Hacker News: IsTom

New comment by IsTom in "The Dead Economy Theory"

IsTom — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:59:04 +0000

It's much easier to generate and publish vast amounts of slop articles than to make real ones.

New comment by IsTom in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

IsTom — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:49:47 +0000

> at which point I think it ceases to be "just" Latin script?

I draw my line at 'U'.

New comment by IsTom in "--dangerously-skip-reading-code"

IsTom — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:14:14 +0000

> What we really we need is some kind of more detailed spec language that doesn't have edge cases, where we describe exactly what we expect the generated code to do, and then formally verify that the now generated code matches the input spec requirement.

That's theorem provers and they're awful for anything of any reasonable complexity.

New comment by IsTom in "Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions"

IsTom — Tue, 19 May 2026 07:31:24 +0000

And there are language families where minimal DFA is still exponentially large compared to NFA.

New comment by IsTom in "I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left"

IsTom — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:01:11 +0000

I might be holding it wrong, but last time I tried to use DynamoDB it made absolutely no sense performance-wise to me. Postgres on my laptop was many orders of magnitude faster for fraction of price. It seemed like it maybe might make sense when you hit multiple TBs of database data and can no longer run on a single server? But then the costs would be sky-high and you probably could engineer your way around this with this kind of money.

New comment by IsTom in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

IsTom — Sun, 10 May 2026 07:10:48 +0000

You could like, just trust a single binary. Have a button right there in the popup that already shows up.

New comment by IsTom in "All means are fair except solving the problem"

IsTom — Sat, 09 May 2026 07:57:04 +0000

Last time I had that problem -xerror helped.

New comment by IsTom in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

IsTom — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:30:06 +0000

It's the punishment for all the times people laughed at calling regular Linux "GNU/Linux".

New comment by IsTom in "Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal"

IsTom — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:18:11 +0000

Well, I'm using uBlock Origin on Firefox and can see the content just fine. So maybe that's the way.

New comment by IsTom in "Docker 29 has changed its default image store for new installs"

IsTom — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:26:32 +0000

Docker is already hogging a lot of disk space and needs to be pruned regularly. I can't imagine what's it's going to be like now.

New comment by IsTom in "What can we gain by losing infinity?"

IsTom — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:10:26 +0000

There is a way to look at mathematics as just a bunch of rewrite rules for things on paper. It might not be particularly inspiring, but it's a valid way to look at things.

New comment by IsTom in "The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss"

IsTom — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:47:01 +0000

Besides "secret" knowledge like the know-how at jobs, there's things like unwritten social etiquette (especially as it varies from place to place) or interfacing with physical world – reading about chopping tomatoes is different from experience acquired by actually chopping tomatoes.

New comment by IsTom in "US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid"

IsTom — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:28:01 +0000

Historically aristocracy was the military class. Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead.

New comment by IsTom in "DeepSeek v4"

IsTom — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 07:23:21 +0000

You can say the same about the US

New comment by IsTom in "I am building a cloud"

IsTom — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:12:48 +0000

And funnily recently many of the Big Serious Cloud Websites are shitting the bed of availability aggressively.

New comment by IsTom in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

IsTom — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:30:54 +0000

Wikipedia seems to disagree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Abiogenic_petroleum

New comment by IsTom in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

IsTom — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:30:39 +0000

Well, it's on web archive. So unless they got their hands on it almost a month early or escaped their light cone it wasn't.

New comment by IsTom in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

IsTom — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:12:27 +0000

Never had this issue with several cellphones I had in ye olden times when all cellphones had removable batteries. All it takes is a properly designed connector.

New comment by IsTom in "The RAM shortage could last years"

IsTom — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:46:26 +0000

Or just using less electron and writing less shit code.

New comment by IsTom in "Category Theory Illustrated – Orders"

IsTom — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 10:16:49 +0000

I think that CT is more akin to just a different language for mathematics than a solid set of axioms from which you can prove things. The most fact-y proof I've personally seen was that you can't extend the usual definition of functions in set theory to work with parametric polymorphism (not that just some constructions won't work, but that there isn't one at all).