Hacker News Reader

pjobon Color Comparison Between E Ink's Spectra 6 and ChLCD

I think it depends on the use case. My understanding is the more popular panels for color ereaders releasing now are the E Ink Kaleido (3) due to their faster refresh rates. Other technologies like spectra 6 may be better for digital signage where the slower refresh rate is less of a concern.

pjobon America’s semiconductor boom [video]

https://www.wsj.com/tech/intels-chips-act-requirements-waive...

https://archive.is/nhLyB

pjobon Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash, then a hacker found it

That might not be a good bet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45063380

pjobon Rendering a game in real time with AI

I suspect you'll have much better luck directly implementing the style you want rather than trying to get a (current gen) AI to reliably generate ANSI art. This video is a nice overview of implementing a variation of the style in a post-processing shader:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg40RWiaHRY

pjobon A vibe-coding tool for serious developers

FYI, the layout for the navigation component is broken on many smaller screen sizes. It's a small issue that I wouldn't mention normally, but it does undercut your messaging about the "future of software development" and "serious developers" when the first element on the page doesn't render properly.

pjobon How we enforce .NET coding standards to improve productivity

You could check out FAKE. It’s pretty popular in the F# community. While not C#, the terser syntax may be beneficial for a build DSL and you still have access to .NET APIs.

https://fake.build/

pjobon Watching o3 model sweat over a Paul Morphy mate-in-2

I came away much less impressed than you did. The "step by step analysis" consists mostly of it considering, ruling out, and reconsidering an obviously invalid move. The code that it "tries to write" first zooms and pans around the image for no reason as it's already identified the layout of the pieces in the initial analysis. It then tries to import a library it has not yet installed in the sandbox (in addition to importing `chess.polyglot` for no discernable reason) before giving up on that thread entirely. It then manages to write a one-liner that contains an IndentationError before spending more time/tokens reestablishing the board layout. It does all of this before finally delegating the question to a search engine.

If you just paste the image into a search engine (without needing to include the text prompt) the first result contains the solution. We live in a world where Sam Altman claims that usage of words like "please" and "thank you" in prompts have cost OpenAI "tens of millions of dollars"[0]. In this case, OpenAI's "most powerful reasoning model"[1] spends 7m 51s churning through expensive output tokens spinning its wheels before ultimately giving up and searching the internet. This strikes me as incredibly wasteful. It feels like the LLM equivalent of "punch[ing] through the table". The most impressive thing to me here is that OpenAI is getting people to pay for all this nonsense.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/04/22/please-thank-...

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/compare

pjobon Things I learned about software and startups by playing video games

Somewhat interestingly, "Mario Bros." now refers to the last name of the pair of plumber brothers, making their full names "Mario Mario" and "Luigi Mario" respectively. This wasn't originally the intent of the creators, but it's been slowly retconned over the history of the franchise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario#Name

https://www.denofgeek.com/games/super-mario-bros-luigi-last-...

pjobon KiCad 9.0 Released

This is a good summary. SolidWorks does have a lower cost license for makers/hobbyists for personal use but it’s a little difficult to find from their main marketing pages.

https://www.solidworks.com/solution/solidworks-makers

pjobon The Bering Land Bridge was more like a swamp

Polynesian use of outrigger canoes is well documented. Are you claiming all outriggers are catamarans? Why be pedantic about this?

pjobon Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg [pdf]

I was curious about your defense of Matt's behavior in this thread but your empathy makes sense given that you work on a similar project that you describe as:

> A static site that is 100% free and open-source, competing with several businesses operating scammy subscription models.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30295629

Is this a competitor to Wordpress? Can you elaborate more about how the competition in this space uses scammy subscription models? It might help to illustrate the issues in the industry for outsiders like me.

Off topic, but I'm a bit of an amateur musician myself. I try to check out other musicians that I encounter, but I wasn't able to find anything about you or your music online. Do you have a bandcamp or something similar? The contrabass trombone is a really interesting instrument.

pjobon Show HN: Sonatino – small audio dev board based on ESP32-S3

Please stop posting low effort LLM summaries of HN text posts. It doesn’t add anything to the discussion and is literally spam.

pjobon Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Odd to see that in a press release like this. Perhaps they were going for “crack team”. Cracked makes it sound like they’re looking for twitch streamers.

pjobon Sotomayor writes 9-0 opinion supporting NRA in First Amendment case [pdf]

This is a recurring theme on the 5-4 podcast. You may want to reference their episode list as a starting point for relevant cases to research.

