<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: TruePath</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TruePath</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 21:43:50 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=TruePath" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, it changes the nature of the work.  Back when you started coding there were people experiencing the same thing about shifting to higher level languages.  What some of them liked was the efficency and aesthetic of using just the right assembly language trick and good compilers with high quality instruction selection took that away.  I'm sure there were programmers who missed the days of punching in hex into memory.<p>We start to understand those old fogeys who we blew past we were young once we get to their age.  It's the way of the world.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 11:32:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397648</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397648</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397648</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "No right to relicense this project"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If the AI is good enough to truly implement the whole thing to a similar level of reliability without copying it then who cares.  At that point you should be able to decompile any program you want and find enough information inside that an AI can go write a similar quality program from the vague information about the call graph.  We've transcended copyright in computer code.<p>If it can't and it costs a bunch of money to clean it up then same as always.<p>OTOH if what is actually happening is just that it is rewording the existing code so it looks different then it is still going to run afoul of copyright.  You can't just rewrite harry potter with different words.<p>Note that even with Google vs oracle it was important they didn't need the actual code just the headers to get the function calls were enough.  Yes it's true that the clean room isn't required but when you have an AI and you can show that it can't do it a second time without looking at the source (not just function declarations) that's pretty strong evidence.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:19:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280554</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280554</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280554</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's assuming you won't need anyone to manage the purchased software platform and its integrations and that you need a full time engineer to maintain your version.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:06:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207374</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207374</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207374</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Could you clarify exactly what you think is an illegal tie-in?  Because it seems like what you are upset about is literally the opposite -- Anthropic unbundling their offerings so you aren't required to buy the ability to offer third party access when you purchase the ability to use Claude code and their other models. Unless I really misunderstand you, your complaint is literally thaf<p>The laws prohibiting tie-ins don't make it illegal to sell two products that work well together.  That's literally what the laws are designed to make you do -- seperate products into seperate pieces.  The problem tie-in laws were designed to combat was situations like Microsoft making a popular OS then making a mediocre spreadsheet program and pushing the cost of that spreadsheet program into the cost of buying the OS.  That way consumers would go "well it's expensive but I get excel with it so it's ok" and even if someone else made a slightly better spreadsheet they didn't have the chance to convince users because they had to buy it all as one package.<p>Anthropic would be doing something much closer to that if they did what you wanted.  They'd be saying: hey we have this neat Claude code thing you all want to use but you can't buy that without also purchasing third party access. Now some company offering a cheaper/better third party usage product doesn't get the chance to convince you because anthropic forced you to buy that just to get claude code.<p>Ultimately this change unbundled products the opposite of a tie-in.  What is upsetting about it is that it no longer feels to you like you are getting a good deal because you now have to fork over a bunch more cash to keep getting what you want.  But that's not illegal, that's just not offering good value for money.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:49:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47079105</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47079105</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47079105</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I guess I don't even really understand the objection.  That's how ALL mathematics works.  You specify some axioms or a construction and then reason about objects that satisfy those constraints.  Some of them like the complex numbers turn out to be particularly useful.<p>But it's not fundamentally any different than what we do with the natural numbers.  Those just feel more familiar to you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2026 02:25:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998202</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998202</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998202</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Whoever wrote this just doesn't understand who apple's main customers really are.  Yes, devs may be a high impact customer base but most of apple's customers are people like my mom who struggles with the difference between Gmail the app, Gmail the web page and Gmail in apple mail and is reasonably worried about scams and viruses because she knows she isn't really tech savvy enough to spot them.  If she is going to run AI on her apple products it can't be 'well it probably won't delete your data.'. It needs to be something she can be sure is safe and is limited to the access she gives it.<p>That's a really tough problem.  I'm not even sure yet google can pull it off.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:40:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905766</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905766</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905766</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What is the usecase for using ssh at all where you don't need to be resistant against timing analysis? Either it's not sensitive and you can use telnet (if necessary after using ssh to authenticate) or the game (or other stuff on the connection) might be sensitive and you need traffic analysis resistance.