Hacker News: tmseidman

New comment by tmseidman in "The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood"

tmseidman — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:35:59 +0000

I disagree- I think it's not much different than working at a distillery or cigar company (wrappery?). Social media is a vice not very different than whiskey or cigars- they're addictive, feel good in the short term, and are problematic to have too much or to do habitually. But we still let people indulge in them because they're fine in small quantities for responsible adults, and we expect that parents will not let their kids have access to them.

The only differences as far as I can see are in buying- a child could technically buy a phone for themself if they had the money and create an account on Instagram for free, and in cultural recognition of social media as a vice, which I believe is starting to change.

The overall point is, the law should assume that adults are reasonably intelligent and responsible people, and that parents should be the ones responsible for parenting their own children their own way.

New comment by tmseidman in "The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood"

tmseidman — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:21:19 +0000

Third string

New comment by tmseidman in "Programming Used to Be Free"

tmseidman — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:31:06 +0000

LLMs aren't programming.

Thank You for Being Annoying

tmseidman — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:26:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/thank-you-for-being-annoying

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46541350

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by tmseidman in "Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?"

tmseidman — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 20:01:42 +0000

Nope, haven't started yet, since I'm out of town and my keyboard is at home. But yeah, I'll be self-learning! I did it with guitar a few years ago and it worked for me (to a point; I never got amazing at guitar).

New comment by tmseidman in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

tmseidman — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 17:08:29 +0000

On the contrary, there's absolutely a reasoned, principled position here. Pike isn't a hypocrite for creating a Markov chain bot trained on the contents of an ancient public domain work and the contents of a single usenet group, and still complaining about modern LLMs; there's a huge difference in legality and scale. Modern LLMs use orders of magnitude more resources and are trained on protected material.

Now, I don't think he was writing a persuasive piece about this here, I think he was just venting. But I also feel like he has a reason to vent. I get upset about this stuff too, I just don't get emails implying that I helped bring about the whole situation.

New comment by tmseidman in "Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?"

tmseidman — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 03:43:53 +0000

Me too! I'm using Alfred's Adult Piano course book.

Dlang Interfacing with C++

tmseidman — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 03:00:32 +0000

Article URL: https://dlang.org/spec/cpp_interface.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297754

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by tmseidman in "Don't Download Apps"

tmseidman — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:02:22 +0000

It seems to be browser.viewport.desktopWidth; I found 500 to be a decent starting point on my phone.

New comment by tmseidman in "Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels"

tmseidman — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 22:33:56 +0000

I always feel like these "We do this new horrible thing that's taking over" articles are always blown out of proportion- sure, _some_ people talk that way, maybe it's even trending to talk that way for a significant group of people, but it's not true of everyone, all the time. To me, this trend seems largely confined to youth culture and social media.

I also found it ironic that part of the OP's argument was that nobody has personality anymore, they just have problems to solve, and this article seemed to be doing the same thing, but for culture at large; reducing it to a problem to be solved.