HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

_tom_

1,215 karma · joined June 7, 2020

submissionscomments
_tom_··on Tiny Undervalued Hardware Companions (2024)
Organization:

I got a storage organizer with 24 drawers. One for each type of cable I use. So instead of one big box that I have to hunt through, I have instant, labeled access to all my usb cables, and a few other cables and items.

_tom_··on Tetrachromatic Vision
But was it distinguishable by tetrachromat?
_tom_··on After millions of years, why are carnivorous plants still so small?
You are assuming that they haven't.

Brambles can trap sheep, benefiting from the sheep as fertilizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGobnZq83g

Falling coconuts can not only kill people, but probably kill far more small animals, again benefiting from them as fertilizer,

_tom_··on Cray versus Raspberry Pi
The pi has a sub $100 accelerator card that takes it to 30 TFLOPs. So you can add three more orders of magnitude of performance for a rough doubling of the price.
_tom_··on (Backup!) Built an AI that brutally roasts your website designs
Doesn't work. Did it die under the load?

Firefox and safari, iPhone.

_tom_··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
I think it's the writing.

I learned long ago that I could read a book, study it, think about it. And I still would really master the material until I built with it.

_tom_··on Human coders are still better than LLMs
For me, it's a bit like pair programming. I have someone to discuss ideas with. Someone to review my code and suggest alternative approaches. Some one that uses different feature than I do, so I learn from them.
_tom_··on Wrench Attacks: Physical attacks targeting cryptocurrency users (2024) [pdf]
Literally yesterday:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/nyregion/crypto-investor-...

_tom_··on Mermaid: Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text
I think he's saying you can click and edit on the diagram, which mermaid doesn't support. This does propagate back into the source.

I think you are talking about "just change the text and regenerate", which achieves much the same goal.

I'm not sure in what cases the former is better.

_tom_··on Strings Just Got Faster
Off-the-cuff thought:

Could you solve the empty string hashes to zero problem by just adding one when computing hash codes?

_tom_··on Redis is open source again
You have to make the choice about sharing at the start. If you use AGPL and later decide to make changes, you'll have to share. So most don't want to risk it.

But more important, AGPL software is banned at many large corporations. It's simply not an option.

_tom_··on Redis is open source again
Doesn't AGPL give you LESS rights? (fewer?)

AGPL is pretty much a non-starter for any commercial development.

The RSALv2 let you use Redis, unless you were a service provider. Now, you can't use it for anything (EVERYTHING is accessed over a network now) without sharing your source.

So, before everyone but amazon could use it for commercial purposes, now no one can.

_tom_··on A single line of code cost $8000
Automated dependency resolution has made it so the default is frequently

> Someone imports a single method from the RIGHT package

and hundreds of megabytes come in for what might be one simple function.

_tom_··on The last masters of Afro-Colombian machete fencing
Well, the video linked above is labelled "Esgrima de Machete y Garrote.".
_tom_··on How University Students Use Claude
No one seems to be talking about the fact that we need to change the definition of cheating.

People's careers are going to be filled with AI. College needs to prepare them for that reality, not to get jobs that are now extinct.

If they are never going to have to program without AI, what's the point in teaching them to do it? It's like expecting them to do arithmetic by hand. No one does.

For every class, teachers need to be asking themselves "is this class relevant" and "what are the learning goals in this class? Goals that they will still need, in a world with AI".

_tom_··on AI tools are spotting errors in research papers: inside a growing movement
This basically turns research papers as a whole into a big generative adversarial network.
_tom_··on Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep (2018)
I suggest backing it up in multiple places.

Electronic forms are so much less durable than physical.

_tom_··on Ask HN: How to sell a script that will save companies $100k a month?
There are tons of products that do this. Are you familiar with the market you are trying to enter?

Look at what they are doing.

_tom_··on Please fix your slow website. I'm begging you
And half the problem is not that there is one bit of software doing tracking, it's that there are fourteen different package that different people added at some point, all doing similar things.
_tom_··on The deeper under the Earth's surface, the more species you can find
This is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere

"he biomass in the deep subsurface is about 15% of the total for the biosphere"

I'd bet that it's a higher percentage. That 15% represents what we have already found. There is likely more at greater depths we haven't found, and perhaps other types of life we aren't yet recognizing yet (a parallel to finding Archaea),

_tom_··on Magic/tragic email links: don't make them the only option
Yeah, and everyone who did not flunk security training knows not to click on the links.

Don't send me a link, tell me where to find it, after I log in.

_tom_··on The Future of Htmx
I feel this article makes the same mistake many technical articles make.

What does it do? After reading a large chunk of the article, I have no idea. No, wait it "enables behavior".

Maybe it's only relevant to people that are already familiar with it. But it would seem that a hacker news front page would be a great opportunity to let more people know about your product.

_tom_··on Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts
Social media, for example.
_tom_··on Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts
But it's changing over time, and students always lied.

But it's possible that this generation is wiser/ more cynical and doesn't believe in anonymous surveys.

I know I don't.

_tom_··on Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts
You can probably get same day delivery on drugs, too.
_tom_··on Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts
Incorrect title. "Illegal drug use among teens drops" is what the study is talking about.

Psychoactive prescriptions are up probably orders of magnitude in the last fifty years.

People have been talking about "self medicating" with alcohol and other legal drugs to deal with various problems for decades. Now there are legal "doctor medicating" options.

_tom_··on Fish have a brain microbiome – could humans have one too?
Wow. If true, that would be fascinating.

We know that non-brain microbiomes can influence behavior. What might something in brain tissue itself do?

_tom_··on Maybe Bluesky has "won"
It's still an empty place. I just moved over, and I could find NO ONE with my interests (a common hobby). There are / were thousands of people in this group on twitter. I doubt it's even one percent of even what's left on X.
_tom_··on You too can write a book
What I remember from college is that the instructors who wrote their own books had terrible books.

They used their own books because it was theirs, not because it was good.

Most people do not write well, but the people who can become a standard textbook do. The vast majority of people write worse than this. Usually much worse.

_tom_··on Fraud, so much fraud
And yet, it's common. And it can pay off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino

That guy has a channel on fraud.

Also check out Data Colada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Colada

This isn't theoretical, there's a lot of it going on.

Page 1 of 16Next →