<p>If you get clever and write a client to ensure sensitive data like passwords or email are sent in a burst you could just use an encryption library just for that data instead.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 04:19:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750663</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750663</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750663</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Lots of the real world vulnerabilities out there exist exactly because of people choosing to support a range of crypto algorithms.<p>Sure, if it's an internal tool you can recompile both ends and force a universal update.  But anything else and you need to stay compatible with clients and anytime you allow negotiation of the cryptosuit you open yourself up to quite a few subtle attacks.  Not saying that choice about go is clearly a good one but i don't think it's obviously wrong.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 04:11:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750624</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750624</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750624</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To clarify the point in the other reply -- imagine it sent one packet per keystroke.  Now anyone sitting on the network gets a rough measurement of the delay between your keystrokes.  If you are entering a password for something (perhaps not the initial auth) it can guess how many characters it is and turns out there are some systemic patterns in how that relates to the keys pressed -- eg letters typed with the same finger have longer delays between them.  Given the redundancy in most text and especially structured input that's a serious security threat.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 04:07:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750601</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750601</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750601</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Amazon is ending all inventory commingling as of March 31, 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I couldn't think of something worse than demanding Amazon decide what is counterfeit or violates regulations and policing that rule.  The law on both those points is far too complex for the result to be anything but Amazon blocks what the big brands tell them to and protect them from competition.<p>Amazon is essentially a logistics company with a search engine.  It doesn't really make sense to have them enforce regulations or counterfeiting rules than it would to make UPS and google.  It's not like they hide who the seller is on any item (it's listed as sold by).<p>What your complaining about is a fundamental consequence of <i>anything</i> that lowers the barriers to selling goods.  You once needed to buy a storefront to sell retail goods, later you at least needed sufficient name recognition for people to visit your website -- that investment gave anyone whose goods were counterfeit as well as regulators assets to seize.<p>But just like making it easy for every citizen to publish their thoughts means we see lots of hate and dumb shit online -- anything that lowers the barriers to selling retail goods (in general a good thing) will make it easy to sell counterfeit or defective crap.<p>In the long run, I suspect tech will make reputable 3rd party evaluations easier to access but let's not blame Amazon for not becoming an arm of the state and judging what is and isn't legal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:37:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46703679</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46703679</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46703679</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That gets a bit tricky in terms of what you mean by valid programs.  I presume what you mean is that you can't write a compiler that accepts every function which always returns the borrowed reference and reject every piece of code which fails to do so.<p>Though it's technically a bit different than the halting problem as this issue remains even if you assume that the function terminates -- you only want to show that the reference is returned assuming the code terminates if it isn't returned because it enters an infinite loop that's not a leak.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2026 02:33:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472203</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472203</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472203</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "The compiler is your best friend"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is no inherent benefit in going and expressing that fact in a type.  There are two potential concerns:<p>1) You think this state is impossible but you've made a mistake.  In this case you want to make the problem as simple to reason about as possible.  Sometimes types can help but other times it adds complexity when you need to force it to fit with the type system.<p>People get too enamored with the fact that immutable objects or certain kinds of types are easier to reason about <i>other things being equal</i> and miss the fact that the same logic can be expressed in any Turing complete language so these tools only result in a net reduction in complexity if they are a good conceptual match to the problem domain.<p>2) You are genuinely worried about the compiler or CPU not honoring it's theoretical guarantees -- in this case rewriting it only helps if you trust the code compiling those cases more for some reason.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 Jan 2026 23:06:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459193</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459193</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459193</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Optimizing my sleep around Claude usage limits"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is worth remembering that before artificial lighting the normal sleep pattern is to sleep in two segments and get up in the middle to have sex, talk, do some chores, change the baby etc.  And I believe a normal sleep cycle is something like 90 minutes so if you *really* sleep in 3 hour chunks that's actually probably healthier than the normal us sleep schedule. I mean many of us find the usual wake at 7am alarm schedule to be pretty damn brutal. However, if what you actually do is kinda lie around check your phone in bed etc and then get blasted awake by an alarm that's a different story.