Hacker News: IsTom

New comment by IsTom in "Our approach to EU text provenance rules"

IsTom — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:37:05 +0000

Generally doing something intentionally or unintentionally might have different penalties.

New comment by IsTom in "Our approach to EU text provenance rules"

IsTom — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:09:49 +0000

Imagine that somebody sold you text that they mislead you to think is not generated by AI and then trying to convince court that they didn't mislead you intentionally. If they've removed the watermark it stops this kind of defense.

New comment by IsTom in "Replacement of petroleum based products with plant-based materials (2025)"

IsTom — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 14:04:05 +0000

It's from algae, which are not plants.

New comment by IsTom in "Run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B) on consumer hardware (RTX 4090) at 100T/s"

IsTom — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:09:56 +0000

> You can easily review 10-100x that in an hour

40k LoC per hour of pedantic review? That's eleven lines per second, every second, for an hour.

New comment by IsTom in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

IsTom — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 08:57:52 +0000

You need to be aware of all ways outside people can rack up your bill. If you've got experience it's okay, but getting hit with a huge bill because you left an S3 bucket out in the open is something that has happened too many times to people starting out.

New comment by IsTom in "Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes"

IsTom — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:56:39 +0000

In the EU it's typical to keep to the spirit of the law, not necessarily to the letter. It makes it less game-able. If the tax break is for research and you use it for research and not "well, technically it could be considered research if you squint hard enough", you'll be fine.

New comment by IsTom in "Tesla takes on $30B in credit as it approaches unprofitability"

IsTom — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:25:33 +0000

I've seen taxi drivers use them in Europe multiple times basically every time you want to transport more people. Beats using 2 cars.

New comment by IsTom in "Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests"

IsTom — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:18:36 +0000

> speaking about gypsies in a racist way is followed by a ban

I'm suspecting that is only because of behaviors learned from US on the internet. If not for that they wouldn't have thought of banning for it. It's not a topic that comes up often, but IRL negative views on gypsies are the norm in Europe.

I think it's important to understand that it's viewed as culture issue, not color-of-skin issue (that is something that can be changed, people of gypsy heritage that go to school and work are not considered gypsies for this) and so not getting filled in the category of "racism".

New comment by IsTom in "OpenAI: Tomorrow we are re-opening the Pro $200 subscription"

IsTom — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:06:02 +0000

And renamed to Copilot

New comment by IsTom in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

IsTom — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 18:02:21 +0000

If the Nord Stream didn't get blown up it could have been different.

New comment by IsTom in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

IsTom — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:34:27 +0000

That's the point. France has 70%+ nuclear energy in the mix, but isn't the economic miracle that nuclear power is supposed to bring.

New comment by IsTom in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

IsTom — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:29:34 +0000

> During the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder, the social democratic-green government decreed Germany's final retreat from using nuclear power by 2022.[1]

The Gerhard Schröder that

> Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom.[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der

New comment by IsTom in "Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage"

IsTom — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:15:14 +0000

Yeah, and it's alt+k on my default keyboard layout on debian… I think some punctuation is available on macos as well — so perhaps it's a windows-ism that «only AI can use punctuation».

New comment by IsTom in "Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap"

IsTom — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 20:40:36 +0000

> The "trick" is that they are not Turing-complete, they mandate termination of every expression.

I don't think this is a big deal for day-to-day programming. You're trying to stay in n, nlogn or maybe n^2 realm most of the time. And the kind of infinite loops you encounter (e.g. event loops) are co-inductive or have some notion of making progress.

New comment by IsTom in "I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture"

IsTom — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 18:27:02 +0000

Even more concretely, the halting problem for turing machines with halting problem oracle would be undecidable for them. And if you could solve that you won't believe what problem would be undecidable. It's turtles all the way up.

New comment by IsTom in "C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour"

IsTom — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:24:43 +0000

Yeah, but then you need compiler to somehow know if it's truly unreachable to know when to emit the warning and when to not do that.

New comment by IsTom in "C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour"

IsTom — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:08:30 +0000

> should've explored a rule that required the compiler to emit a diagnostic or error for trivial loops (whether as defined by C11 or otherwise), requiring the programmer to explicitly insert ::yield or similar

It wouldn't work when this kind of loop is generated by macros/templates in some unreachable case left after const folding.

New comment by IsTom in "Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap"

IsTom — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:39:03 +0000

> no general purpose programming language lets you put an arbitrary expression in the same language in a type as a permanent condition, or lets you state facts that the compiler will prove

Lean can be used as a regular programming language. There's also languages like idris2 and f-star, but they don't seem to have much traction.

New comment by IsTom in "Small programming tricks"

IsTom — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:54:04 +0000

`find` does a lot more things than that.

New comment by IsTom in "Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously"

IsTom — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:46:31 +0000

It's also a particle and a self-propelled gun. There's a limited number of short legible words.