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thomasfl

2,059 karma · joined February 21, 2007

Thomas Flemming - software developer located in Oslo, Norway. Specialised in web frontend and UX. Father of four.

http://github.com/thomasfl

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thomasfl··on Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
Will Tinder be blamed for the sudden decline in fertility rate? Is there any other plausible explanstion to South Korea’s sudden and dramatic drop in fertility rate to 0.8? No matter how bad the housing market is or the job market is, there has never in history been such a drop in population.
thomasfl··on What Sun got wrong
We had a similar company in Norway in the 1980ies. Norsk Data (literally means Norwegian Computers) made computers, a multi taskin operating, a word processor thar inspired MS Word, a relational database on the same level as Oracle, the firsr web server was made by Tim Berners-Lee on one of their computers. It all went down because the managers kept insisting that they were a hardware company. The software was supposed to help selling their hardware. They were not good at making hardware.
thomasfl··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
As a fellow Norwegian I must say that this is pure art by the developer Arne Munthe-Kaas.
thomasfl··on Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)
This shows not only how highly inefficient the land use is in LA, it also shows when it started happening. Towns that were planned before cars were introduced, have a much more efficient use of land. I.e. less space used for roads, but more greenery and the same amount of people and businesses. Barcelona and Paris was planned and built around 70 years before cars become commonplace. The city of the future is built around peoples quality of life and what is good for the economy, except the car industry. US car industry is slowly dying anyway, so the US should start making the country just as attractive to live in as Europe. Disclaimer: I am the founder of the architectural uprising in Norway.
thomasfl··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
This fits neatly in the backpack with the MacBook Pro, if I need more compute power.
thomasfl··on Belgian car salesman becomes prince after DNA test proves royal parentage
The Fresh Prince of Bel...gium.
thomasfl··on Stolen Buttons
So many different looking buttons. Wish there were more standards.
thomasfl··on You can't unit test for taste
That's what linters are for. Linters can prevent SQL code from spilling out to code outside the model layer. Even more important when vibecoding.
thomasfl··on How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)
Private companies and competition, solve a lot of problems in the society. Like making food supply work. Planning and building cities and public transport is something the public sector is better at solving. Clean, nice and walkable cities with a good working public transport system, is important for the local economy to work. City planning is the art of compromises - no body get’s what they want, but overall everybody is better off in the end.
thomasfl··on South Korea Politicians Wants AI Profit Sharing
The AI's winner-take-all economics simply needs redistribution of wealth in other ways then before. Universal Basic Income in companion with politics for housing, is the simplest way of redistributing wealth.

This article mentions Norway's pension fund. I am a Norwegian citizen and built the app for applying for social welfare as consultant for the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration. What I learned talking to users, is the deteriorating effect stress have on your cognitive abilities. In other words people become really, really stupid under stress. Stressed people do really bad choices. They are bad a concentrating and thinking clearly. Give people UBI and a home where they feel safe, and basically at home, and watch the magic happen.

Norway is no way near having UBI, and the housing market in the few big towns are really a clusterfuck. It costs 30% more to build housing in Norway than across the border in Sweden. Norway has twice as many people working in the public sector as our neighbor Finland, per capita. The income from the oil industry is slowly sneaking into to the economy. The high taxes, rising inflation, AI adoption and increased public spending, is creating a toxic climate making it increasingly harder for startups and young people to thrive. UBI and housing policy seems like the only viable solution.

thomasfl··on Firewood Splitting Simulator
Gaussian splat based game will probably become popular. This game is not gaussian splat rendered 3d, but it is pretty close. Next step is gaussian splat and animations.
thomasfl··on Running DOS on Behringers DDX3216 with a DIY x86-Bios from Scratch
Will it run Doom?
thomasfl··on Danish pension fund excludes SpaceX citing governance and valuation
As a Norwegian I envy your ethical pension fund. Our Norwegian pension fund goes by the name the oil fund, and was financed solely by fossil fuel production.
thomasfl··on The dead economy theory
Thanks for pointing that out. Not nitpicking, but facts.
thomasfl··on The dead economy theory
AI will accelerate the decline in the world’s population. No job, no marriage and no kids will be the norm for most people. For many years to come. Some will say it’s good for the planet and especially for other species of vertebrates. Others will see it as a personal failure to not have any living offspring when they get old.

