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TrevorFSmith

372 karma · joined February 1, 2012

Eternal newbie.
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TrevorFSmith··on Show HN: PhreshOS – OS for Web Apps
How tightly is the system tied to React? Can it be run with no React at all?
TrevorFSmith··on Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked
Is it ethical to scrape when a site has explicitly blocked bots? I know a fair number of people who run small sites who are already considering closing them down because the bots are relentlessly hammering their sites and driving up hosting costs.
TrevorFSmith··on I Won't Buy You a Coffee
Blogging is cheap if the writer values neither their nor your time.

Blogging is also cheap only for writers who don't spend time and money to gain experience, validate information, and maintain relationships in order to writing interesting words.

Blogging only costs a few euro per year if we ignore the resources that go into servers, electricity, IT folks, laptops, and the luxury of time and safety to write.

TrevorFSmith··on Dogma 25 – Vow of Chastity (2025)
I maybe shouldn't judge their ideas about film by their choice of illegible background and text colors, but I do.
TrevorFSmith··on Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)
Definitely keep in mind that right or wrong, these hosts are unusual as far as most commercial services are concerned and it can reveal annoying edge cases in their software.
TrevorFSmith··on Permacomputing Principles
Every effort doesn't need to address every problem, I think. You're right that individual effort isn't sufficient and many of the permacomputing folks are also activists of varying sorts but I think it's ok to separate concerns as most people understand that there's no single and complete solution.
TrevorFSmith··on The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it
I think you're missing one of the major reasons people are against "AI": the jerks at the top. When obviously nefarious people are lining their pockets and not bothering to even pretend to care about the people around them, it's no surprise they're hated.
TrevorFSmith··on TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool
This is a vibe coded app and isn't what I'd want but still, it's interesting to consider what a good implementation of "Figma for TUIs" could be, especially if it avoids the trap of simply treating the console as a crude raster instead of taking advantage of text and keyboards. IMO we don't need WIMP GUI shoved into terminal emulators.
TrevorFSmith··on Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026
The correct title is "Don't host your own transactional business email, use a transactional email provider."

Hosting your own personal mail isn't for everyone but it's not impossible. It is, however, something you'll need to maintain so be ready to pick up a new hobby.

TrevorFSmith··on Vim-pencil: Rethinking Vim as a tool for writing
I saw this headline and excitedly clicked through expecting to find an attempt to make a modal drawing canvas made using lessons from and the ethos of vim. It isn't that. It's a vim plugin for writers. Which is fine, just not what I hoped for.
TrevorFSmith··on Oat – Ultra-lightweight, zero dependency, semantic HTML, CSS, JS UI library
If nothing else, it's refreshing to see nicely modern CSS and JS formatted and laid out in a legible manner. https://github.com/knadh/oat/tree/master/src
TrevorFSmith··on All my new code will be closed-source from now on
The essence of free software is and always has been charity. Some people attempt to interface with capitalism via "open source" but that game is rigged to make previous winners continue to win so you missed the boat. It's a mistake to link coding to how you get food, shelter, safety, etc. Do it for fun or not at all.
TrevorFSmith··on The year of the 3D printed miniature and other lies we tell ourselves
I 3D print items that aren't mass produced, either because I'm one of few people who wants them so there's no market or I'm the only person who wants them because they're customized for me. Most reasonable 3D printer users don't believe they'll replace mass production. They use them for parts you can't buy.
TrevorFSmith··on The entire New Yorker archive is now digitized
I am a subscriber but still would love a tarball of PDFs of each issue.
TrevorFSmith··on Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
If AI feature are on by default then no thanks!

This is how to burn what little trust remains: "AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off."

It has to be opt-in or you're not worthy of trust.

