Hacker News: Timpy

New comment by Timpy in "Those who can, teach history"

Timpy — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:24:31 +0000

I really like Crash Course World History. I'm older than the target demographic for this resource to be sure, but it's a great high level overview and having this under my belt helped me feel a little more oriented in every other historical thing I've dabbled in since.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBDA2E52FB1EF80C9

New comment by Timpy in "Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub"

Timpy — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 01:57:29 +0000

I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting to take my coding hobby more seriously at the time and hacking on Anki was a big part of that too. Thanks for all the hard work Damien and David Allison. I'm so grateful for the software you've worked on.

New comment by Timpy in "I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me"

Timpy — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 12:51:46 +0000

A lot of training data was curated in Kenya[0]. I would imagine if LLM data was curated in Japan our LLMs would sound a lot like the authors of their most popular English text books. Maybe other common Japanese idioms would leak in to the training data, like "ね" or "でしょう", ChatGPT would say "Don't you agree?" at the end of every message.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...

New comment by Timpy in "Checkout.com hacked, refuses ransom payment, donates to security labs"

Timpy — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 13:00:50 +0000

Yes but I think it's a good virtue to signal considering the circumstances. If they paid the ransom that would signal that ransoming this company works, incentivizing more ransoms. If they refuse to pay the ransom it might signal that they care more about money than they do integrity. Taking the financial hit of the ransom, but paying it to something that signals their values, is about the best move I can imagine.

New comment by Timpy in "I built my own phone because innovation is sad rn [video]"

Timpy — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 21:12:54 +0000

This is cool, very much the hacker ethos. But I didn't see any evidence that it can make a phone call though?

New comment by Timpy in "iPhone dumbphone"

Timpy — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 12:19:55 +0000

I think this guide is nice, and having a variety of articles like this is great so everybody can look at the different ideas and find what's right for them.

I would urge people to consider going a little bit further than this guide, consider not using your phone as a reading device. Imagine deciding to sit down with a physical book, but keeping your phone nestled on the opposite page as you read. It would be a lot nicer to read without interruption, without being exposed to notifications at all times. Sure there are going to be use cases where the phone is more convenient, but I think sacrificing convenience is worth it.

New comment by Timpy in "Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s"

Timpy — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 13:05:15 +0000

This is something I want to see in the world. Do you have a public repo? I'm currently doing third party application development for the Yoto, and I've done a lot of hacking on MP3s. If you're open source I'd be interested in helping, or at the very least chatting about the project.

New comment by Timpy in "At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work"

Timpy — Mon, 26 May 2025 14:14:29 +0000

I keep feeling like there's a huge disconnect between the owners/CTOs/managers with how useful they think LLMs _are supposed to be_, vs the people working on the product and how useful they think LLMs _actually are_. The article describes Harper Reed as a "longtime programmer", so maybe he falsifies my theory? From Wikipedia:

>Harper Reed is an American entrepreneur

Ah, that's a more realistic indicator of his biases. Either there's some misunderstanding, or he's incorrect, or he's being dishonest; it's my job to make sure the code that I ship is correct.

New comment by Timpy in "Someone at YouTube needs glasses"

Timpy — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 17:08:06 +0000

This is totally orthogonal to the issue but I think the best fix possible is to block the YouTube home page. I have gained value from algorithm-curated feeds in the past but it's no longer a net positive in my life. I recommend checking out News Feed Eradicator[0], Distraction Free YouTube[1], and set up some extremely aggressive uBlock Origin rules.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/

New comment by Timpy in "Reasoning models don't always say what they think"

Timpy — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:44:10 +0000

The models outlined in the white paper have a training step that uses reinforcement learning _without human feedback_. They're referring to this as "outcome-based RL". These models (DeepSeek-R1, OpenAI o1/o3, etc) rely on the "chain of thought" process to get a correct answer, then they summarize it so you don't have to read the entire chain of thought. DeepSeek-R1 shows the chain of thought and the answer, OpenAI hides the chain of thought and only shows the answer. The paper is measuring how often the summary conflicts with the chain of thought, which is something you wouldn't be able to see if you were using an OpenAI model. As another commenter pointed out, this kind of feels like a jab at OpenAI for hiding the chain of thought.

