Hacker News: wxw

New comment by wxw in "StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site"

wxw — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:42:55 +0000

I wasn’t aware there was a beta. For those familiar, what were its issues?

New comment by wxw in "A brief history of instant coffee"

wxw — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:44:28 +0000

> In 1832, President Andrew Jackson had replaced soldiers’ daily spirit rations with coffee beans and sugar. This created a heavy logistical burden for the army, with a 20-day supply for 100,000 troops weighing 250 tons, all needing transport by horse-drawn wagon. Roasting, grinding, and brewing coffee in the field was also time-consuming for soldiers.

respect to the third wave coffee connossieurs of the 19th century

New comment by wxw in "AI for American-produced cement and concrete"

wxw — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:40:45 +0000

Awesome. People take concrete for granted. Even at small scales (e.g. your patio) with formulas provided on the cement bag, concrete can go wrong (crazing, scaling, cracks). There's a lot of unappreciated craft in the work, not only in the composition and mixing, which is what this research seems dedicated to, but also in the placing, leveling, curing, finishing.

New comment by wxw in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

wxw — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:20:20 +0000

> Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.

> We don’t own Your Content, but we may use Your Content to operate Copilot and improve it. By using Copilot, you grant us permission to use Your Content, which means we can copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, edit, translate, and reformat it, and we can give those same rights to others who work on our behalf.

lol

New comment by wxw in "Firefox Adds Tab Notes"

wxw — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:00:15 +0000

Nice to see Firefox experimenting with browser features, even small stuff. I don’t think this solves the user problem they mention though.

> This work is inspired by user research that we conducted last year, which explored how people resume tasks after interruptions. One key insight we learned is that when we are interrupted, even a small reminder or message can significantly improve our ability to resume a task

Interruptions are unplanned for. Don’t think I’d be preemptively leaving notes on my tabs to defend against interrupts. Especially since tabs are an ephemeral interface. Much more likely that useful notes go into an actual knowledge base (i.e. the other note tools mentioned).

For a browser tab, I’d prefer to have automated lineage/metadata (e.g. I opened this at X time, branching off Y page, etc) that I can use to deduce where I’d left off.

New comment by wxw in "Introducing DoorDash Tasks"

wxw — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:50:36 +0000

Neat product expansion. Isn’t this what store employees are already doing though? Maybe it’s more for building datasets.

New comment by wxw in "Streaks"

wxw — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:47:33 +0000

Agreed. Simple things also tend to compound.

New comment by wxw in "Developer's Guide to AI Agent Protocols"

wxw — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 04:15:42 +0000

Interesting, besides MCP how well adopted are any of these protocols?

New comment by wxw in "Bored Founder"

wxw — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:38:53 +0000

Why do personal things feel like a waste of time?

New comment by wxw in "OpenAI Plans Launch of Desktop 'Superapp'"

wxw — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:37:17 +0000

Don’t think this article should frame consolidation as a failure of the individual bets.

The reality is likely that shipping these separately was (1) faster given org structure at the time and (2) made sense in the environment (e.g. if Perplexity launches a browser and that turns out to be what users want, we should have one too). Better to iterate and move on then try crystal balling perfect projects.

New comment by wxw in "The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it"

wxw — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:00:41 +0000

Strongly agree. Personal software is also personal responsibility. It’s fun to dream up features, much less fun to be responsible for their implementation and maintenance.

New comment by wxw in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

wxw — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:56:24 +0000

I grew up on Windows, switched to Mac (college and beyond), and over time, have come to hate Windows. It feels like it doesn’t have a user’s best interest in mind. I’m just there to have Copilot or XYZ service shoved down my throat. I’m not sure Mac is actually any less sinister but at least it feels less so.

Smoother Signatures (2012)

wxw — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:24:23 +0000

Article URL: https://developer.squareup.com/blog/smoother-signatures/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47421574

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Build More Slop

wxw — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:00:58 +0000

Article URL: https://iamwillwang.com/notes/build-more-slop/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357848

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by wxw in "Fixing retail with land value capture"

wxw — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 03:57:51 +0000

> The Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway buys up the land around new station sites before they start building them. This rail-plus-property model makes them one of the few profitable transit services in the world.

I really enjoyed this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_roPoXi8QI describing more in detail how they did this. It has as much to do with historical circumstance as it does with good decision-making. The MTR is an impressive organization. MTA in NY seems to be taking a few cues, prioritizing in-house expertise.

New comment by wxw in "GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark"

wxw — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:50:46 +0000

Great stuff. People are getting used to agents as the interface for everything, even work as simple as "change label X to label Y". More speed on that front is welcome. The Codex "blended mode" they refer to will be useful (similar to Claude Code bouncing between haiku and opus).

I imagine it's a win-win. This could significantly help their tokenomics.

The example showing a plan being generated instantaneously is interesting. Human understanding will end up as the last, true bottleneck.