Hacker News: ThomW

New comment by ThomW in "NPR finds "no sign" of Polymarket at its Panama HQ address"

ThomW — Tue, 05 May 2026 22:50:49 +0000

Why are Americans allowed to invest in a business that would be illegal if based in the US? Why can they be patrons? Idgi

New comment by ThomW in "Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood"

ThomW — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:09:49 +0000

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.“

New comment by ThomW in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

ThomW — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:17:16 +0000

Companies are making decisions based on these things. It's mind-boggling.

New comment by ThomW in "Murder-suicide case shows OpenAI selectively hides data after users die"

ThomW — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:39:12 +0000

I don't think the AI should have the ability to pretend it's something it's not. Claiming it's achieved some level of consciousness is just lying -- maybe that's another thing it should be prevented from doing.

I can't imagine any positive outcome from an interaction where the AI pretends it's not anything but a tool capable of spewing out vetted facts.

New comment by ThomW in "Shader Glass"

ThomW — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:57:27 +0000

I really want all my media players to include this. Cheers doesn't look the same since my 27" CRT died, and watching it through Shader Glass reminds me a lot of the look of that old TV.

New comment by ThomW in "I ditched Docker for Podman"

ThomW — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 19:07:08 +0000

We did the same. Switching was a cinch honestly - the only thing that screwed me up was some dumb page that returned a bunch of nonsense I was supposed to do to my docker-compose.yml file to make it more compatible with podman-compose. I spent a couple hours trying to figure out why things weren't working, until I finally rolled back all the stupid suggested changes, and my app fired right up.

The only impactful difference I've noticed so far is that the company is moving to an artifact repository that requires authentication, and mounting secrets using --mount doesn't support the env= parameter -- that's really it.

I treat podman like I did docker all day long and it works great.

New comment by ThomW in "SuperSight: A graphical enhancement mod for Brøderbund's "Stunts""

ThomW — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 14:44:11 +0000

I’m always thrilled when someone posts something new about Stunts. I had such a good time with that game in college. :)

New comment by ThomW in "Using lots of little tools to aggressively reject the bots"

ThomW — Sat, 31 May 2025 17:39:20 +0000

It ticks me off that bots no longer respect robots.txt files at all. The authors of these things are complete assholes. If you’re one of them, gfy.

New comment by ThomW in "I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt"

ThomW — Tue, 06 May 2025 04:46:05 +0000

It absolutely floors me that children are forced by law to attend school and they don't automatically get a hot meal. That's irresponsible.

New comment by ThomW in "How to help us build open source Pebble software"

ThomW — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 15:12:22 +0000

It was really the first usable smartwatch in my mind.

My absolute favorite thing was that it gave developers the ability to create custom watch faces. I wrote a bunch of them and absolutely loved the dumb thing.

New comment by ThomW in "Minecraft with object impermanence"

ThomW — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 14:13:21 +0000

I'm guessing the author didn't play Cyberpunk at launch -- the cars and pedestrians would blink out of existence if you turned around. I couldn't help but think that Rockstar had figured this out 19 years prior in GTA3. :/

New comment by ThomW in "Show HN: I made a mini golf in my lunch time"

ThomW — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:01:37 +0000

Hex tiles are a really smart improvement on the game. I do kind of miss the little trees instead of just the dark green color though. :D

I also wonder if the graphics wouldn't make playing easier for color blind folks. :)

New comment by ThomW in "Talking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer"

ThomW — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 23:14:30 +0000

I feel super fortunate to be a part of that generation where screwing around at home could lead directly to employment. I taught myself Atari BASIC on my 800 and took a 286 IBM compatible to college where I was a music major. I dropped out and landed working for an industrial automation company because I knew how to write dumb little programs. A couple years later I was the sole guy programming robots for them in a structured BASIC language.

New comment by ThomW in "FCC votes to limit prison telecom charges"

ThomW — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 14:21:10 +0000

Prisons need to be run by the government and aim for rehabilitation. For-profit prisons shouldn't exist. What's the incentive for a company to rehabilitate prisoners? It'd ruin repeat business and eat into profits. :/

New comment by ThomW in "Show HN: I wrote a symmetry game with a daily puzzle"

ThomW — Wed, 15 May 2024 18:37:09 +0000

Safari in MacOS just shows a screen full of "Scroll down" after the initial "Let's Go" is clicked. :/

New comment by ThomW in "I made a new backplane for my consumer NAS"

ThomW — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 18:18:36 +0000

I would have bought some velcro strips with adhesive and stuck it to the side of the box. lol

New comment by ThomW in "When do we stop finding new music?"

ThomW — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 03:12:07 +0000

I'm 53 and love Spotify and Reddit's 80s subreddits for music discovery.

I love finding new stuff (IDLES, Shame, and High Vis are recent faves) and finding old stuff that's new to me (I flew across the country to see The Cult playing in LA as their old band name -- Death Cult -- and never knew there was a live album version of Dreamtime that's terrific from back in the day).

New comment by ThomW in "LinkedIn laying off nearly 700, mostly from core engineering teams"

ThomW — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 16:25:49 +0000

This is my fault. I finally unsubscribed from one of their annoying pointless emails that I never open this weekend.

New comment by ThomW in "Getty made an AI generator that only trained on its licensed image"

ThomW — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 14:55:50 +0000

I think this is where all the AI stuff is headed.

Authors, artists, etc. are suing projects whose models just inhaled their work and generate derivative works and I'm surprised the studios aren't getting more involved with going after AI models that included their properties in them.

I can see this going the route of us having a Disney AI, Sony AI, Discovery AI, Amazon AI, etc. where you can generate stuff using models owned by the studios, but only those studios and any public domain stuff they suck in too.

New comment by ThomW in "Atari has launched collectible arcade circuit boards of retro classics"

ThomW — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 15:18:09 +0000

What letdown -- they're unpopulated PCBs. I'd buy Major Havoc in a second if it was ready to pop into my Tempest machine. :)