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pcai

512 karma · joined April 1, 2015

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pcai··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
Thanks! Yes almost all claude, with me focused on gameplay, art direction, mechanics, and storytelling. Keep at it - Claude makes some things possible and other times it only helps you realize sooner your idea was too fuzzy!
pcai··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
I fixed some of these road issues in the latest release, and added those zone overlays that were missing. Still ironing out bugs in both these systems, but thanks so much for writing this up!
pcai··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
Thanks - I obviously didn’t get the balance right for everyone, and honestly it’s partly because I started with a maximalist position of “don’t hide the complexity that’s the point”, spent a bunch of time getting those details right…and then quickly realized during playtesting the same thing you and many others pointed out: progressively layering/revealing the depth works better to establish the contrast, while also being significantly easier for players to actually engage with.

Thanks for taking the time to take a look and give thoughtful feedback!

pcai··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
Thanks for checking it out! Eminent domain and covenants are great material - I’m definitely going to work those into the next update.

I’m aiming for a specific mood so the others are going in the backlog until i can do them uhh tastefully

pcai··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
I've never seen this, but this is amazing!
pcai··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
Thanks so much for your feedback! I originally started with a pretty diverse corpus of prewritten story arcs for diversity, and went back to retrofit them into the engine once I started customizing stories and details for the city. It looks like I missed a few spots, sorry about that!

And yes, I did sketch a version that is even more procedurally generated, but it’s taking longer to get right than I thought

pcai··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
I’m sorry you ran into this! It looks like the game tried to allocate too much memory. I got claude to fall back to lower resolution textures when this happens, thanks for reporting.
pcai··on Show HN: SimCity, but with Permits
I’m sorry you ran into this! Taking a quick look.
pcai··on AI is Dunning-Kruger as a service
A vehicle is driven on public roads and can kill people, that’s why licenses are required.

Outlawing certain kinds of math is a level of totalitarianism we should never accept under any circumstances in a free society

pcai··on Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
> For this argument to work you have to believe that decreasing the price of service delivery wouldn't decrease the price of health insurance.

I think we are talking past each other. My argument is not that lower prices for medical services wouldn’t lead to lower insurance costs. My argument is specifically that increasing supply doesn’t necessarily lead to lower prices for medical services. It would be quite a finding if US cities with more doctors per capita have cheaper medical services but if anything the opposite is true

pcai··on Denver rent is back to 2022 prices after 20k new units hit the market
I think you’re still missing the point - it’s NOT classic supply and demand because the mechanism by which that works is prices, and in many healthcare markets including the US — the buyer isn’t the payer, and shortages lead to rationing (via wait times) rather than increased prices, so often increasing supply doesn’t change prices even as it increases aggregate costs (because there’s still excess demand and rationing).
pcai··on Let me pay for Firefox
I 100% agree! It's almost like income stability is valuable!
pcai··on Let me pay for Firefox
Hmm if this is true why is it so rare that software devs quit their jobs and make more money freelancing or starting their own companies?
pcai··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2025)
Sigma Squared | Senior Software Engineer | Cambridge, MA | Full time | ONSITE

Sigma Squared is a mission-driven data science platform for making better people decisions. Companies use our software to make better hiring and promotion decisions - based on merit, not intuitions. This leads to fairer outcomes and less bias.

We recently raised $10MM series A from 8vc and are launching in food&bev and law enforcement this year.

We're hiring senior (full stack) engineers (and in customer success, sales, marketing, and product management).

Our stack: React, Typescript, AWS (we also work closely with data scientists so we dabble in python)

To apply: https://sigmasquared.io/careers?ashby_jid=92adf2c5-8bed-466b...

pcai··on Ruby Meetups
Note this is hosted on gh so you can open a pr to add yours: https://github.com/ruby-conferences/ruby-conferences.github....

I’m on mobile at the moment otherwise I’d do it myself

pcai··on Ruby Meetups
This list is hosted on github, contributions are welcome: https://github.com/ruby-conferences/ruby-conferences.github....
pcai··on FCC wants all phones unlocked in sixty days, AT&T and T-Mobile aren't so keen
My point is that carrier locking is about managing credit risk and fraud, not an evil plot to trap customers, and not a mechanism for discouraging street theft.

