Hacker News: _tom_

New comment by _tom_ in "Tiny Undervalued Hardware Companions (2024)"

_tom_ — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 18:01:41 +0000

Organization:

I got a storage organizer with 24 drawers. One for each type of cable I use. So instead of one big box that I have to hunt through, I have instant, labeled access to all my usb cables, and a few other cables and items.

New comment by _tom_ in "Tetrachromatic Vision"

_tom_ — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 05:51:06 +0000

But was it distinguishable by tetrachromat?

New comment by _tom_ in "After millions of years, why are carnivorous plants still so small?"

_tom_ — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 21:02:18 +0000

You are assuming that they haven't.

Brambles can trap sheep, benefiting from the sheep as fertilizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGobnZq83g

Falling coconuts can not only kill people, but probably kill far more small animals, again benefiting from them as fertilizer,

New comment by _tom_ in "Cray versus Raspberry Pi"

_tom_ — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 07:57:44 +0000

The pi has a sub $100 accelerator card that takes it to 30 TFLOPs. So you can add three more orders of magnitude of performance for a rough doubling of the price.

New comment by _tom_ in "(Backup!) Built an AI that brutally roasts your website designs"

_tom_ — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 11:58:04 +0000

Doesn't work. Did it die under the load?

Firefox and safari, iPhone.

New comment by _tom_ in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

_tom_ — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:38:26 +0000

I think it's the writing.

I learned long ago that I could read a book, study it, think about it. And I still would really master the material until I built with it.

New comment by _tom_ in "Human coders are still better than LLMs"

_tom_ — Thu, 29 May 2025 17:42:08 +0000

For me, it's a bit like pair programming. I have someone to discuss ideas with. Someone to review my code and suggest alternative approaches. Some one that uses different feature than I do, so I learn from them.

New comment by _tom_ in "Wrench Attacks: Physical attacks targeting cryptocurrency users (2024) [pdf]"

_tom_ — Sun, 25 May 2025 18:22:16 +0000

Literally yesterday:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/nyregion/crypto-investor-...

New comment by _tom_ in "Mermaid: Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text"

_tom_ — Sat, 24 May 2025 01:39:28 +0000

I think he's saying you can click and edit on the diagram, which mermaid doesn't support. This does propagate back into the source.

I think you are talking about "just change the text and regenerate", which achieves much the same goal.

I'm not sure in what cases the former is better.

New comment by _tom_ in "Strings Just Got Faster"

_tom_ — Fri, 02 May 2025 20:11:39 +0000

Off-the-cuff thought:

Could you solve the empty string hashes to zero problem by just adding one when computing hash codes?

New comment by _tom_ in "Redis is open source again"

_tom_ — Fri, 02 May 2025 19:28:19 +0000

You have to make the choice about sharing at the start. If you use AGPL and later decide to make changes, you'll have to share. So most don't want to risk it.

But more important, AGPL software is banned at many large corporations. It's simply not an option.

New comment by _tom_ in "Redis is open source again"

_tom_ — Thu, 01 May 2025 20:59:13 +0000

Doesn't AGPL give you LESS rights? (fewer?)

AGPL is pretty much a non-starter for any commercial development.

The RSALv2 let you use Redis, unless you were a service provider. Now, you can't use it for anything (EVERYTHING is accessed over a network now) without sharing your source.

So, before everyone but amazon could use it for commercial purposes, now no one can.

New comment by _tom_ in "A single line of code cost $8000"

_tom_ — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 03:21:34 +0000

Automated dependency resolution has made it so the default is frequently

> Someone imports a single method from the RIGHT package

and hundreds of megabytes come in for what might be one simple function.

New comment by _tom_ in "The last masters of Afro-Colombian machete fencing"

_tom_ — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 03:06:32 +0000

Well, the video linked above is labelled "Esgrima de Machete y Garrote.".

New comment by _tom_ in "How University Students Use Claude"

_tom_ — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 05:34:13 +0000

No one seems to be talking about the fact that we need to change the definition of cheating.

People's careers are going to be filled with AI. College needs to prepare them for that reality, not to get jobs that are now extinct.

If they are never going to have to program without AI, what's the point in teaching them to do it? It's like expecting them to do arithmetic by hand. No one does.

For every class, teachers need to be asking themselves "is this class relevant" and "what are the learning goals in this class? Goals that they will still need, in a world with AI".

New comment by _tom_ in "AI tools are spotting errors in research papers: inside a growing movement"

_tom_ — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 17:19:01 +0000

This basically turns research papers as a whole into a big generative adversarial network.

New comment by _tom_ in "Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep (2018)"

_tom_ — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 10:06:50 +0000

I suggest backing it up in multiple places.

Electronic forms are so much less durable than physical.

New comment by _tom_ in "Ask HN: How to sell a script that will save companies $100k a month?"

_tom_ — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 01:47:49 +0000

There are tons of products that do this. Are you familiar with the market you are trying to enter?

Look at what they are doing.

New comment by _tom_ in "Please fix your slow website. I'm begging you"

_tom_ — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 20:28:43 +0000

And half the problem is not that there is one bit of software doing tracking, it's that there are fourteen different package that different people added at some point, all doing similar things.

New comment by _tom_ in "The deeper under the Earth's surface, the more species you can find"

_tom_ — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 20:24:12 +0000

This is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_biosphere

"he biomass in the deep subsurface is about 15% of the total for the biosphere"

I'd bet that it's a higher percentage. That 15% represents what we have already found. There is likely more at greater depths we haven't found, and perhaps other types of life we aren't yet recognizing yet (a parallel to finding Archaea),