>    =LET(
        filterCriteria, "Fred",
        filteredRange, FILTER(A2:D8,A2:A8=filterCriteria),
        IF(ISBLANK(filteredRange),"-", filteredRange)
    )
</code></pre>
There must be an odd number 2D + 1 of arguments. The first 2D are D name-expression pairs and the final one is the expression whose value is returned.<p>The end result - as you see - is quite readable.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:04:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346758</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346758</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346758</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Am I going mad or do some of those old.reddit comments slope downhill?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:13:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255603</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255603</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255603</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Credit report shows Meta keeping $27B off its books through advanced geometry"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The Outlook is Superficially Stable, defined here as “By outward appearances stable unless, you know, things happen. Then we’ll downgrade after the shit hits the fan.”</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:16:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079927</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079927</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079927</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Mixpanel Security Breach"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Really only if you ask for your data to be deleted too</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Nov 2025 18:12:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46071765</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46071765</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46071765</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why do you think the current government would be the slightest bit interested in solutions to housing, inflation or healthcare if Epstein wasn't an issue?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 22:47:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986369</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986369</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986369</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Gemini 3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A nice Easter egg in the Gemini 3 docs [1]:<p><pre><code>    If you are transferring a conversation trace from another model, ... to bypass strict validation in these specific scenarios, populate the field with this specific dummy string:

    "thoughtSignature": "context_engineering_is_the_way_to_go"
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3?thinking=high#migrating_from_other_models" rel="nofollow">https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3?thinking=high...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:40:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968602</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968602</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968602</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In contrast to Microsoft, who puts Copilot buttons everywhere and succeeds only in annoying their customers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 13:39:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45965746</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45965746</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45965746</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "Z3 API in Python: From Sudoku to N-Queens in Under 20 Lines (2015)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's worth noting these notes are 11 years old. The first give-away was the comment that in Python 3/2 is an integer, which is indeed true in Python 2 but not in Py3.<p>For modern users of Z3, you'd want to do `pip install z3-solver` rather than use `Z3Py` mentioned at the very bottom of this doc.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Nov 2025 23:06:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949276</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949276</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45949276</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevesimmons in "UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> gas sets the price in the merit order so we don’t want it on 24/7<p>I never quite understood the logic for this. Sure, if you overlay a simple upward sloping cost curve on a downward sloping demand-price curve, the market-clearing price is where they intersect, and that in practice much of the time is a gas generator.<p>But there must be a million other aspects that can affect what price <i>needs</i> to be paid to secure the capacity below that point. Surely only part of the total area under that market-clearing price needs to accrue to the generators?<p>And if generators are getting windfall profits, can't the market rules be adjusted so more of it can given to the consumers in the form of lower energy prices?<p>Can someone explain this? Maybe that is what actually happens, just it is too complex for the mass media.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Nov 2025 18:39:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947309</link><dc:creator>stevesimmons</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947309</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947309</guid></item></channel></rss>