Hacker News Reader

stevesimmonson Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site

  - KeePass files synced between laptop and phone on OneDrive, DropBox, etc
  - KeePassXC on Windows and Mac
  - Keepass2Android mobile client
  - Browser integration on mobile. 
  - On laptop, I prefer no browser integration; Copy username and password with Ctrl+B and Ctrl+C

stevesimmonson UK sovereign LLM inference

It is if your country isn't in the US and (a) GDPR requires data residency in UK/EU; (b) you're concerned about capricious actions by the US govt cutting off access to US-controlled services (cloud, payments systems, etc).

stevesimmonson UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

There was an article in the FT back in March [1] with the headline "NHS official pushed to add patient data to Palantir platform while also advising company".

Amusingly, the person concerned has the surname "Swindells"...

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6c548670-0f3e-45f1-ba08-8bb6dd152...

stevesimmonson Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track

As opposed to premature deaths from fossil fuel emissions, deaths of rooftop solar installers (surprisingly common), wars in the Middle East involving oil interests, drowning and environmental damage from dam failures, etc, etc.

stevesimmonson 8087 Emulation on 8086 Systems

Also, need to bear in mind that 25-30 years ago, laptops were 10x more expensive than today.

For my postdoc in 1995, my industry sponsor bought me a then top-of-the range Dell Latitude XP with 100MHz 80486, integrated 80487 coprocessor and 32MB RAM for radar signal processing research.

In Australia at the time, it cost A$10,000, as much as my car.

Even the 24MB RAM upgrade from 8 to 32MB cost USD1,200 ($2,500) in today's money. Which puts current complaints about the soaring cost of RAM into perspective!

stevesimmonson Record wind and solar saved UK from gas imports worth £1B in March 2026

That's only true for spot pricing, right? Longer term supply contracts can embody more "strategic" criteria.

stevesimmonson Has electricity decoupled from gas prices in Germany?

... because you may have signed a longer term contract that might in turn guarantee offtake from you rather than the other farmer?

This marginal price is only for the spot market right? So the key question is more what % of the mix is spot vs longer term. And thus what the overall impact is on total blended price.

stevesimmonson Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)

Standard for a UK layout keyboard. shift-3 is £

stevesimmonson NHS staff refusing to use FDP over Palantir ethical concerns

There have been recent articles in the FT about a man (who surname, funnily enough, sounds like swindle) who was an advisor to Palantir while also being chair of 4 NHS Trusts and pushing the trusts to put more of their data into Palantir.

Definitely not a conflict of interest...

stevesimmonson Harold and George Destroy the World

Surely it's a bit early to declare "astonishing success of ... destroying Iran's capability to wage future wars".

As far as I can see, the US has managed to replace an older Ayatollah Khomeini with a younger Ayatollah Khomeini with even more reasons to seek vengeance against the US and obtain nuclear weapons.

> If you're actually at war, winning should be objective not PR optics.

Which of course is why a former TV host is clearly the most qualified person to be Secretary of Defense, sorry War.

stevesimmonson Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

That's not majority of trips, it's by distance travelled.

Basically in the Netherlands, if you're within 5-10km, you go by bike. If public transport is reasonable, which it mostly is in urban areas, you take it. You'd almost never choose car within a major city, unless it's on the outskirts.

stevesimmonson CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)

- me, also in 2010, when a junior colleague ("what would he know?") spent his bonus on bitcoin.

stevesimmonson Hamming Distance for Hybrid Search in SQLite

USearch has a sqlite extension that supports various metrics on including Hamming distance on standard sqlite BLOB columns. It gets similar performance and is very convenient.

(There's also an indexed variant that does faster lookups, but it uses a special virtual table layout that constrains the types of the other columns in the table.)

See https://github.com/unum-cloud/USearch. pip-installable for Python users.

stevesimmonson Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

How exactly does GDPR prevent you from complying with cybersecurity laws?

For instance, one of GDPR's 6 lawful bases for processing data is in order to comply with legal obligations.

If you're going to make strong claims like that, the onus really is on you to give specific examples.

stevesimmonson Data is the only moat

We totally found this doing financial document analysis. It's so quick to do an LLM-based "put this document into this schema" proof-of-concept.

Then you run it on 100,000 real documents.

And so you find there actually are so, so many exceptions and special cases. And so begins the journey of constructing layers of heuristics and codified special cases needed to turn ~80% raw accuracy to something asymptotically close to 100%.

That's the moat. At least where high accuracy is the key requirement.

stevesimmonson New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis

Only for those inputs that are compressible.

If a compressor can compress every input of length N bits into fewer than N bits, then at least 2 of the 2^N possible inputs have the same output. Thus there cannot exist a universal compressor.

Modify as desired for fractional bits. The essential argument is the same.

stevesimmonson Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title

You can also use the =LET(...) formula to define named variables:

    =LET(
        filterCriteria, "Fred",
        filteredRange, FILTER(A2:D8,A2:A8=filterCriteria),
        IF(ISBLANK(filteredRange),"-", filteredRange)
    )

There must be an odd number 2D + 1 of arguments. The first 2D are D name-expression pairs and the final one is the expression whose value is returned.

