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simongray

2,057 karma · joined December 8, 2014

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simongray··on Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election
It was pretty great until around 2010 when it was still a social network rather than social media.
simongray··on Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service
Self-hosted Seafile + Tailscale works great for me.
simongray··on Show HN: Capsule – Single-file web apps that save their data into SQLite
I see. Thanks for enlightening me.
simongray··on Show HN: Capsule – Single-file web apps that save their data into SQLite
That file editor seems to work in Firefox. I just tested the save/open functionality.
simongray··on Show HN: Macros with a Behringer FCB1010 MIDI Pedalboard in macOS
Other than the novelty of being able to press buttons with your feet, why is this useful?

If you lack special buttons, you could also just buy a bigger keyboard (or a MIDI controller that sits on the table).

simongray··on Simple Is Not Small
He's speaking at the coming Clojure Conj, so there will be a new talk soon.
simongray··on Sonic Pi v5
> I always wish I could replace the UI with my own embedded editor (emacs in my case)

Consider his his older project instead? https://overtone.github.io/

He even used to perform using emacs before he created Sonic Pi.

simongray··on Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago
> A two hour commute is much less of a problem if you can be a bit productive.

A two hour commute sounds absolutely unbearable to my ears. I guess it makes sense if you are able work for 4 hours daily inside a train or something, but that's already half of the workday, i.e. you might as well just work from home.

simongray··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
> What is the cost balance from being that net exporter? Are they selling energy for more than they buy?

Electricity production is a subset of energy production. A lot of factories use natural gas directly, they don't produce electricity first. ICE cars also use petrol directly, they don't first generate electricity.

simongray··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
> The oil industry is full of really smart people, but this all appears to be so stupid. Why don't the fossil fuel companies just expand their investment portfolios to include off-shore wind?

Some of them do, e.g. Ørsted here in Denmark is a former gas and oil extraction company which then became the biggest developer of offshore wind in the world. Trump has, by the way, been fighting the wind farm that they're setting up in the US currently ever since he came into office.

simongray··on LLMs reward expertise
I am sure some variant of the infinite monkey theorem applies. Anthropic devs have unlimited access to Claude, so they are no doubt lazy when it comes to prompt writing and just brute-force the agent to do what they want.
simongray··on Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
I don't think these numbers are correct, but desktop Linux is no doubt having its year now. So many big YouTube content creators are covering Linux content and switching to Linux specifically, since the major obstacle to switching (gaming) has now been solved. Add to that the push effect from the constant enshittification of Windows.
simongray··on GPT‑Live
They don't act the way humans would.

It's normal to start a sentence after the other person in the conversation pauses, especially if you're eager to say something (like the chat agent is), but a real human is socially aware and would in most cases immediately cease talking if the other person starts another sentence at the same time. Humans do this so much in their conversations that the other person doesn't really register the interruption at all.

simongray··on Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design and art
> Or are there other reasons why this lib was moved to TS?

I'm pretty sure reach was the motivation. The author basically wrote his own TypeScript libraries duplicating a bunch of Clojure stuff, so the code is quite Clojure-like still.

simongray··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
I don't think you can conclude much from a sample size of 1.

My country at least (and probably yours too) is producing more organic products than ever before. People are also consuming organic products more than before.

simongray··on Official Clojure Documentary page with Video, Shownotes, and Links
I am pretty sure Dustin Getz is American.
simongray··on Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down
NemID, the previous national 2-factor solution, used a small card with rows of pre-printed single-use codes. When you logged in to a bank or a public sector website, it would ask for a random code at a specific row and column number. Once the system registered that you had just a handful of codes left, a new card would be sent to you via snailmail. It worked fine for the time.

The current system, MitID, depends on smartphones, though you can get an an external key generator as a backup too.

simongray··on The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling
Maybe the momentum of Stoxx600 will last the next 4 years? Or maybe the S&P500 will come crashing down soon? Who knows.

The Shiller PE ratio is insanely high. At least the European market isn't completely overinvested in just 7 companies who are spending a lot of their money on the exact same thing, so it has that going for it.

simongray··on The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling
> And what's the actual result? Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies..

Europe is actually doing quite well at the moment. The European stock markets have over-performed quite decently vs. the US ever since Trump became president, despite the various curveballs thrown at Europe in recent years. Market capitalisation in the US is held up primarily by the Magnificent 7 who are great outliers in the American stock market.

simongray··on France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US
It's a crucial step on the way. Definitely nothing to scoff at.
simongray··on France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US
Eu Inc. will become a reality soon, so it isn't like the Commission is standing still: eu.inc/what-is-eu-inc
simongray··on Painless Software Schedules (2000)
> What's the saying? Time in the market vs timing the market.

Seems like he managed both.

simongray··on Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15
I am talking about the purpose of the law and the way it is written. It's not hard to create a law that only targets the bigger services, just make it apply to entities with a daily user count above N. A law isn't a headline on Hacker News, it's a carefully written document.
simongray··on Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15
Why do you think it's going to be arbitrary?

The law will obviously be framed in such a way as to hit the targets it is supposed to hit, avoid collateral damage. It's not like complete amateurs are writing our laws.

simongray··on Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15
> everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).

The biggest players in social media are precisely the ones that this law is targeting.

No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. do so.

simongray··on Novo Nordisk's Canadian Mistake
> in exchange for a promise to use the revenues "for good purposes".

They still do an enormous amount of charity, though activities of the foundation are probably highly localised to Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk_Foundation

simongray··on URL-Driven State in HTMX
The behaviour of an HTML datalist is basically completely different in every browser. It is a highly flawed element.
simongray··on The jank programming language
> How does programming with Clojure targeting multiple platforms (JVM, JS, CLR, LLVM, ...) work?

Each variant has its own file extension, e.g. .clj for JVM and .cljs for JS.

In case you're writing code that needs to work on multiple platforms, you put it in a .cljc file. Any of the code in these files that still needs to be different due to the platform choice is differentiated inline using a reader macro, which results in the different platform compilers getting a (slightly) different abstract syntax tree, so it is not too dissimilar from writing cross-platform code in other languages (just more convenient due to the Lisp style).

simongray··on Show HN: HomeBrew HN – generate personal context for content ranking
I'm not talking about the content but about the topics.
simongray··on Show HN: HomeBrew HN – generate personal context for content ranking
Having to rate the 30 examples made me realise just how much HN is dominated by LLM content these days. Kinda sad.
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