Hacker News: TimPC

New comment by TimPC in "What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?"

TimPC — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:05:20 +0000

I think pop musicians are capable of doing greater works later, but the perception of pop works are so heavily influenced by the image/presentation of the artist that we view the works as lesser. I don't think there is something fundamentally different about pop music that leads to best works being earlier relative to other genres of music beyond that.

New comment by TimPC in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

TimPC — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:44:27 +0000

Elderly retirees seldom move. They’ve long paid off their mortgage and we keep property taxes extremely low so they are pretty much immune to the cost of housing. Once you put down roots in a community it’s hard to leave.

New comment by TimPC in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

TimPC — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:03:04 +0000

It's easier to define safeguards and the definition of inside information for stock markets than for prediction markets though. There is plenty of information that should ban someone from prediction markets that also wouldn't meet the definition of material non-public information.

New comment by TimPC in "OpenAI resets spending expectations, from $1.4T to $600B"

TimPC — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:10:25 +0000

OpenAI is a bet on LLMs replacing a large chunk of the labour force in whatever sector it’s best at replacing. It’s essentially looking to get companies to pay $5k-$10k a month to have coding agents replace the output of a single software engineer.

If the S-curve levels off below that level OpenAI will be an unsuccessful company.

New comment by TimPC in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

TimPC — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:38:55 +0000

Big tech likes this because there are a lot more face recognition technologies in the wild in real life and being able to connect all real life data to online data is quite valuable. It's also quite possibly the largest training set ever for face recognition if ids are stored and given how ids and images are sold across many companies it seems very high probability that some company will retain the data rather than delete after use.

New comment by TimPC in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

TimPC — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:05:24 +0000

I think more than ever programmers need jobs where performance matters and the naive way the AI does things doesn't cut it. When no one cares about things other than correctness your job turns into AI Slop. The good news right now is that AI tends to produce things that AI struggles to do well with so large scale projects often descend into crap. You can write a C-compiler for $20,000 with an explosive stack of agents, but that C-compiler isn't anywhere close to efficient or performant.

As model costs come down that $20,000 will become a viable number for doing entirely AI-generate coding. So more than ever you don't want to be doing work that the AI is good enough at. Either jobs where performance matters or being able to code the stack of agents needed to produce high quality code in an application context.

New comment by TimPC in "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"

TimPC — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 23:30:43 +0000

It’s far less important for ad-free content. They mainly want to connect your ad watching behaviour to an email and then have loyalty program data connected to the same email so that they can identify which ads convert vs not.

New comment by TimPC in "The "confident idiot" problem: Why AI needs hard rules, not vibe checks"

TimPC — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:56:51 +0000

The benchmarks are dumb but highly followed so everyone optimizes for the wrong thing.

New comment by TimPC in "Mathematics is hard for mathematicians to understand too"

TimPC — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:04:41 +0000

If it's actually in the service of rigor then it's not unnecessaryily unwelcoming. If it's only nominally in the service of rigor than maybe, but Mathematics absolutely needs extreme rigor.

New comment by TimPC in "School cell phone bans and student achievement"

TimPC — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 02:22:23 +0000

This seems like the single worst way to measure this because by looking at chronological data you get all kinds of temporal effects. A better baseline would be to look at the difference between pre-cell phone ban scores and post cell-hone ban scores compared to other districts where the cell phone ban didn't occur.

I find it completely unremarkable that test scores went up post-COVID and feel it's very hard to tell what is causing what.

New comment by TimPC in "It's Always the Process, Stupid"

TimPC — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 15:47:00 +0000

I feel like this is an inside view from the BPO community and the only part of AI they see is the part that affects BPO. But for most businesses AI strategy is not about AI for internal use but AI to either improve customer funnels or launch new products. Most of the companies I've talked to in the past year wanted a strategy for customer facing AI not internal AI.

New comment by TimPC in "A Sad Collapse in Student Preparation at UC San Diego Was Inevitable"

TimPC — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 14:58:05 +0000

Earning a 4.0 GPA in high school math while only knowing middle school math seems absolutely wild. Is that truly a side effect of COVID or are certain schools just going to be heavily penalized in admissions because their standards are far too low?

New comment by TimPC in "Ireland is making basic income for artists program permanent"

TimPC — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:01:31 +0000

This program is an insignificant spec of spending compared to UBI though. UBI in most countries would be 50% of all government spending and welfare related spend is just nowhere close to that.

New comment by TimPC in "Ireland is making basic income for artists program permanent"

TimPC — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:00:38 +0000

Psychological wellbeing contributes some amount of money though in systems that pay for healthcare (especially when that includes psychiatry). It's also to a degree one of the key things government spending is hoping to produce so if it is actually producing that it's a good use of funds.

I do agree the program needs to make it doable to get the funds in order to become an artist since otherwise it's exclusively for rich artists who can be an artist while waiting for eligibilty.

New comment by TimPC in "How has mathematics gotten so abstract?"

TimPC — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:03:36 +0000

In general you aren't testing as an empiricist though, you are looking for a rational argument to prove or disprove something.

New comment by TimPC in "This map is not upside down"

TimPC — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 13:49:54 +0000

The article fails to cover the main point. It's not just about putting the south at the top of the map but doing the projection from the south instead of the north which makes the south appear bigger and the north appear smaller rather than vice versa. I think top vs bottom for good vs bad is weaker than the bigger is better piece they fail to even mention.

New comment by TimPC in "H-1B Visa Changes Approved by White House"

TimPC — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 19:27:30 +0000

Ranking by Salary probably makes the most sense if you're going to cap the numbers you want the most productive people who contribute the most to the tax base.

New comment by TimPC in "AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser"

TimPC — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 19:13:06 +0000

People should be worried because right now AI is on an exponential growth trajectory and no-one knows when it will level off into an s-curve. AI is starting to get close to good enough. If it becomes twice as good in seven months then what?

New comment by TimPC in "Building better AI tools"

TimPC — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 13:11:29 +0000

I think the problem is do you want to give the AI access to prod. See the recent example where AI wiped a DB despite instructions not to (because AI sometimes does things more often when you tell it not to do something because the negative from not is not always reliably picked up)

New comment by TimPC in "I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again"

TimPC — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:41:19 +0000

A product with $6000 in revenue selling for only $12,500 seems crazy to me. Why were you so eager to get rid of it?