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 Aug 2025 07:29:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44861608</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44861608</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44861608</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Optimizing my sleep around Claude usage limits"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Some of the happiest and most satisfied people I know are academics who work 80+ hours a week because they love what they do.  You don't need to sacrifice health to work more than 50 hours a week.  And realistically there is no long term health damage from what he is doing.  And yes you can trade money for better health, though in the first world you rapidly hit diminishing returns but if your sleep deprivation can make the difference between being able to afford good health care or moving to an area with less pollution it absolutely can trade off like that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 Aug 2025 07:19:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44861542</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44861542</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44861542</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Why Deep Learning Works Unreasonably Well [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I really enjoyed the video but I think it can be a bit misleading.   It gives the impression that it is the universal approximation property that make neural nets so effective when, of course, the learning algorithm: memorize the training data and on input x return the output y which was associated with the input nearest x -- also has the universal approximation property.  Given training data from a continuous function f sampled via a distribution with non-zero density on interval I it will a converge to f (uniformly if I is a finite, and hence compact, interval).   Nor does the geometric explanation at the start have anything to do with why neural nets are so effective.<p>I'm honestly unsure of the theoretical reason neural nets are so effective at language processing.  But it certainly requires some characterization of the problem space (e.g. problems where the function to be learned has such and such property) since there are plenty of  mathematical techniques for approximating well-behaved continuous functions with certain features that way outperform neural nets at learning various classes of mathematically nice functions..</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 11 Aug 2025 04:29:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860763</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860763</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860763</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Kindle is removing download and transfer option on Feb 26th"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a problem that can only be fixed by legislation.  Other things being equal DRM that's convenient for the vast majority increases book sales and consumers aren't willing to pay enough more for DRM free books to cover the difference  -- much less understand the difference between 'owning' books and 'if we feel like it' licenses.  And even if a general (i.e. not O'REILLY) ebook/ereader vender just wanted to do the right thing it's far from clear you could write a license that is flexible enough to allow pivoting with changing market conditions, get good deals with publishers but not so flexible as to be meaningless.  And it's hard to sell a more expensive DRM free option alongside since, as the DRM free price goes up each sale is more likely to be sold to a 'pirate'.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:10:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43115621</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43115621</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43115621</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Fran Blanche: This Is Not Legal"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The government can invoke the Sherman antitrust act and other laws.  YOU can't (at least not generally).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:33:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32168237</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32168237</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32168237</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Google open sourced PSP (hardware cryptographic offload)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe I'm missing something, but seems pretty brittle to me.  From what I can tell, since the decryption key is entirely derived from the information in the PSP header (SA/SPI) a bad actor who observes PSP encrypted packets from some other sender can simply copy that inner packet and the target machine will decrypt it as if it came from that sender.<p>The document acknowledges this but basically leaves it to other aspects of the network stack to defend against this (maybe there is some extra protection provided by the ICV check).  Google's stack  seems carefully designed to be secure in this way but it feels brittle.<p>Wouldn't it have been better to require a checksum of some of the exterior headers (source IP??) inside the encrypted section to block attempts to repackage the same encrypted content inside another packet.  Or is that somewhere in there and I'm missing it?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 May 2022 07:41:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31444446</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31444446</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31444446</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Dr. Whitehurst and the FBI Lab Scandal (2017)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'd like to see a charity that retrospectively sends people like this cash.  Creating both the sense that you'll be financially and socially rewarded for this kind of brave action would do a lot to make the world better.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Mar 2022 03:30:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583930</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583930</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583930</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by TruePath in "Procedural Worlds from Simple Tiles"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Damn't I didn't mean compact connected.  I meant that if you have a <i>convex</i> region you can extend it.  Obviously, non-convex regions can raise problems (e.g. maybe tropical rainforest can't transition to tundra in the space of a single tile).  But it should work with convex regions.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Jan 2022 03:21:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29870210</link><dc:creator>TruePath</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29870210</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29870210</guid></item></channel></rss>