pjobon Introducing Copilot+ PCs

One team I was on had a bug where the product name was so long that it was being truncated in the about dialog. It was something like:

Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 2011 for Microsoft® Office Outlook® with Offline Access

pjobon No, You Aren’t Going to Get Rich by Options Trading

The idea is that you have a specific entry price in mind and are waiting until it drops to that point. While you wait, you can collect a premium from selling the option. Let's say that based on your assumptions you think stock X would need to drop to $6 for you to make a good enough risk-adjusted return, but it's currently trading at $7. While you're waiting for the price to drop you could sell a Put (generally a cash-secured put) to collect a premium. If the stock price drops below $6 within the duration of your option, you'll get assigned the stock at the price you wanted ($6), but if it stays above this price the option expires worthless and you keep the premium.

There's too much detail to cover in a short comment, but the main risks with a strategy like this is that the price drops well below your strike price and you're forced to buy the stock at higher price than the current market value. For cash-secured puts, you'll also need enough cash in your account to cover the purchase of the stock at your strike price. That said, depending on your mindset and goals, this can be a way to generate income while waiting for the right price.

The opposite side of this also applies for exiting positions. You can sell calls on a stock you own (covered calls) to collect a premium while you wait for the price to reach your chosen strike price. The risk being the potential that the price blows past your strike price, your shares get called away, and you don't get to profit from the extra gains above the strike.

pjobon HP Dev One Laptop with Pop_OS

I don't think you should use Apple to put upgrade pricing in perspective. They've used inflated pricing to extract extra money from a captive audience for many years. Other OEMs cannot demand similar premiums for commodity products.

pjobon The New OCaml Website

Multicore support announcement: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/the-road-to-ocaml-5-0

Latest monthly update: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/multicore-ocaml-march-2022

Github for the multicore project: https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/ocaml-multicore

pjobon C# Raw String Literal Proposal

The browser that I'm using to read this proposal, for one.

pjobon Why I'm boycotting TurboTax this year

I've actually been avoiding TurboTax for about 3 years now. Mostly due to dissatisfaction with their lobbying policy.

pjobon Why I'm boycotting TurboTax this year

I will be boycotting TurboTax this year. Their latest ad campaign[1] is particularly egregious. It claims that (with TurboTax's help) "people can be good at anything... even taxes". Given the amount of lobbying that Intuit does to make taxes more complicated, this message is disingenuous at best.

[1] https://www.campaignlive.com/article/turbotax-returns-new-ca...

pjobon It’s Time for Caps Lock to Die

As an alternative to the "remap caps lock to esc or ctrl" crowd, I'd like to suggest remapping to scroll lock. I don't need easier access to esc or ctrl, so I decided to pick a different key. Scroll lock doesn't really get used for anything important (in my workflow) and provides an extra key to use in bindings for your text editor or games. I've been using it for about a decade and it gives me a bit of additional utility for a key that I wouldn't otherwise use.

pjobon Microsoft Gives Paint the 11th Hour Reprieve It Deserves

This is generally my workflow as well. One useful tip is that Alt+PrintScreen will scope the screenshot to only the active/focused window, reducing the need for additional cropping.

pjobon Apple Special Event [video]

Hasn't this been addressed by products like AliveCor's kardia line for a while now? I'd prefer the form factor of a phone-paired device over a watch in a multi-patient environment.

pjobon Ubuntu is now available on the Windows Store

Cmder is a package of Conemu (already mentioned by ZenoArrow), Clink, and Unix tools with a nicer theme. It's the best that I've tried on Windows.

http://cmder.net/

Hyper also has a Windows port if you're into that kind of thing.

https://hyper.is/

pjobon More on GVFS

I use cmder to host cmd.exe processes. Definitely worth a try if you are looking for console emulators on Windows.

http://cmder.net/

pjobon Ripgrep code review

Some excellent ones here:

http://fabiensanglard.net/

Mostly video game related.

pjobon After Apple's Disappointing MacBook Pro Refresh, What's an Engineer to Do?

I highly recommend you try out cmder. It's a bundle of the excellent conemu console emulator, clink for bash style completion in cmd.exe, and some unix tools.

http://cmder.net/

pjobon Tableau stock down almost 50%

I'm not sure about the Desktop app, but the web app should work in any modern browser today. Features are generally prioritized using user feedback, and this is one of the top suggestions on the ideas site:

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/sugge...

pjobon Tableau stock down almost 50%

It's free, offered as a standalone service separate from Office. You just need to sign up with an email address from a non-free provider.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.