Hacker News: willlma

New comment by willlma in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

willlma — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:13:37 +0000

Yes, people who live in the countryside need cars. But just because that's the case doesn't mean that the auto industry has nothing to do with the development of transit and cycling infrastructure in cities. I too am from Switzerland, but I lived near a train station (I now live in the US). When I'm there, I would much rather take the train than the car for most trips. It was an eight-minute walk to the station and the train is usually faster or the same duration as driving and I don't need to drive (which sucks; I'd rather read a book or look out the window than stare at the car in front of me). In the past, I owned an Urban arrow bakfiets which would fit my child and wife and me all at the same time with our groceries.

So yeah, you live in the countryside; you're in the minority, but you're trying to make global claims about the car industry based on your experience. For most humans, getting in the car involves bumper to bumper traffic to get somewhere, then 10-30 minutes of searching for a parking spot, and not having the infrastructure to make that a choice rather than a requirement in densely populated places is unacceptable.

And it's well documented in the US that the oil industry knee-capped public transit and train systems.

New comment by willlma in "My journey to the microwave alternate timeline"

willlma — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:15:07 +0000

Surprised to see no mention of the Anyday: https://cookanyday.com/

I'm partially living in this alternative timeline as an accomplished microwave chef thanks to this thing. I mostly use it to steam veggies.

Didn't think the Maillard reaction was possible in the microwave (and that's what I miss the most). The tin-oxide pans are fascinating, though pre-heating them doesn't seem terribly convenient now that we have induction stove-tops.

Also, the number of paper towels used...

New comment by willlma in "Mistral 3 family of models released"

willlma — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 05:13:17 +0000

It's interesting. I've been tinkering with an article summarizing/highlighting browser extension, and realized that I don't want the end-user to have read AI-generated content because it's not as high-quality as I'd hoped. But on the flip side, I'm loving having the AI write most of the code for me.

New comment by willlma in "The pivot"

willlma — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 17:50:16 +0000

You only have to change every car, truck, tractor, water heater, clothes dryer, lawn mower, leaf blower, stove top, etc to be electric instead of using natural gas (ie electrfy everything), which likely requires all the changes that the parent mentioned. Also, not everyone has enough land to install enough PV to power their entire homes + transportation, so a lot of this is going to have to come from the grid, which requires changes in transmission which are being actively blocked by the current administration (see Grain Belt Express).

New comment by willlma in "Indefinite Backpack Travel"

willlma — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 05:36:25 +0000

And throw it all away before you fly home? That's like saying "Why wash dishes when you can just throw them away and buy new ones"?

As an aside, you should absolutely wash your clothes after buying them before wearing them. They're covered in chemicals that aren't great for your skin. I usually pack a week's worth of clothes and do laundry once a week while traveling. Doing laundry more often is a drag.

New comment by willlma in "Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run – Now Open Source"

willlma — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:55:14 +0000

Hey, thanks for building this. I'm trying to use it for this usecase. I'm trying to pause the script during the manual steps. How would you go about this? Example: 1. Change working directory block 2. Interactive terminal 3. Manual Step 4. Interactive terminal 5. Manual step

If I press run at the top, then it doesn't stop for me to do 3 before executing 4. Should I run each step individually for this usecase? Will changing the directory in step 1 apply to steps 2 and 4 if I don't hit run at the top?

New comment by willlma in "Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line"

willlma — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 16:47:06 +0000

This is not recycling. Recycling implies that you can produce the same product again many times; it's a sustainable practice. This is repurposing or upcycling. It's cool they're getting a second life, but they won't get a 3rd, 4th, Nth life unless the batteries are actually recycled into their component materials at end-of-life. It's kind of like the plastic brick companies: cool that plastic is being turned into a construction material, but it doesn't mean we can stop mining for the primary source material any time soon.

New comment by willlma in "I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file"

willlma — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 03:52:55 +0000

How do you check your todo list on mobile?

