Hacker News: tingletech

New comment by tingletech in "Fc, a lossless compressor for floating-point streams"

tingletech — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:25:46 +0000

isn't sound a time series? I guess it's not usually 64-bit doubles.

New comment by tingletech in "Podman rootless containers and the Copy Fail exploit"

tingletech — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:44:15 +0000

is that no longer true?

New comment by tingletech in "SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format"

tingletech — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:22:18 +0000

I don't think it has had a BSD license this century, Sleepy Cat was selling licenses in the 90s before Oracle bought them.

New comment by tingletech in "AI didn't delete your database, you did"

tingletech — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:12:01 +0000

I wholeheartedly agree with these, and I think point 1 is a real danger.

An ai system can't lie, and it can't deliberately ignore your directions. The current frontier class does not have a model of the world or their action -- they live in a world of words. Scolding them or arguing with them has no point other than to scramble the context window.

I do think zoomorphizing them might be useful. These poor little buggers, living as ghosts in the machine, are pretty confused sometimes, but their motives are purely autoregressive.

New comment by tingletech in "For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day"

tingletech — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:32:39 +0000

It's who the dead heads follow around now.

New comment by tingletech in "ARC-AGI-3"

tingletech — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:18:37 +0000

I agree that anthropomorphizing is a real risk with LLMs, but what about zoomorphizing? Can feel bad for LLMs without attributing them human emotions/motivations/reasoning?

New comment by tingletech in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

tingletech — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:45:22 +0000

When ATMs first came out, they were mostly still only at the branch because they were big machines. I remember in the late 70s/early 80s, if you got a steady check (like social security or a paycheck from a steady job) you could cash them at the liquor store. The liquor store would even run my Dad a tab, and he would pay it off when he cashed the check. On paydays he would not be the only one doing that, they must have had to get a lot of cash on hand.

New comment by tingletech in "CasNum"

tingletech — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:20:38 +0000

Cool. I just learned of compass and straight edge calculations from this video on doubling a cube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96LbF8nn05c from Ben Syversen's channel a couple of months ago

New comment by tingletech in "Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude"

tingletech — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 18:02:56 +0000

I can tell by the em dashes

New comment by tingletech in "Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude"

tingletech — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:53:56 +0000

XML and HTML are SGMLs

New comment by tingletech in "Zotero 8"

tingletech — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:59:22 +0000

I think it's the latter

New comment by tingletech in "Stunnel"

tingletech — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 03:31:09 +0000

wrapping z39.50?

New comment by tingletech in "Electrolysis can solve one of our biggest contamination problems"

tingletech — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 02:47:05 +0000

When I worked for Bill Atkinson's sister, Dr. Kathy Atkinson, at UCR in high school, I was involved in a DMSO leak. Dr. A. was a microbiologist, but botanists worked upstairs. I guess DMSO is used a lot in botany, and they let an experiment boil over and DMSO got into the HVAC air return and then into the whole building. Smelled like garlic, and I turned bright pink. We had to evacuate. I also tasted garlic for a day or so. Nowadays you have to be 18 to get a job in a UC Lab.

You could get DMSO and ketamine at the vet supply store back then in the 80s. I heard of people ingesting acid via DMSO in that time frame, but it could have been an urban legend. It was a horse area and DMSO was used with horses to get stuff deep into their legs or something like that.

New comment by tingletech in "MIRA – An open-source persistent AI entity with memory"

tingletech — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 23:27:53 +0000

I think they literally coined and defined the term over 25 years ago.

New comment by tingletech in "30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript""

tingletech — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 17:33:33 +0000

Right around this time I got to go to the bookstore at UCSD and buy a Sun desktop machine. I also bought a shrink-wrapped compiler, a shrink-wrapped Sybase, and a shrink-wrapped Netscape Enterprise Server.

I built a lot of server side javascript web apps in Netscape enterprise server, and a built a windows shell in javascript with netscape (I had to get a code signing certificate to remove the chrome in Netscape). Over 300 public workstations in the libraries ended up running that funky javascript shell (replacing all the green and amber screen terminals).

Writing the server side apps and hacking together that shell is basically what taught me programming. That plus I had to migrate a bunch of perl 4 code to perl 5.

New comment by tingletech in "Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code"

tingletech — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 01:06:09 +0000

Do rust projects have a reputation for complaining about corporate forks not contributing back code?

New comment by tingletech in "Moss: a Rust Linux-compatible kernel in 26,000 lines of code"

tingletech — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:13:28 +0000

What is a "pushover" license?

New comment by tingletech in "GitHub: Git operation failures"

tingletech — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 21:56:18 +0000

Years ago on hackernews I saw a link about probability describing a statistical technique that one could use to answer a question about if a specific type of event was becoming more common or not. Maybe related to the birthday paradox? The gist that I remember is that sometimes a rare event will seem to be happening more often, when in reality there is some cognitive bias that makes it non-intuitive to make that decision without running the numbers. I think it was a blog post that went through a few different examples, and maybe only one of them was actually happening more often.

New comment by tingletech in "URLs are state containers"

tingletech — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 02:28:15 +0000

Reminds me of xlink:href with an #xpointer(xpath) — with it you could xinclude an inner XML node out of a remote file

New comment by tingletech in "Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files"

tingletech — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 23:52:33 +0000

I had an early job with an ISP that was similar, had modems in people's garages all over the county since this was when calling local could get expensive. The ISP was in the back of a computer store though. Once an ISP customer came into the store. I was just answering phones in the back room, but they sent me to the floor to talk to the customer. I was wearing sandals, and the sales manager fired me on the spot for being on his floor with sandals. The person who I really reported to tried to hire me back when he found out that sales manager had sent me home and fired me.