Hacker News: t_mann

New comment by t_mann in "OMSCS Open Courseware"

t_mann — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:27:47 +0000

> there is no way to make the distinction in an interview

Just ask?

Some online degrees state that they're equivalent, but interviewers may still have their own opinions. I would discourage anyone from failing to mention the online nature of a degree in their CV. You're really not doing yourself a favor. A rigorous online degree is something to be proud of. I see people with PhD's proudly announcing their online course certificates on LinkedIn. However, 'discovering' that an education was of a different nature than one had assumed based on the presented materials may raise questions.

New comment by t_mann in "The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude"

t_mann — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:27 +0000

The article says that having decompiled some functions helps with decompiling others, so it seems like more than one example could be provided in the context. I think the OP was referring to the fact that only a single prompt created by a human was used. But then it goes off into what appears to be an agentic loop with no hard stopping conditions outside of what the agent decides.

We're essentially trying to map 'traditional' ML terminology to LLMs, it's natural that it'll take some time to get settled. I just thought that one-shot isn't an ideal name for something that might go off into an arbitrarily long loop.

New comment by t_mann in "The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude"

t_mann — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 17:31:13 +0000

> The ‘give up after ten attempts’ threshold aims to prevent Claude from wasting tokens when further progress is unlikely. It was only partially successful, as Claude would still sometimes make dozens of attempts.

Not what I would have expected from a 'one-shot'. Maybe self-supervised would be a more suitable term?

New comment by t_mann in "How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs"

t_mann — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 09:39:54 +0000

Sounds like saying that nothing about the Industrial Revolution was steam-machine-specific. Cost changes can still represent fundamental shifts in terms of what's possible, "cost" here is just an economists' way of saying technology.

New comment by t_mann in "Show HN: I built a dashboard to compare mortgage rates across 120 credit unions"

t_mann — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:48:28 +0000

Would renting it out be an option?

New comment by t_mann in "Show HN: I built a dashboard to compare mortgage rates across 120 credit unions"

t_mann — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:46:36 +0000

Great initiative and beautiful site! Tiny nitpick, the wrapping of the controls above the table on my phone could probably be improved. What did you use for the table?

New comment by t_mann in "R packages for data science"

t_mann — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:36:53 +0000

There's a school of thought of using mostly base R, for all its flaws it already had before Hadley, and selectively using some tidyverse packages. Base R has been the de-facto coding standard for academic statisticians for decades, with all the wealth of open source packages that that entails, and some of the tidyverse packages are just a godsend. ggplot2 is probably the most powerful plotting library I've seen, while being fairly accessible. You don't have to subscribe to an entire philosophy for data wrangling or plotting (and may even frown at the syntax overloading) to get a huge amount of utility out of it.

New comment by t_mann in "Copyparty, the FOSS file server [video]"

t_mann — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 21:59:09 +0000

What about Headscale?

> Headscale is an open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

https://headscale.net/

New comment by t_mann in "The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting"

t_mann — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 13:23:27 +0000

The article mentions some complications and browsers like LibreWolf that address some of them. But that's not really what I have in mind - I'm thinking more of a dashboard with editable fields for everything that might get queried, populated with what currently gets sent, and a drop-down that lets you select among preset/saved custom profiles.

New comment by t_mann in "The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting"

t_mann — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 23:06:34 +0000

What I don't get, all this data is reported by your machine - why isn't there a tool/browser fork that allows spoofing a (fairly) complete realistic profile, with some sane presets like Edge/W11/Thinkpad or Safari/macOS/M4? Is it too complex, would it break too much, or am I just unaware?

New comment by t_mann in "Blender 5.0"

t_mann — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:57:06 +0000

Fully agree that text-based CAD is the obvious path forward. But OpenSCAD won't cut it, it just lacks too many features, starting from basic fillets to more fundamental things like relative object positioning. Check out CadQuery, it's much more ergonomic and future-proof.

New comment by t_mann in "I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla"

t_mann — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 05:05:40 +0000

Maybe Firefox would have a higher market share if they worked on features their users actually want instead of things that get widely criticized. I personally would use it a lot more if it had an --app flag like Chromium, which would probably also be a lot less work than AI integration.

New comment by t_mann in "Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier"

t_mann — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:40:33 +0000

CadQuery? Would be appreciated if you're inclined to do writeup of your lessons learned.

New comment by t_mann in "Firefox Forcing LLM Features"

t_mann — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 17:55:41 +0000

Much of this thread is people complaining about on-by-default features and hard-to-find configurations. We're really just talking about a continuation of a trend.

New comment by t_mann in "Firefox Forcing LLM Features"

t_mann — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 23:49:39 +0000

It's the beginning, A/B-testing takes time...

New comment by t_mann in "Firefox Forcing LLM Features"

t_mann — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 19:59:21 +0000

> Honestly people who deny any usefulness of AI are getting dangerously close to flat-earthers by now.

What made you jump to that conclusion? My guess about someone who's using a non-mainstream browser and figuring out how to configure it to their liking is that they're likely also using AI in more ways than the standard Chat-Webinterface, eg Agents, CLI tools, MCP,... To give an analogy, rolling your eyes over brainrot memes isn't denying the usefulness of smartphones or messengers either. The underlying sentiment is being critical of things that get pushed down our throats through A/B-optimized patterns that ultimately serve other interests than your own, profits or darker.

New comment by t_mann in "I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars"

t_mann — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 21:25:22 +0000

Cool! It's still purpose-built hardware, but cool to hear such stories. Do you use colocation in a data center?

New comment by t_mann in "I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars"

t_mann — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 08:10:58 +0000

In principle, you don't even need a "server", ie purpose-built hardware like what he's showing. An old laptop will be fine for many projects, although I'd be interested if someone can help put a perspective on how to decide whether your specific project/load will be too much for your specific hardware. My bigger concern with 'true' self-hosting would be how to get a good/reliable enough internet connection.

New comment by t_mann in "Show HN: I was tired of wasting engineer time on screening calls so I built Niju"

t_mann — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:06:27 +0000

So in summary, there is actually no pressure that would need resolving, and time being wasted by applicants is a good thing?

New comment by t_mann in "Show HN: I was tired of wasting engineer time on screening calls so I built Niju"

t_mann — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 17:50:33 +0000

How is "most of that pressure gone"? You're still being evaluated and have to code against a clock, with less time, less opportunities to ask questions and less immediate feedback that could get you back on track.

Also, your 20 vs 30 minute calculation ignores that companies are incentivized to conduct more screening tests if it becomes practically free for them. But the number of positions stays the same. So if instead of 10 screening calls they do 16 tests for one position, that's already more time being wasted, even if the tests are 1/3 shorter. And realistically, the number will shoot up much more.