Hacker News: stevesimmons

New comment by stevesimmons in "U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative"

stevesimmons — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:32:58 +0000

> The right to bear arms is critical... The governmental structure of the US is so good...

Not sure many outside the US would agree with these statements.

> People should own a gun for self defense and a car to get where they need to go.

Nor these.

Never felt the need to own a gun. I don't know anyone who does. Haven't owned a car for 17 years. I get along fine.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding"

stevesimmons — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:56:43 +0000

This Red Blob Games blog post would be accessible to a wider group of readers if it spent just a few sentences up front on motivation and terminology.

If you don't already know exactly what the heuristic function is and that L is something called a landmark marker, and anyway what is a landmark marker anyway, you need to read quite a long way through the blog post to make sense of it.

And when you do finally get to that point, you realise it is all very simple, so why not just say that at the start?

New comment by stevesimmons in "New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S."

stevesimmons — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 11:54:33 +0000

Speaking as a European, current foreign policy is not "reducing trust in America as a reliable and stable partner". It has already reduced trust to rock bottom.

It's hard to see how much worse it could get, short of outright invasion or allying with Russia.

Just this week, amongst other news:

* America's useless adventures in Iran have used up so many Patriot missiles there aren't any left to defend Kyiv against Russian missiles, while Iran is still firmly in control of the Straits of Hormuz.

* Meddling in Greenland went up a notch with landing equipment to start oil drilling.

* State Department funding MAGA-oriented "free speech" disinformation campaigns in the UK.

* The revival of Trump's tariffs under the hypocritical guise of guarding against slave labour. Especially when the US prison system is such a large domestic source of slave labour.

Zero trust left here. Zero desire to visit the US ever again.

New comment by stevesimmons in "My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”"

stevesimmons — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:26:47 +0000

why do you want your watch to manage a grocery list? seriously

New comment by stevesimmons in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

stevesimmons — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:54:26 +0000

Lots of fossil fuel infrastructure was built in formerly nice places that now you'd never go to voluntarily...

New comment by stevesimmons in "Denmark: EVs Make Up 97% of New Private Car Sales in July"

stevesimmons — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 07:44:24 +0000

Maybe that's a fair price for the externalities of fossil fuels.

New comment by stevesimmons in "How the words we teach English language learners changed"

stevesimmons — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:26:20 +0000

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

New comment by stevesimmons in "BYD Launches the Denza Z9 GT EV in Europe and the UK at over 3X the Price"

stevesimmons — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:59:09 +0000

"3x the price" means 3x the Chinese price.

Crucial missing context from the truncated headline!

New comment by stevesimmons in "FreeInk: Open ecosystem for e-readers"

stevesimmons — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:20:29 +0000

By the way, I'm in the UK. I bought it on eBay UK from a guy named "Reliable Trove" who imports them and reflashes them with CrossPoint.

I know it's not hard to do, but I needed it to work first time before my summer holiday, couldn't wait for a Chinese import, and had no spare time to mess around with putting new firmware on it.

New comment by stevesimmons in "FreeInk: Open ecosystem for e-readers"

stevesimmons — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:13:48 +0000

I got an Xteink X4 a month ago. It's perfect: none of the distractions of a phone, battery life measured in weeks, small enough to carry everywhere, cheap enough that I don't worry about anything happening to it.

So far I have only read one book on it. But that is Tolstoy's "War and Peace" (361 chapters, 1300 pages in paper editions), which I'd never managed to read more than a few tens of pages of before.

Which is pretty solid proof of how nice the X4 is.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Launch HN: Parsewise (YC P25) – Reason Across Documents with an API"

stevesimmons — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:36:37 +0000

"retaining lineage"

New comment by stevesimmons in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

stevesimmons — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 05:48:47 +0000

I'm not sure that follows. I stopped making open source contributions when I switched from mature companies to startups.

Now all my "non-work" time is spent on startup work. And none of that is visible via GitHub.

New comment by stevesimmons in "Challenging the Narrative of European Decline"

stevesimmons — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:29:31 +0000

I don't buy into this critique at all... I live in two cities in Europe. I like our size of houses. I like not needing to own a car. I like that in both of the cities I live in there are 8 supermarkets within ten minutes walk. I like that I never have to think about healthcare costs. I've never felt the need for air conditioning. And when I see Americans' lives, they seem full of crappy stuff that I have no need for, food that's positively unhealthy. Not to mention guns, etc, etc.

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