The end result - as you see - is quite readable.

stevesimmonson LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted

Am I going mad or do some of those old.reddit comments slope downhill?

stevesimmonson Credit report shows Meta keeping $27B off its books through advanced geometry

> The Outlook is Superficially Stable, defined here as “By outward appearances stable unless, you know, things happen. Then we’ll downgrade after the shit hits the fan.”

stevesimmonson Mixpanel Security Breach

Really only if you ask for your data to be deleted too

stevesimmonson Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board

Why do you think the current government would be the slightest bit interested in solutions to housing, inflation or healthcare if Epstein wasn't an issue?

stevesimmonson Gemini 3

A nice Easter egg in the Gemini 3 docs [1]:

    If you are transferring a conversation trace from another model, ... to bypass strict validation in these specific scenarios, populate the field with this specific dummy string:

    "thoughtSignature": "context_engineering_is_the_way_to_go"

[1] https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/gemini-3?thinking=high...

stevesimmonson Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]

In contrast to Microsoft, who puts Copilot buttons everywhere and succeeds only in annoying their customers.

stevesimmonson Z3 API in Python: From Sudoku to N-Queens in Under 20 Lines (2015)

It's worth noting these notes are 11 years old. The first give-away was the comment that in Python 3/2 is an integer, which is indeed true in Python 2 but not in Py3.

For modern users of Z3, you'd want to do `pip install z3-solver` rather than use `Z3Py` mentioned at the very bottom of this doc.

stevesimmonson UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales

> gas sets the price in the merit order so we don’t want it on 24/7

I never quite understood the logic for this. Sure, if you overlay a simple upward sloping cost curve on a downward sloping demand-price curve, the market-clearing price is where they intersect, and that in practice much of the time is a gas generator.

But there must be a million other aspects that can affect what price needs to be paid to secure the capacity below that point. Surely only part of the total area under that market-clearing price needs to accrue to the generators?

And if generators are getting windfall profits, can't the market rules be adjusted so more of it can given to the consumers in the form of lower energy prices?

Can someone explain this? Maybe that is what actually happens, just it is too complex for the mass media.

stevesimmonson Meta Replaced the Native WhatsApp for Windows 11 with a Shitty Web App

WSL gives a pretty great Linux dev experience under Windows.

As for "a large portion of the software industry is iOS native apps"... How about plugging in some assumptions here and then multiplying them together:

1. Mobile app share of total software development. 30%

2. iOS share versus Android: 30%

3. What % of iOS app dev is native apps? 40%

My assumptions here give something like 4%. You should put whatever numbers you feel are right here, and I'm pretty sure it won't be close to "a large portion".

stevesimmonson Baffling Microsoft ad shows Copilot incorrectly identifying Windows 11 setting

Surprised their ads don't show customers getting pissed about a huge, distracting Copilot icon right in the middle of their Word document, with no ability to turn it off...

stevesimmonson Designing a Language (2017)

For Python, you can read the PEP documents - Python Enhancement Proposals - and see the discussion of what was suggested, pros and cons, work done to determine the preferred implementation, and the final decision.

https://peps.python.org/

To get the best historical sense, pick a language feature that has evolved in several steps over a number of years, e.g. async/await, type annotations, the GIL, etc.

For ordered dicts, for instance, which is topical because of [1] posted two weeks ago, the relevant PEPs are:

- PEP372: The original collections.ordereddict proposal in Python 3.1 [2]

- PEP468: Making kwargs ordered in Python 3.6 [3], which also made standard dicts ordered.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45756058

[2] https://peps.python.org/pep-0372/

[3] https://peps.python.org/pep-0468/

stevesimmonson How the richest man is boosting the British right

And paradoxically, the more he tries to influence British politics, the more people become aware of his efforts, and think more negatively of him.

Plus who in UK would buy a Tesla now? Other than because it was discounted.

stevesimmonson Microsoft in court for allegedly misleading Australians over 365 subscriptions

I am in the UK.

I got Microsoft's emails, did not want Microsoft's forced imposition of Copilot in my Office subscription (regardless of price), found the classic option mentioned in online forums, and managed to switch to it just before my renewal.

My 89 year old aunt on the other hand got stung for the unwanted forced upgrade. I had to call Microsoft, complained about them unfairly exploiting vulnerable customers, and eventually got a downgrade and the difference refunded.

What really annoys me about this - quite apart from the initial deception/misrepresentation - is I now expect Microsoft to pull similar tricks in future. A real disincentive to sign up to any other 'value-added' services.

Why make subscriptions so full of traps that consumers end up hating you? (Yes, I know, so some GM can hit this quarter's bonus)

That reminds me, having just cancelled Spotify (due to their price rise), Disney+ is next on the list. Maybe Netflix too.