<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: Timwi</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Timwi</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:59:24 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=Timwi" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves NP-Complete Problems"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What non-contrived polynomial time problem can you think of that is n^20? I'm really curious.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Jun 2026 05:46:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48595217</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48595217</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48595217</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "How to earn a billion dollars"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is in the context of this thread, because the article is about exponential growth.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 05:36:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48551010</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48551010</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48551010</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're fond of asking candidates an unrealistic hypothetical and you think that's revealing?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 05:00:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550791</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550791</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550791</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Segmented type appreciation corner (2018)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The one that is labeled as “German” is similar to, but noticeably different from, the hardware display actually in use on Berlin underground trains. The real one has proper descenders, and also has narrow i/t/l and wider m/w (that is, it's not monospace). Alas, the provided link 404s as well.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:51:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48533190</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48533190</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48533190</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are a few mistakes in this talk; I'll list just two that I noticed.<p>1. He calls Array(16) and then talks about there being 16 separators. Of course, there are only 15. This kinda breaks the Batman joke.<p>2. He writes {}+[] and claims that he's adding a list to an object, then mocks the fact that it gives a different result than []+{} which gives [object Object]. In reality, if you write ({}+[]), you also get [object Object]. I'll leave it as a puzzle for you to figure out why {}+[] is different. (Hint: Gurer vf ab bowrpg gurer.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:32:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532992</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532992</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532992</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For future reference, the phrase is “hear, hear”.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:00:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532645</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532645</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532645</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you like Kool-aid? Perhaps a lot? You may be addicted.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2026 10:00:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48525755</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48525755</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48525755</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Leaving Mozilla"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Mastodon does not have persistence of data though. Your instance shuts down? All your posts are gone. I naively assumed I could just move them to a new instance and found out the hard way. I have felt disillusioned with Mastodon ever since.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 12:12:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516517</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516517</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516517</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "How we made hit video game Prince of Persia"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It’s megahit, no hyphen. Also the exe is called prince.exe in my copy of the game but it’s possible there were other versions.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:41:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514964</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514964</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48514964</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What SQL system have you been using where just escaping a string requires “an ever-increasing pile of regexes”?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:47:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480888</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480888</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480888</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why is a format string or string concatenation (or interpolation, what I would use) the “wrong way” when all user input (more precisely: all string literals) are properly escaped?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:42:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480816</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480816</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480816</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Win16 Memory Management"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can tell you about <i>my</i> experiences with this, which from what I hear are unusual. I first learned programming in C128 BASIC. Then on the PC it was QBasic and Turbo Pascal, and later Perl.<p>What all of these languages have in common is that you can write meaningful programs entirely without pointers or manual memory management. In particular, all of these languages handle <i>strings</i> in a natural, high-level way (treating them as a <i>value</i>) and don't require you to allocate and free buffers for them. Perl goes a step further with arrays and hashmaps and employs a full garbage collector.<p>I have vague memories of trying C for the first time and getting completely lost and bogged down by all the pointers and memory management. My reaction was the same as yours: how does anyone program in this. Why bother with this complexity when you can just use Pascal where you simply don't have to.<p>Of course, the Pascal compiler was likely written in C or assembly and all the memory management still had to happen even if it was hidden away from me. To some people, this might mean that I “lost” something, but to me, it meant greater freedom as I was able to explore the world of higher-level programming which I found interesting, and not have to bother with the low-level details which I found tedious and even infuriating.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:08:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440623</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440623</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440623</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I want doctors to outsource their diagnosis to AI if and only if the AI’s accuracy of diagnosis has surpassed that of the doctor.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:13:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414584</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414584</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414584</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> how do you take the shape of the human corpus and all its gradients and [somehow] arrive at something greater than human, where was the missing information hiding?<p>Well, how do humans do it? Scientists discover new stuff that isn't in any corpus. Even I as a lowly computer user occasionally figure something out about a software without reading a help screen. It's obviously possible to arrive at new information by interpolating existing information.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:10:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413576</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413576</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413576</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Why Janet? (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> But that’s not how humans writing code generally think about ambiguous expressions. You can see that by how few precedence rules programmers tend to internalize<p>I'd argue that it <i>is</i> how humans think about ambiguous syntax, <i>except</i> in the special case of operator precedence, which is the most complex example. A more salient example to me would be, say, the case of an ‘else’ block after a double-‘if’:<p><pre><code>  if (c) if (d) X; else Y;
</code></pre>
It's technically ambiguous, but you only need to run into it once, see how your IDE auto-formatter indents it, and then you've internalized the precedence rule immediately.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:16:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48376428</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48376428</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48376428</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Why Janet? (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I actually hung out in their IRC for a while hoping to maybe form a social connection and then get an invite, but somehow it just never materialized, and the chat wasn't engaging, so I stopped coming back...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:06:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375514</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375514</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375514</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> "Matter" is an abstaction. Mind, properly considered, (i.e. not with words) is not.<p>> Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically.<p>Did you mean to say “matter” where you said “mind” and vice versa? It’s obviously the reverse of what you said; everything consists of matter, but what specific arrangements of matter you want to call a “mind” is obviously the abstraction.<p>Ockam’s razor is not really applicable here. Unless, that is, you want to ascribe something mythical to the mind that exists beyond matter — then it’ll trigger.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:59:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364147</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364147</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364147</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's a lot of assertions with no real argument to back it up.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:47:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364066</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364066</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364066</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I read it too in school. I thought it was super obscure!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:29:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363936</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363936</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363936</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Timwi in "Only 17% of all 64-bit Integers are products of two 32-bit integers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It looks like that has been fixed in the article. Good catch!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:59:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363220</link><dc:creator>Timwi</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363220</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48363220</guid></item></channel></rss>