Hacker News: stevesimmons

New comment by stevesimmons in "Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use"

stevesimmons — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:34:20 +0000

... 20 years of not remembering that I only ever want to see distances in km

New comment by stevesimmons in "Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts"

stevesimmons — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:30:04 +0000

Which is why NTSC was often said to mean Never Twice the Same Color!

New comment by stevesimmons in "Microsoft open-sources "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date""

stevesimmons — Sun, 24 May 2026 07:03:23 +0000

And mine is a Commodore Vic-20 circa 1981, with 3583 bytes of free RAM. Programmed in 6502 assembler. Can't get much closer to the CPU than that.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines"

stevesimmons — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:11:46 +0000

What would your alternative look like?

New comment by stevesimmons in "Archaeologists find Egyptian mummy buried with the 'Iliad'"

stevesimmons — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:44:37 +0000

There's a great article on the Ptolemaic dynasty in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. Tons of fascinating detail.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/robert-cioffi/pharao...

For instance, the Library of Alexandria had up to 500,000 scrolls (which of course were all handwritten). And it was partly stocked by confiscating all the books from any ship that happened to dock in the nearby port.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure"

stevesimmons — Sat, 16 May 2026 22:40:11 +0000

I'd never heard of it either. A comment further down suggests it is Japanese.

Digging deeper, the kyu -- or Q for quarter millimeter -- is apparently a foundational distance measurement in Japanese typesetting, which is metric and operates on a millimeter grid.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site"

stevesimmons — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:22:18 +0000

  - KeePass files synced between laptop and phone on OneDrive, DropBox, etc
  - KeePassXC on Windows and Mac
  - Keepass2Android mobile client
  - Browser integration on mobile. 
  - On laptop, I prefer no browser integration; Copy username and password with Ctrl+B and Ctrl+C

New comment by stevesimmons in "UK sovereign LLM inference"

stevesimmons — Fri, 15 May 2026 10:37:38 +0000

It is if your country isn't in the US and (a) GDPR requires data residency in UK/EU; (b) you're concerned about capricious actions by the US govt cutting off access to US-controlled services (cloud, payments systems, etc).

New comment by stevesimmons in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

stevesimmons — Fri, 15 May 2026 09:55:38 +0000

There was an article in the FT back in March [1] with the headline "NHS official pushed to add patient data to Palantir platform while also advising company".

Amusingly, the person concerned has the surname "Swindells"...

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6c548670-0f3e-45f1-ba08-8bb6dd152...

New comment by stevesimmons in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

stevesimmons — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:22:09 +0000

As opposed to premature deaths from fossil fuel emissions, deaths of rooftop solar installers (surprisingly common), wars in the Middle East involving oil interests, drowning and environmental damage from dam failures, etc, etc.

New comment by stevesimmons in "8087 Emulation on 8086 Systems"

stevesimmons — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:31:33 +0000

Also, need to bear in mind that 25-30 years ago, laptops were 10x more expensive than today.

For my postdoc in 1995, my industry sponsor bought me a then top-of-the range Dell Latitude XP with 100MHz 80486, integrated 80487 coprocessor and 32MB RAM for radar signal processing research.

In Australia at the time, it cost A$10,000, as much as my car.

Even the 24MB RAM upgrade from 8 to 32MB cost USD1,200 ($2,500) in today's money. Which puts current complaints about the soaring cost of RAM into perspective!

New comment by stevesimmons in "Record wind and solar saved UK from gas imports worth £1B in March 2026"

stevesimmons — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:15:12 +0000

That's only true for spot pricing, right? Longer term supply contracts can embody more "strategic" criteria.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Has electricity decoupled from gas prices in Germany?"

stevesimmons — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:13:16 +0000

... because you may have signed a longer term contract that might in turn guarantee offtake from you rather than the other farmer?

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.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

stevesimmons — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:57:41 +0000

Standard for a UK layout keyboard. shift-3 is £

New comment by stevesimmons in "NHS staff refusing to use FDP over Palantir ethical concerns"

stevesimmons — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:54:13 +0000

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.

Definitely not a conflict of interest...

New comment by stevesimmons in "Harold and George Destroy the World"

stevesimmons — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:38:37 +0000

Surely it's a bit early to declare "astonishing success of ... destroying Iran's capability to wage future wars".

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.

> If you're actually at war, winning should be objective not PR optics.

Which of course is why a former TV host is clearly the most qualified person to be Secretary of Defense, sorry War.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

stevesimmons — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:51:05 +0000

That's not majority of trips, it's by distance travelled.

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.

New comment by stevesimmons in "CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)"

stevesimmons — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 18:18:05 +0000

- me, also in 2010, when a junior colleague ("what would he know?") spent his bonus on bitcoin.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Hamming Distance for Hybrid Search in SQLite"

stevesimmons — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:25:45 +0000

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.

(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.)

See https://github.com/unum-cloud/USearch. pip-installable for Python users.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

stevesimmons — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:35:47 +0000

How exactly does GDPR prevent you from complying with cybersecurity laws?

For instance, one of GDPR's 6 lawful bases for processing data is in order to comply with legal obligations.

If you're going to make strong claims like that, the onus really is on you to give specific examples.