New comment by willlma in "Uv: Running a script with dependencies"

willlma — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 18:56:34 +0000

I'm not a Python dev, but had to write a script the other day and got all cought up with the virtual env stuff. Why can't `uv` just infer the dependencies from the `import ...` line? Why declare the dependencies twice?

New comment by willlma in "Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly a century"

willlma — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 17:06:36 +0000

I had the same thought with a recent NewScientist article. Signed up, read it, and tried to cancel to avoid the recurring fee. There's no click to cancel; I had to submit a form + request and repeatedly check my email to see if my request had been honored. I'm still waiting for the perfect pay-per-article platform to show up.

New comment by willlma in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

willlma — Tue, 27 May 2025 16:55:14 +0000

As someone who has built a timer-based procrastination browser extension, I'd like to add that it would be a nice touch if you could stop playback between videos (or maybe between chapters on long videos) rather than cut people off right as the timer goes off. It's a bit jarring to be in the middle of something you're enjoying and for the screen to go blank.

New comment by willlma in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"

willlma — Tue, 27 May 2025 16:37:53 +0000

This isn't entirely on-topic but I've been trying to understand why AI video editing isn't more common, and thought you might know. I've had an idea for a while to make tennis match highlight videos that show every single point of the match. Tennis has a lot of downtime between points (and even more between games and sets). I just want to tell an LLM: here's a two-hour long video of a tennis match. Strip out all the gaps between points. I'm guessing this would a very expensive frame by frame analysis of the video right now and that's why it's not done. Is that right or are there other reasons?

New comment by willlma in "Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)"

willlma — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 20:02:19 +0000

Yep, it's cold outside. So there's a CO2, energy, comfort (choose two) tradeoff.

New comment by willlma in "Detroit killed the sedan. Trump's trade war will make them wish they hadn't"

willlma — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:25:44 +0000

Confusingly, he reused the first part of the title from an article posted here [0] last year. This is newer.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40345090

Detroit killed the sedan. Trump's trade war will make them wish they hadn't

willlma — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:22:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.fastcompany.com/91296810/detroit-killed-the-sedan-trumps-trade-war-will-make-them-wish-they-hadnt

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43430176

Points: 6

# Comments: 3

New comment by willlma in "Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]"

willlma — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 21:54:11 +0000

I'm so glad that buried deep in the HN commments in an individual who cares about the environment. In the other conversations I've seen about this no one mentions or thinks about fuel consumption. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills sometimes. It's like "Yay! We figured out another way to accelerate the disastrous consequences of climate change. Go us!"

New comment by willlma in "Goodbye, Slopify"

willlma — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 21:40:35 +0000

Since people are reminiscing on the loss of their favorite music services from the past, I'd like to add We Are Hunted [1] to the list.

> proprietary search technology which continuously scanned the Internet to identify the hottest new music in the world.

For a short period is was the best way to discover new unknown music. It was bought by Twitter, folded into Twitter music (even though they never created a comparable feature) and killed along with it.

If anyone knows anything like this that exists today, please let me know.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted

New comment by willlma in "OpenERV"

willlma — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 02:13:24 +0000

I guess increasing atmospheric CO² by maximizing your fossil fuel usage is one way to equalize the interior and exterior CO² of your house...

New comment by willlma in "Entering text in the terminal is complicated"

willlma — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 13:23:02 +0000

I switched my Mac terminal to Warp.dev simply for the default mac text input. I can ⌥ and ⌘ left and right to select words or until the end of the line ⌘A to select all. It comes with so many other bells and whistles that I've mostly ignored for this simple convenience. I don't use emacs (or vim) keybindings in any other context and I'm not sure why the terminal forces you to.

New comment by willlma in "Show HN: A free minimalist daily habit tracker"

willlma — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 12:13:02 +0000

Is the assumption that you do these things once a day? Any way to edit the frequency? I'd like to do things every other day, once a week, once a month, etc.