The "chain of thought" is still just a vector of tokens. RL (without-human-feedback) is capable of generating novel vectors that wouldn't align with anything in its training data. If you train them for too long with RL they eventually learn to game the reward mechanism and the outcome becomes useless. Letting the user see the entire vector of tokens (and not just the tokens that are tagged as summary) will prevent situations where an answer may look or feel right, but it used some nonsense along the way. The article and paper are not asserting that seeing all the tokens will give insight to the internal process of the LLM.

New comment by Timpy in "Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news"

Timpy — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 12:11:31 +0000

Just a friendly heads up, for the Japanese exercises the video starts just a bit too late and the word you're listening for is cut off. This might only be pertinent for languages where vocab words are appearing at the beginning of sentences, French and Spanish didn't have "gap words" at their sentence start for the few exercises I tried.

This is a cool app, I would have enjoyed this when I was grinding on Japanese back in the day.

New comment by Timpy in "The Great Barefoot Running Hysteria of 2010"

Timpy — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 12:58:01 +0000

"The concept of running shoes as we understand them today, specifically designed to improve running efficiency and comfort, did not emerge until the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

It's a neat idea imagining what running footwear was like throughout history. Was Pheidippides barefoot when he purportedly ran from Marathon to Athens? Did Indigenous Americans debate which style of moccasins was better for your long term foot health? Did warriors develop plantar fasciitis from poorly designed boots?

New comment by Timpy in "The High Heel Problem"

Timpy — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:33:04 +0000

I love these easy-to-illustrate examples where a request seems simple, but adds a lot of trouble for the person implementing it. "It's just adding a new skin for their footwear, how hard could that be?"

New comment by Timpy in "Microsoft is killing Skype"

Timpy — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 14:32:12 +0000

Back in the Windows 7 days I installed Skype on my parents computer before moving abroad, their user experience was basically like receiving a phone call. Even though they weren't tech savvy we never had any issues. I would call them, and if they were home and near the computer, they could answer it and we'd be video chatting.

A year or so ago I found this to be impossible, there was no application for desktop that was as simple as receiving a phone call. My father has no smart phone. I sent him a zoom link via email but he couldn't log on to the family computer without getting blasted with UI updates, terms of service changes, "Do you want to use OneDrive?", "Here's what's new in Chrome", "Try asking Copilot anything!", etc. From his perspective the computer never worked the same way twice. I wish we had regulations that prevented buying out competition.

New comment by Timpy in "Meta Project Aria - Smart Glasses Research Kit"

Timpy — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 13:56:56 +0000

You're right, it's possible and common to be recorded without somebody pointing a phone camera at you. That doesn't negate my point, right now the norm is that in many situations you _can_ record to your personal device without informed consent but you shouldn't. That will change if these types of cameras are everywhere.

New comment by Timpy in "Meta Project Aria - Smart Glasses Research Kit"

Timpy — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 15:15:30 +0000

Right now people have to point their phone cameras at at the thing they're photographing or recording, it's a very clear visual signal to others and there are cultural norms for this behavior. If a person is doing this in a common tourist destination that's more acceptable than pointing your camera at somebody else's children without asking them first. Imagine how uncomfortable it would be for somebody to hold their phone at eye level and point it at you the entire time they're having a conversation with you, even if they say they're not recording or anything like that. Having a distaste for smart glasses is pretty consistent with the status quo.

New comment by Timpy in "13ft – A site similar to 12ft.io but self-hosted"

Timpy — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 21:25:16 +0000

I wasn't even thinking about paywalls, the first thing I did was check to see if cookie banners and "Sign in with Google" popups went away. There's so many user-unfriendly things that you constantly deal with, any amount of browsing is just a bad experience without putting up defenses like this.

New comment by Timpy in "Color Wheels Are Wrong (2011)"

Timpy — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:39:08 +0000

> Ask any artist to explain how color works, and they’ll launch into a treatise about how the Three Primary Colors—red, blue, and yellow—form a color wheel

I don't think the author asked _any_ artists how color works before writing this line.

New comment by Timpy in "Developer posts secret key on GitHub, loses $40K in 2 minutes"

Timpy — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 12:34:37 +0000

I didn't read that to mean a literal two minutes. Based on his style of writing that was quoted in the article and the nature of his mistake I don't think he's reporting an in-depth postmortem on the situation, although I didn't bother going to twitter to take a closer look. He probably didn't even realize his mistake within two minutes.

New comment by Timpy in "Beej's Guide to Interprocess Communication"

Timpy — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 13:01:27 +0000

When I took my graduate level operating systems class we had to do a bunch of coursework in C. Beej's Guides are the reason I passed that class. Thank's Beej!