Hacker News: thomashobohm

New comment by thomashobohm in "Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals"

thomashobohm — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:59:15 +0000

Thanks man I'll just use the $600k we had lying around.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals"

thomashobohm — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 03:32:37 +0000

Appreciate the advice but this is Claude Managed Agents, so one can’t simply write one’s own harness.

Regression: malware reminder on every read still causes subagent refusals

thomashobohm — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 23:59:57 +0000

Not sure if anybody else has experienced this, but for my job I've been playing around with Claude Managed Agents to run code generation tasks in our repo. Every read operation in the managed agent is appended with a system prompt instructing Claude to scan the file for malware; Claude then wastes a bunch of time and tokens (money) performing the analysis; then, once the agent has confirmed that it is not malware, it still interprets the appended prompt to mean that it is disallowed to augment or write any code, and quits. And we're charged for every session that this happens in. Posting here because apparently they only addressed the issue in the past because of a Hacker News discussion. So here's hoping they'll see this and prioritize fixing it again so we can stop losing money.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47942492

Points: 251

# Comments: 146

New comment by thomashobohm in "Comparative advantage and when to blow up your island"

thomashobohm — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 21:59:59 +0000

I think it's sort of strange to refer to comparative advantage, which is taught in every "Introduction to Macroeconomics" class/textbook in existence, as an "arcane" part of economics.

New comment by thomashobohm in "US video game sales have record quarter as consumers stay at home"

thomashobohm — Fri, 15 May 2020 15:31:12 +0000

I think your source for the "game dev side" is odd-it's from 2009, a recession with markedly different characteristics than this one-and says nothing about the claim you've made about people losing jobs right now. Usually video game sales track the market, this time they're not doing that, which makes this more interesting. Do you have any links indicating that game developers have been losing jobs at an absurd pace?I haven't been able to find any.

New comment by thomashobohm in "The iPad's new cursor and keyboard"

thomashobohm — Thu, 07 May 2020 07:43:50 +0000

They probably meant out of the platforms Apple competes with. Presumably I could find a platform with, say, 12 users and only 1 non-native app, and if that app followed native UI guidelines I could say it has 100% native UI adoption and thus the “highest” out of every platform ever, but that is a useless statement.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update"

thomashobohm — Tue, 05 May 2020 16:18:28 +0000

Both iPhone SEs have retina displays?

New comment by thomashobohm in "Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update"

thomashobohm — Tue, 05 May 2020 16:11:15 +0000

You're wrong, I owned an XPS 13 before my MacBook and the power supply was small and well designed.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update"

thomashobohm — Tue, 05 May 2020 16:09:16 +0000

I'm not going to engage in some arcane debate about the particularities of random windows laptops vs. apple ones. The fact is that there are comparable windows laptops at this point when it comes to "bezels and ports," in particular, but also when it comes to most things that make a laptop nice to use.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update"

thomashobohm — Tue, 05 May 2020 16:05:19 +0000

Presumably the vast majority of people are not going to want to scale their 13-inch display so that everything is significantly harder to read for the sake of increased screen real estate. But I'm glad that the MacBook works well for your specific use case.

I currently work on a MacBook Pro 13 and I switched from a XPS 13 with a 4k display. They're largely comparable, and the only difference I notice or care about is the OS. It seems that is how it is for most people.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update"

thomashobohm — Tue, 05 May 2020 15:55:58 +0000

That's not really accurate; a similarly specced XPS 13 is several hundred dollars cheaper than my laptop. But Apple is certainly winning the touchpad game, you're right about that.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update"

thomashobohm — Tue, 05 May 2020 15:53:30 +0000

Yeah, but almost nobody opts for the super high resolution display because the screen is so small that the difference is basically unnoticeable. A similar configuration to my laptop is several hundred dollars cheaper, and that's a not insignificant difference.

Edit: I owned both.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update"

thomashobohm — Tue, 05 May 2020 15:45:46 +0000

Have you seen any Windows laptops in the past five years? Many Windows ultrabooks rival Apple's in terms of "ports and bezels." The XPS 13, for example, has significantly thinner bezels than the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on, at a much more reasonable price.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Ask HN: How to Study Mathematics?"

thomashobohm — Tue, 05 May 2020 02:39:50 +0000

In terms of aptitude testing, going through some books like "How to Prove It" and working on rigorous proofs-based material (perhaps an introductory analysis book with lots of diagrams) will be helpful. As will brushing up on geometry-lots of people memorize a lot of geometry in middle school/high school, do well in their class, and forget it. Geometric concepts continue to appear throughout math and having a deep grasp of them is super helpful for your first "rigorous" math classes, where the secret to finishing a proof often lies in visualizing or drawing it correctly.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Ask HN: How to Study Mathematics?"

thomashobohm — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:45:19 +0000

This depends super heavily on the math courses you’ve already taken.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Federal Reserve balance sheet trends"

thomashobohm — Mon, 04 May 2020 04:21:43 +0000

Sure, sorry!

New comment by thomashobohm in "There are many SARS-CoV-2 strains with gene deletions"

thomashobohm — Mon, 04 May 2020 04:16:35 +0000

The ability to downvote isn't correlated with anything besides the frequency of your posts/comments.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education"

thomashobohm — Mon, 04 May 2020 04:14:30 +0000

If you want to study applied math and go into the workforce, then my point still stands, going to Princeton vs. Michigan simply doesn't matter. If you want to go to graduate school, it's unclear if it matters all that much. Princeton tends to draw the most talented young mathematicians in the world, and has for decades. Presumably if a student of that caliber went to Michigan, they would do just as well, because Michigan also has talented mathematicians who do good research and can write good letters of recommendation for graduate school.

New comment by thomashobohm in "Explainable Deep Learning: A Field Guide for the Uninitiated"

thomashobohm — Mon, 04 May 2020 04:07:48 +0000

I think it should be obvious why there's no mention-in fact, you said it yourself-"these new routing algorithms are not yet widely used" but are a "promising avenue of research." The purpose of the paper as stated is to help people explain how commonly used deep learning tools work to laymxn, and including an aside about some niche subfield of deep learning research doesn't align with that goal (regardless of how interesting you personally think it is).

New comment by thomashobohm in "Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education"

thomashobohm — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 19:50:52 +0000

Once you're at that level, the differences are marginal. It matters if you want to go to graduate school, I suppose, but we're talking about people who just want to get a degree and go into the workforce here. For them, Princeton vs. Michigan won't matter a bit if they're studying to become an engineer.