In ancient Greece, Diana was the goddess of hunting, wildlife and personal freedom and Venus was the goddess of love, family and domestic life. The Greeks had stories and plays about how those two goddesses never seemed to get along very well. If you feel like you’re a follower of Diana, then the future will be bright. If you feel like a follower of Venus, then rough times are ahead.

thomasfl··on High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building
For thousands of years, people have seen the benefits of living in cities.What is really a city? Simply a place where people have a mutual interest in living close to each other. Urban sprawl and car centric society seems to be a really bad idea. Build better cities rather than self driving cars.
thomasfl··on Ti-84 Evo
Distraction free tools like this calculator, is increasingly important to help keeping focus.
thomasfl··on Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
How much does a subscription for this website costs per month? After all it says Adobe in the title.
thomasfl··on Soft launch of open-source code platform for government
Next step is to use this for laws and legislations. Do you have a proposal for new law? Make a pull request!
thomasfl··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
If Github were shut down, it would feel even worse than if Hacker News was shot down. I am github user 1520. Signed up a just few days after Mithcel on february 2008. I remember the early days sitting in a hotel lobby next to Chris Wanstrath and discussing a bug I found on github. Not ready to do the switch yet.
thomasfl··on Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
This is the same reason why I switched from riding a car to riding bicycles. Easy to get parts. Easily repairable. No electronics.
thomasfl··on Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
I hope the authors mom is not on the internet. Cursing in capslock. Good grief.
thomasfl··on Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language
It is a lot of good code there.
thomasfl··on Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language
The brunost programming language could be very useful for norwegian government agencies. It is common to use norwegian names for variables and functions at the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV in Norwegian). A subset of typescript where the reserved words are written in nynorsk, would help prevent misunderstanding.
thomasfl··on DaVinci Resolve – Photo
Great news. One more piece of software that makes the world less reliable on A*be's expensive subscription fee based software.
thomasfl··on Doom, Played over Curl
This is a good template for making terminal based apps that run on remote servers.
thomasfl··on Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator
Not directly related but still interesting. The fellow who came up with the ide for the Architectural Uprisings we have seen around the world, is still anonymous.
thomasfl··on AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart
My favorite pasttime for the last 12 years, besides reading hacker news, is to make music on my phone, ipad or on my piano. Will I stop making music now that Suno is here? No frigging way. Because I still like to make music. I won’t stop talking either, just because some AI is better at doing conversation about research. If I make enough money on my latest, I will spend more time making music.

Some of my music is available om SoundCloud. Most of it is made on an iPhone. https://on.soundcloud.com/lHJN26CwcwtnQzc2CB

thomasfl··on Show HN: I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work
Is there some documentation for this? The code is probably the simplest (Not So) Large Language Model implementation possible, but it is not straight forward to understand for developers not familiar with multi-head attention, ReLU FFN, LayerNorm and learned positional embeddings.

This projects shares similarities with Minix. Minix is still used at universities as an educational tool for teaching operating system design. Minix is the operating system that taught Linus Torvalds how to design (monolithic) operating systems. Similarly having students adding capabilities to GuppyLM is a good way to learn LLM design.

thomasfl··on Do Architects Still Need to Draw? (2020)
Yes, architects still very much needs to draw by hand. Imagining working as an architect on a single family house. Being able to listen to the client and make drawings by hand in meetings is the best way to communicate architectural ideas. Drawing on paper before continuing on a computer, also makes it easier for an architect to design something other than square boxes.
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