Hacker News: TomMasz

New comment by TomMasz in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

TomMasz — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:26:40 +0000

The "no one at Microsoft, not a single soul, could articulate why up to 173 agents were needed to manage an Azure node" really stuck with me. You have to wonder how many other parts of the code lack ownership and are in there just because no one knows what will happen if you take them out.

New comment by TomMasz in "Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)"

TomMasz — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:16:05 +0000

Having worked in food service, I learned that restaurants are low-margin businesses that will cut every corner they can. Paying to have their grease taken care of when there's a convenient drain out back is a non-starter. It wouldn't be surprising if they also never cleaned their ventilation hoods or the grease trap in the drains. When you see a mention of a restaurant fire (that isn't arson), it's likely because of dirty hoods.

New comment by TomMasz in "Fontcrafter: Turn Your Handwriting into a Real Font"

TomMasz — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 15:00:17 +0000

I did this years ago with a site whose name I can't recall. I still use the results for certain things, but it's certainly not a font you can use for everything.

New comment by TomMasz in "Mozilla is working on a big Firefox redesign, here is what it looks like"

TomMasz — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:19:06 +0000

Change for the sake of change.

New comment by TomMasz in "Ask HN: How many of you hold an amateur radio license in your country?"

TomMasz — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:07:37 +0000

KC2TCK since 2007.

New comment by TomMasz in "Medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are fiction"

TomMasz — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:35:56 +0000

This is fine, though somewhat belated. But it does nothing to deal with the public's growing distrust of science in general, and medical science in particular.

New comment by TomMasz in "Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon"

TomMasz — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:25:56 +0000

I was wondering this, too. There's no mention of OS support, but I assume Intel is working with the usual suspects on it.

New comment by TomMasz in "I built a pint-sized Macintosh"

TomMasz — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:52:47 +0000

There's a really small form-factor Mac clone based on the pico-mac on a Pi RP2040. Only available in kit form after Apple complained.

https://blog.1bitrainbow.com/pico-mac-nano/

New comment by TomMasz in "U.S. science agency moves to restrict foreign scientists from its labs"

TomMasz — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:45:40 +0000

Isn't this the same sort of thing that the Nazi's did?

New comment by TomMasz in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

TomMasz — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:19:31 +0000

This sounds like one of those laws that get used not so much to force compliance, but to punish noncompliance as part of a larger case.

New comment by TomMasz in "Grocy "Home Management""

TomMasz — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:39:14 +0000

I would use something like this. My wife most certainly would not, which would defeat the whole purpose.

New comment by TomMasz in "Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations"

TomMasz — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 20:08:06 +0000

Isn't this the sort of thing editors are supposed to catch before publication? It's good that they retracted the article and apologized to the person who was falsely quoted, but it still managed to appear before someone caught it.

New comment by TomMasz in "Ask HN: Anyone Using a Mac Studio for Local AI/LLM?"

TomMasz — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:32:38 +0000

I've got an M2 Ultra with 64 GB, and I've been using gpt-oss-20b lately with good results. Performance and RAM usage have been reasonable for what I've been doing. I've been thinking of trying the newer Qwen 3 Coder Next just to see what it's like, though.

New comment by TomMasz in "Usenet personality"

TomMasz — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:30:05 +0000

Kibo, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

The days of Usenet, uucp, and Telebit Trailblazers seem as long ago as the telegraph now.

New comment by TomMasz in "Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All"

TomMasz — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:17:15 +0000

The 555 figured prominently in a digital circuits course I took back in the mid-80s. It was into its second decade of existence by that point, and it's still going strong.

New comment by TomMasz in "LM Studio 0.4"

TomMasz — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:54:02 +0000

I've been using LM Studio for a while, this is a nice update. For what I need, running a local model is more than adequate. As long as you have sufficient RAM, of course.

New comment by TomMasz in "Robin Williams tickles Coco the monkey"

TomMasz — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:58:30 +0000

It's Koko, not Coco. And she was a gorilla, not a monkey.

New comment by TomMasz in "Bugs Apple loves"

TomMasz — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 11:57:03 +0000

Mail search is a joke. HoudahSpot was the best way to search your mail right up until Apple made that stop working.

New comment by TomMasz in "You can now download Windows 7 and Vista ISO images with all the updates"

TomMasz — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:54:03 +0000

Windows 7 was the last really good Windows. MS lost sight of the goal after that.

New comment by TomMasz in "The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible"

TomMasz — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:34:18 +0000

This is great. It created a link to my personal site that Firefox blocked me from going to.