It’s only complicated if people conflate issues or fail to understand the mechanics of carrier locking. You can just call up a carrier and ask to have the phone unlocked and they’ll oblige if its paid off. Sometimes people confuse carrier locking with imei blacklists, which is for stolen handsets. Sometimes people confuse phones with modems or firmware that only work with specific carriers as “carrier locked” but again, that’s not the same thing

pcai··on FCC wants all phones unlocked in sixty days, AT&T and T-Mobile aren't so keen
It’s not speculation - this is literally why cell phone locking was invented. The imei blacklists were created much later specifically for theft, not to manage credit risk of customers getting subsidized phones.

You can literally just call your carrier to ask how to get your subsidized phone unlocked. There’s no need to speculate- it’s not a secret!

pcai··on FCC wants all phones unlocked in sixty days, AT&T and T-Mobile aren't so keen
This is incorrect. You can pay off a phone early and simply ask that it be unlocked - the carrier will happily comply because you are no longer a credit risk. You can also just purchase phones unlocked by paying cash upfront. You don’t need to be a genius to deduce how this works.

The imei blacklists for theft were created much later and aren’t honored globally

pcai··on FCC wants all phones unlocked in sixty days, AT&T and T-Mobile aren't so keen
It’s impractical to “repossess” phones so in practice the carriers wouldn’t be able to stop people from deliberately defaulting on the contract with no repercussions (they can bring it to a different carrier who is indifferent)
pcai··on FCC wants all phones unlocked in sixty days, AT&T and T-Mobile aren't so keen
It is 100% an anti theft mechanism - it prevents people from stealing phones from carriers. The scam is: - get a new iphone from tmobile that costs $30 over 2 years. - don’t pay them anything: you just got a free iphone. Tmobile is mad and won’t provide service to that handset because you stole it from them. - You open a new line with at&t and tell them you’re bringing your own phone.

Carrier locking prevents this. If someone steals your phone on the train that’s a different problem with a different solution

pcai··on 23-Floor Manhattan Office Building Just Sold at a 97.5% Discount
I never understood the argument that “locking in your losses is actually a form of tax evasion” - or am I misunderstanding what you are trying to say?
pcai··on Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
Actually caffeine is a well known and widely studied performance enhancing drug, for example in endurance sports
pcai··on Eight years of organizing tech meetups (2023)
> Even in those larger numbers, sponsors are flighty and often unappreciative.

Can you elaborate on what you mean? In my experience running meetups, sponsoring is an expensive and thankless activity akin to a donation

pcai··on It's always TCP_NODELAY
TCP solves for “when i send a message i want the other side to actually receive it” which is…fairly common
pcai··on T-Mobile employees across the country receive cash offers to illegally swap SIMs
I think this is conceptually wrong from a layering perspective because youre punching through the abstraction and making it leaky on purpose. This just moves the problem down one layer in the stack - there will be legitimate new use cases for “sim card ID spoofing” and then we’re back to square one. Also from a usability standpoint “getting a new phone” is precisely the wrong time to lock users out of their accounts

A perfect analogy would be trying to implement security with mac addresses but applied to internet. It just makes a mess of an abstraction layer and then you have to rebuild it because those abstractions were useful (mac address spoofing has legitimate uses because mac addresses were used for security and then people realized they needed to be able to transparently swap things out)

pcai··on Zero-rupee note
Have you considered not speeding
pcai··on Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization
I understand where you’re coming from but the thing to understand is: most startups are incredibly marginal to begin with. If you tilt the field such that the entire distribution is now ~5-6% lower expected value for any given outcome, you can easily wipe out 80%+ of the startups that might’ve been “worth trying” but don’t make any sense now on a risk-adjusted basis. The entire asset class can become unfundable because the same money taking the same level of risk simply generates more returns elsewhere
pcai··on Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization
This is wrong because you are speaking on an accrual basis but you have to consider cash. The cash (salaries and taxes) is paid out in year 1 regardless of what year you try to book it in your p&l statements
pcai··on Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization
imagine in year 1 you grossed 100k, spent 200k on salaries, but the new irs rules say you owe taxes on 60k of profits.

To slightly simplify: it forces startups to pay taxes on profits that only exist on paper, with cash that is now much more scarce

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