Hacker News: tom_

New comment by tom_ in "I ♥ RSS – A directory of people who love RSS"

tom_ — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 17:08:14 +0000

I don't remember ever seeing one before either. Will the floodgates now open?

New comment by tom_ in "Severance"

tom_ — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:42:17 +0000

I dunno, man. I just... dunno.

New comment by tom_ in "The C ``Clockwise/Spiral Rule''"

tom_ — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:57:13 +0000

I split the difference and write it "int*w".

(Most style guides tell you to declare one name per line anyway...)

New comment by tom_ in "GCC steering committee announces AI policy"

tom_ — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:29:10 +0000

It feels like we're witness to the possible appearance of a new archetype: a whole new kind of capital-P-Person! A hitherto-unnoticed plane in personality space is slowly becoming discernible.

(Time will tell. It's possible this will turn out to be just one of the same old People that you've already met, with just some minor tweaks to the specific details...)

This lobsters comment on the topic intrigued me: https://lobste.rs/s/omq8rt/vibecoding_gets_emacs_patch_rejec...

New comment by tom_ in "Yudkowsky and Soares' Book Is Lacking (2025)"

tom_ — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:08:11 +0000

It read to me like a book review written by a person.

What do you see as the bot tells? I didn't spot the usual obvious things, and by the time I got to the end I wasn't feeling vaguely suspicious. (But, if this is actually AI-written, and possibly quite transparently so, then I've clearly missed something, and I'd quite like to know what!)

New comment by tom_ in "Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg"

tom_ — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:21:51 +0000

Well, rather your ears than mine.

New comment by tom_ in "New rental trend? A $200 'work-from-home fee' tacked on to Bay Area lease"

tom_ — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 23:09:03 +0000

My thinking was that the landlord would be providing the same internet either way, work from home or no, and it costs the same whatever happens. Sure, you'll maybe use it more if you're working from home - but that costs exactly the same as, say, not using it at all.

(It is possible that the landlord will note that you ticked the WFH box, and spend part of the extra $200/mo on upgrading the broadband at the property to 900 Mbit/sec fibre or whatever. But I just don't think this very likely.)

New comment by tom_ in "SIMD for Collision"

tom_ — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:24:50 +0000

It looks like it supports NEON: https://github.com/erincatto/box3d/blob/781673be801569a94be7...

New comment by tom_ in "The Dark Night of Mathematics"

tom_ — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:17:05 +0000

"Or threaten to hurt them, or their family, or their friends. Then just take the money. What about that option? Didn't think of that, did ya son."

"Don, I..."

"Listen. I think this racket just ain't for you. But you're a good kid - too good, maybe - and I promised your father I'd find you something. I'll ask Giovanni. Maybe he can find something for you in bookkeeping."

New comment by tom_ in "League of Legends designer shares game design field manual"

tom_ — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:14:15 +0000

I found it quite tiring to read as well.

New comment by tom_ in "Ah, the Codeberg Drama"

tom_ — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:37:29 +0000

I assume "AI people" is in quotes to indicate that it's kind of a term of art. Like Car People. Or Computer People. Some visible, bothersome subset of the (much larger (like, how many people these days don't use a car? (ok, so it's not zero, but it's hardly the opposite either))) category of people that use the thing in question.

New comment by tom_ in "Ah, the Codeberg Drama"

tom_ — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:12:49 +0000

It's definitely a theme, but some people are just like that (as has always been the case), and maybe they're the ones most inclined to comment on this matter.

Another theory: https://lobste.rs/s/omq8rt/vibecoding_gets_emacs_patch_rejec... (posted very much not because of the chatbot psychosis aspect, which doesn't seem relevant in this case, more the part about possible minor personality changes from long-term communing with LLMs)

New comment by tom_ in "New rental trend? A $200 'work-from-home fee' tacked on to Bay Area lease"

tom_ — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:23:46 +0000

Who pays per byte for internet?!

The other points are well made, though. The lesson, I suppose: bills included is a bad idea. The incentives are misaligned all round.

New comment by tom_ in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

tom_ — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:46:24 +0000

You misunderstand. They are going to force everybody to pay $5, then force everybody to use chatgpt. 8 billion times 5 isn't much money, but the advertisers will surely pay a lot for that many captive eyeballs!

(I have no MBA either)

New comment by tom_ in "I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs"

tom_ — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:41:11 +0000

I never liked xargs either. My replacement is kind of like "xargs -n 1 -d '\n' -J '{}'", which experience has taught me is almost always what I want. It consumes all of its input before starting, so it knows how many files it has to process, and it can print progress to stderr and/or the terminal title as it goes. It can run each command via the shell if you want. It has --dry-run and --keep-going. It can read the file names from a file rather than stdin. I have a few more ideas for things it could do, but I haven't needed to add them yet.

(For enumerating files, I use find or dir/b/s, possibly combined with grep, then pipe the result in.)

People moaning about avoiding non-basic use of xargs and bash (and inadvertently demonstrating in many cases why some of us think that xargs sucks) miss a large part of the point, which is that it's nice to have a tool that does exactly what you want, and works in a way that's convenient for you, and isn't so widely used that you have to worry about modifying it. If you find the tool doesn't work the way you like, you can just change it. You don't have to be answerable to anybody else. I think tptacek's quite good essay could be relevant: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/05/12/emacsification/

(You don't have to use LLMs for this! I wrote my program by hand, it's only like 250 lines of Python, and you could write one too. But, whichever barriers to entry prevent you from creating your own tools for yourself, using an LLM would probably lower at least some of them.)

New comment by tom_ in "I Stopped “Creating Content”"

tom_ — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:26:30 +0000

New comment by tom_ in "Fake food delivery site for the dopamine"

tom_ — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 19:31:55 +0000

The link is to the BingeEatingDisorder subreddit. From the link,

> I know that at least for me, the actual process of ordering food delivery is part of the addiction

New comment by tom_ in "Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left"

tom_ — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:49:09 +0000

Visual Studio Code asks you if you trust the files in the folder you open, or at least it always has done for me. Presumably this stuff stops working if you don't?

New comment by tom_ in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

tom_ — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:38:52 +0000

Nuance quietly surfaced.

New comment by tom_ in "Mawlynnong, India, transformed by tourism, bans visitors on Sundays"

tom_ — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:40:01 +0000

The new editorialised title is an improvement, given that most of HN's readership is probably not in the UK, especially not at time of writing: 0130 BST on a Tuesday.