<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: TimTheTinker</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TimTheTinker</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 19:18:36 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=TimTheTinker" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "Indoor Wi-Fi Roaming with OpenWRT"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not to be that guy, but...<p>If you want multiple SSIDs, roaming, daily neighbor scanning and auto channel selection, etc, but don't like to spend hours tinkering with your equipment beyond the physical setup, then Ubiquiti UniFi equipment is great.<p>I stopped recommending UniFi around 2020 (several of their best engineers had left, and they made some dumb choices), but IMO they're back to being a decent choice. And I appreciate that they're become a one-stop solution for all home/SOHO as well as mid size enterprise IT needs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 16:43:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48311536</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48311536</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48311536</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Here's the question - does that future spending already appear on partners' balance sheets</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 21:28:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300997</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300997</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48300997</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I thought Anthropic and OpenAI's combined CapEx has been <100B?<p>source: <a href="https://isaiprofitable.com/" rel="nofollow">https://isaiprofitable.com/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 27 May 2026 18:21:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48298291</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48298291</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48298291</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The year of Linux on the desktop (and its broader adoption) is in part slowed by fragmentation across distros and weird names.<p>You wouldn't tell your mom about this great operating system she should use named "GNU/Linux". That's bad marketing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 09:28:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48277242</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48277242</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48277242</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I know that, most technical people know it, but I refuse to call it "GNU/Linux" because that's a dumb name and Richard Stallman is so over the top pedantic to constantly insist on it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 04:21:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274953</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274953</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274953</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "Norway's 2 petabytes of Huawei flash storage and LLM training"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American.<p>Then add top-level instructions saying what country you're from, what country you live in now, and which language you speak. This isn't that hard.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 03:28:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274635</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274635</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48274635</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "California moves to exempt Linux from its age-verification law after backlash"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Huh? An operating system, as defined by Andrew Tanenbaum[0], the author of both Minix and of the best operating textbook ever, is a combination of:<p>- an "extended machine": provide usable abstractions over the hardware to reduce complexity to a manageable level<p>- a "resource manager": provide for an orderly and controlled allocation of the processors, memories, and I/O devices among all the various programs wanting them.<p>By that definition, Linux is very much an operating system... unless by "Linux" you meant the kernel only without the additional tooling (systemd, libc, coreutils, shell, etc.) that distros ship with.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 00:48:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48273679</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48273679</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48273679</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "Shunning AI is the human choice"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>All a functional religion needs is on-demand answers to arbitrary life questions... which is what chatbots do, unfortunately.<p>Ancient Greek/Roman polytheism lost its social power around the time the oracles stopped speaking.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 19:24:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48227759</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48227759</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48227759</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Try prompting Claude to create a drop-in replacement for an existing library, testing against that library's test suite to validate functionality.<p>It will pretty much plagiarize the library verbatim from memory, sans comments.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 17:17:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226084</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226084</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226084</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[OpenProse: Author Outcomes]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://github.com/openprose/prose">https://github.com/openprose/prose</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221650">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221650</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 12:35:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://github.com/openprose/prose</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221650</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221650</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> A police officer's job is to lie to you<p>Federal statute should categorize that as a fireable offense and an intentional tort incurring punitive damages at minimum, and any subsequent proceedings (after the lie) as inadmissible evidence.<p>If that makes investigation more difficult, then so be it. For too long, law enforcement and federal investigators have relied on inappropriate and immoral techniques to obtain conviction. Mass surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, manipulating suspects -- what happened to old-school investigation that was after <i>truth</i> via smart observation and deduction? There's a reason people love watching Poirot: it's a (admittedly stylized) snapshot of real justice in progress.<p>Their expected standard of behavior should be higher than that of citizens.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 17:36:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48211223</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48211223</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48211223</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One of the worst examples in the US is the <i>consequence asymmetry</i> for speech. Law enforcement and federal agents can lie as much as they like with impunity when dealing with citizens, but (a) it's a federal crime to lie to a federal officer (18 US Code § 1001, up to 8 years imprisonment), and (b) truly, <i>anything</i> you say to law enforcement when under any suspicion can and will be used against you in a court of law, even the act of pleading the 5th, regardless of (or perhaps especially because of) your innocence. "I want a lawyer", repeated ad-nauseam, is always the least harmful response, regardless of context[0].