Hacker News: thom

New comment by thom in "Kill The Cookie Banner"

thom — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:27:37 +0000

Allowing bad actors to act badly against all but the most sophisticated users is exactly where lawmakers should be stepping in. Sorry you find that controversial.

New comment by thom in "Kill The Cookie Banner"

thom — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:49:21 +0000

A lot of UK sites (Reach local news stuff) now explicitly say take cookies or pay, which tbh I always thought was illegal.

New comment by thom in "VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide"

thom — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:33:41 +0000

Not everything is about taking information in?

New comment by thom in "The lost joy of music piracy"

thom — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:08:25 +0000

Perhaps I am the only person well served by the modern music industry, but I absolutely love Apple Music. The new music playlist it gives me each week has introduced me to hundreds of new artists and dozens of songs that rank up there with my teenage heart songs. I think I mostly skipped the golden age of piracy as my formative music experiences were the Evening Session and John Peel on the BBC, coupled with lax parenting and a proximity to Camden.

There are still some CDs and MP3s I take special care of because I know they’re not in Apple’s catalogue, and I’ve no doubt I’m contributing to the death of the very thing I love by participating in capitalism, but until access to all my music is unilaterally rescinded I will continue to be a very happy (paying) customer.

New comment by thom in "Clojure 1.13 adds support for checked keys"

thom — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:02:50 +0000

Ah yes, the missing seventeenth way to validate function parameters.

New comment by thom in "Organic Maps"

thom — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:26:41 +0000

Always loved this. There are still parts of the UK where you’ll have no data offline navigation is great, and the walking paths are better than you can get elsewhere.

New comment by thom in "Ask HN: Who is quitting? (July 2026)"

thom — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:11:35 +0000

I quit in June. No real absurdity, I'd just spent two years after we were acquired feeling bad about leaving and abandoning everybody, or that's what I'd tell myself to not feel like a coward. Either way, out now, trying to balance curing burnout with a dozen personal projects and lots of well-intentioned, interesting people talking about new opportunities. I told people (my wife most pertinently) that my plan was to walk the dog a lot and not have a plan, but no lack of a plan survives contact with boredom. So, behold my thundering herd of shaven yaks: three screenplays, two TTRPGs (one CMS for TTRPGs that will do data-driven print layout for you), one video game, one piece of consumer electronics, slowly going through Lingua Latina. And I still feel like I have a lot of unfinished business in football analytics, which was the day job.

I don't really know what the right balance is now, but I'm having fun and generally much happier.

New comment by thom in "CachyOS June 2026 Release"

thom — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:30:39 +0000

I loved Bazzite for hardware compatibility out of the box but the necessity of flatpak made it enormously inconvenient as a general machine. CachyOS sounds worth checking out if I still want to game but also occasionally do real work.

New comment by thom in "An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time"

thom — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 20:52:42 +0000

Do we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?

New comment by thom in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

thom — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 16:23:48 +0000

Sure as shit won't answer them without that though.

New comment by thom in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

thom — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:54:54 +0000

I agree that saying that they have now trained on lots of proprietary data allows them to muddy the legislative waters further than they already have. What a happy coincidence!

New comment by thom in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

thom — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:46:18 +0000

No, you just parroted an increasingly popular talking point, the entire purpose of which seems to be to absolve AI companies of the enormous theft that put them in the position to hire experts in the first place.

New comment by thom in "Tell HN: Happy Fathers Day"

thom — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:26:26 +0000

Happy father's day! Here's my dad on the front of the very first Dragon User magazine. It's been a bit of a bumpy ride but I loved growing up surrounded by every microcomputer under the sun.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/4201/Dragon-User-May...

New comment by thom in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

thom — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:35:24 +0000

Surely it’s called Candid Camera specifically because it reveals something that would otherwise be hidden?

New comment by thom in "How to Become a Person After Smartphones Have Rotted Your Brain"

thom — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:29:56 +0000

How unfortunate that even the act of quitting the rat race of notoriety that comprises life in a modern online society requires the publishing of manifestos, books, newspaper profiles, viral photos of you holding up your non-smart phone published to every corner of the internet.

New comment by thom in "Show HN: I am building a map of people who lived in the Roman Empire"

thom — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:40:37 +0000

Couple of videos from the Roman Society recently, connecting landscapes and Latin epistolography, which may be of interest to those enjoying this map:

https://youtu.be/9aBxIRCGkl4?si=Dh5P6_NGzSasBG_1

https://youtu.be/nxCNrTYQ_ys?si=ngWa94p2KQdri_Fz

New comment by thom in "Software is made between commits"

thom — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:16:46 +0000

At least we agree “modern software development” is the root cause.

New comment by thom in "The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML (2021)"

thom — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:17:41 +0000

I personally think CSS animations are wonderful. I’ve recently returned to dabble in frontend stuff and was delighted with what you could achieve with purely declarative HTML and CSS. I’m finding that you can often match the feel of an SPA with just HTMX and some CSS and I’ve found that simultaneously very satisfying and productive.

New comment by thom in "Software is made between commits"

thom — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:00:57 +0000

A software team’s job is to collaboratively learn an effective model for operating in a domain. They express that model and those learnings in code, tests and associated documentation. So on the one hand I wholeheartedly agree that pull requests and code reviews fatally undermine this process, but immediately recoil that we’re creating yet more secondary processes and artefacts to distract ourselves. This stuff should all be evident from your codebase. It’s not an extra thing. It’s not a bunch of commit messages or ADRs. If your codebase isn’t entirely self explanatory (both the what and the why) to both humans and AIs you’ve failed and will spend your whole life creating more and more process to manage that failure.

New comment by thom in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

thom — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:36:28 +0000

Commits should have no information in them. Teams should be aligned on the design of their software, and all the information about that software should be apparent from its source code.