TrevorFSmith··on Ford kills the All-Electric F-150
It's a shame they didn't ship an EV that fit the uses the F-150 serves. The Lightening is a luxury item. The F-150 is a tool, regardless of whether it's ICE or EV. I hope this puts more people in the market for the Slate truck. It won't serve everyone with an ICE F-150 but I suspect a bunch of farm and ranch vehicles that don't do many highway miles could be Slates.
TrevorFSmith··on Orion 1.0
I'm a happy Kagi subscriber and look forward to Orion on Linux. Every well supported browser other than Chrome is a win. I'd love Kagi to fund people working full time on web standards in the W3C and WHATNG, too.
TrevorFSmith··on Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay
A similar result can be found by reading coverage of events you witnessed or topics you know well.
TrevorFSmith··on Show HN: Glide, an extensible, keyboard-focused web browser
That's a sweet idea and I'm glad to see your comment about maintaining it as a patch on top of Firefox sources so you can roll in their security fixes.
TrevorFSmith··on Samsung confirms its smart fridges will start showing you ads
This reminds me of gas station pumps that play ads on sub-par displays and tiny crackly speakers. I'm already paying for gas and now you think you can force crap ads on me? If an ad starts I immediately stop pumping and go to a different gas station. The fridges in people's homes. Expensive fridges! That's a hard pass.
TrevorFSmith··on A cryptography expert on how Web3 started, and how it’s going
I would really love for new projects to find their own name instead of calling themselves the next version of something they don't like. "Web3" has never been a new version of the web, just a way to inject undeserved clout into a (IMHO fundamentally flawed) experiment. There are so many great unused names! Please pick one.
TrevorFSmith··on I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again
I don't know why people gave you that advice but it's pretty easy to tell when a designer hasn't spent enough (or any!) time defining their target market and then spending time with those people to listen instead of force fitting a technology. Without that up front work we're all just rolling the dice. That said, building stuff is fun by itself so it doesn't always need to be about money and growth. Just know it's a hobby.
TrevorFSmith··on Subreply – An open source text-only social network
I would love for everyone designing a new social app to start by deciding how to handle the issues every social app will have. Abuse, hate speech, brigading, etc. We've known about these for decades. They can't be ignored. I'm not dictating how they should be handled (variety is great!) but decisions should be made and declared up front before the first spec or line of code. Otherwise the app is DOA IMHO.
TrevorFSmith··on Shutting Down Clear Linux OS
A good start would be to distrust anything made by a VC funded start-up or a once-great tech co. If you do want to use something they made, create a hard fork and pretend they already ditched the project as they inevitably will.
TrevorFSmith··on The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs
So, we want incredibly profitable companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple to take their software development costs and subtract that from their tax bill? These are the same companies that file patents so nobody else can use the ideas that they developed at the expense of public services. How about making it a tax break only for small and medium sized companies?
TrevorFSmith··on I just got an ad in VS Code
I see folks suggesting emacs and others saying that they must use VSCode (or forks) because of the ecosystem of plugins. Folks, we made this mistake with Eclipse and many other IDEs. The root problem is binding the build and instrumentation tools to the editor. Here's how to solve the problem once and for all: Use a programmer's editor that's great at manipulating text and run all tools on the command line. Never mix them. All else is folly.
TrevorFSmith··on How Google Is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers – and Why
Kagi downranks sites with many ads and also with many tracking scripts. It's not perfect but it is, in my experience, a better search service.
TrevorFSmith··on It's probably time to rethink "Building in public"
The term is "build in public" not "talk about money in public". If you enjoy chatting about the esoteric details of building a useful thing then great. If you're mostly trying to attract customers and you don't enjoy it, then don't do it.
TrevorFSmith··on Ask HN: Did you regret staying at a job for too long?
I regret that I was born before jobs (the "work or starve" kind we have now) are made obsolete, so in that way I regret keeping every job for any length of time.
TrevorFSmith··on Linux: We need tiling desktop environments
Fedora has a Sway spin that installs all of the usual applets like volume and network config. Sway can also be installed on any Fedora machine with one dnf command. I just don't have the problems described in the article.
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