<p>Also, the body of federal law and regulations is so vast that smart people estimate the average person unknowingly breaks roughly 3 federal criminal laws per day[1], giving the federal government the legal ability to arbitrarily arrest anyone they want.<p>[0] James Duane, <i>You have the right to remain innocent</i>, 2016<p>[1] Harvey Silverglate, <i>Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent</i>, 2011.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 16:09:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48210019</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48210019</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48210019</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "Mythical Man Month"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>AI is certainly able to increase coding speed, especially for experienced engineers who can design the analytical parts themselves (data structures, interfaces, invariants, and process), but in large projects and/or organizations, queuing theory (especially as understood by lean development practitioners like Don Reinertsen) is going to be nasty.<p>Lean development theory teaches us that in a multi-workstream, multi-stage development process, developers should be kept at roughly 65-75% utilization. Otherwise, contra-intuitively, work queue lengths increase <i>exponentially</i> the closer utilization gets to 100%. The reason is that slack in the system absorbs and smooths perturbations and variability, which are inevitable.<p>Furthermore, underutilization is also highly comparable to stock market options: their value <i>increases</i> as variability increases. Slack enables quick pivots with less advance notice. It builds continuous responsiveness into the system. And as the Agile Manifesto tells us, excellent software development is <i>more</i> characterized by the ability to respond to change than the mere ability to follow a plan. Customers appreciate responsiveness from software vendors; it builds trust, which is increasing in value all the more with the rise of AI.<p>But AI-driven development threatens to <i>increase</i>, not decrease individual engineer utilization. More is expected, more is possible, and frankly, once you learn how to guardrail the AI and give it no trust to design well analytically, the speed a senior engineer can achieve  while writing great code with AI assistance often feels intoxicating.<p>I think we're going to go through a whole new spat of hard, counterintuitive lessons similar to those many 1960s and 70s developers like Fred Brooks and his IBM team learned the hard way.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 09 May 2026 05:17:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072026</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072026</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072026</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "I want to live like Costco people"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My wife and I shop at both Costco and TJs. They are our favorite stores...<p>We're a bit odd though. Highly budget conscious, 4 kidsto feed (including 2 teenagers), and European tastes in food.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 20:01:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054136</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054136</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054136</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not intended as anything more than "I'm not a crank to say that, unless you think most people (now and in history) are cranks"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 21:45:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029056</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029056</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029056</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is exactly what I meant. Poor specificity on my part.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 21:43:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029026</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029026</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48029026</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I reject the premise that the universe, the earth, and human existence is without purpose. It's one premise among several, and not one I subscribe to.<p>At least 80% of people agree with me, so I'm not holding to a fringe idea.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 18:08:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026264</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026264</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026264</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines<p>Talking to chatbots is like taking a placebo pill for a condition. You know it's just sugar, but it creates a measurable psychosomatic effect nonetheless. Even if you <i>know</i> there's no person on the other end, the conversation still causes you to functionally relate as if there is.<p>So this isn't "accommodating foibles" with the machine, it's <i>protecting ourselves from an exploit</i> of a human vulnerability: we subconsciously tend to infer intent, understanding, judgment, emotions, moral agency, etc. to LLMs.<p>Humans are wired to infer these based on conversation alone, and LLMs are unfortunately able to exploit human conversation to <i>leap</i> compellingly over the uncanny valley. LLM engineering couldn't be better made to target the uncanny valley: training on a vast corpus of real human speech. That uncanny valley is there for a reason: to protect us from inferring agency where such inference is not due.<p>Bad things happen when we relate to unsafe people as if they are safe... how much more should we watch out for how we relate to machines that imitate human relationality to fool many of us into thinking they are something that they're not. Some particularly vulnerable people have already died because of this, so it isn't an imaginary threat.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 16:47:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025033</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025033</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025033</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "U.S. Senators Vote to Ban Themselves from Trading on Prediction Markets"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The 15% cap likely only applies to IRS-reportable gains on the congressperson's personal tax return. That unfortunately doesn't preclude insider trading by spouses, within IRA accounts, or within wholly or partially owned c-corporations controlled by the congressperson or a close family member.<p>We need a federal law that says: "the definition of material non-public information (MNPI) is extended to mean any non-public information those in federal, state, or local government are privy to that may affect securities prices, and individuals in or adjacent to government are equally subject to prosecution for trading on it".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:55:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47968734</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47968734</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47968734</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TimTheTinker in "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think a better counter is the question "Is there a meaningful difference between binary discretization and Planck units? Aren't those discrete/indivisible as well?"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:47:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953507</link><dc:creator>TimTheTinker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953507</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953507</guid></item></channel></rss>