Hacker News: tomgp

New comment by tomgp in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

tomgp — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:48:59 +0000

60 year olds have been using computers most of their working life. Word processors and spreadsheets having been ubiquitous for office workers from at least the early 90s.

New comment by tomgp in "AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills"

tomgp — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:26:59 +0000

I think this is true, it's like a close relation of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#:~:text=%5B14...

New comment by tomgp in "Map of Metal"

tomgp — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:30:01 +0000

So glad you took the time to keep the site alive!

New comment by tomgp in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

tomgp — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:56:22 +0000

I have it on a long timer so that I have to pause for a while before the auto-complete prompt appears. I've found I tend to deliberately set things up for it to attempt when I know I'm going to have to type a bunch of boiler plate or some code that's logically straightforward but syntactically fiddly ie. I write a quick comment describing what the next few lines should do and then wait a seconds for it to make the suggestion

New comment by tomgp in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

tomgp — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:06:04 +0000

What microsoft employees do in the privacy of their own meeting rooms has basically no effect on me. When Elon Musk appears along side Tommy Robinson in my city, espousing racist "great replacement" to a crowd of drunken thugs and suggesting my neighbours and friends are problem to be expunged from society, well frankly he can fuck right off.

New comment by tomgp in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

tomgp — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:49:27 +0000

Not much better but at least they're not speaking at far right rallys and lending support to fascist parties across Europe.

New comment by tomgp in "How I write software with LLMs"

tomgp — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:23:35 +0000

That's what science is though * our intuition/ hunch/ guess is X * now let's design an experiment which can falsify X

New comment by tomgp in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

tomgp — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:57:50 +0000

Interstingly a paper was published today which confirms accelerated warming whislt accounting for the effects of natural fluctations (el nino, volcanism and solar radiation etc) https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2025...

>We remove the estimated influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation. The resulting adjusted and thus less “noisy” data show that there has been acceleration with over 98% confidence, with faster warming over the last 10+ years than during any previous decade.

New comment by tomgp in "Moss is a pixel canvas where every brush is a tiny program"

tomgp — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 08:36:53 +0000

This feels lovely! The fact that it reacts to the pressure on my Wacom tablet puts it above many desktop tools and streets ahead of most stuff on the web. Fantastic work.

New comment by tomgp in "Don't become an engineering manager"

tomgp — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:09:49 +0000

Yes. Also there's a weird thing going on where the claims are simultaneously that these tools are super easy to use and everyone and their dog is going to be using them to create awesome software and that it's only going to get easier to do so BUT ALSO that you have to immediately start using them or you'll get left behind. Why should we start now if they're going to be more powerful and more accesible in a years time? seems like the effort working with the imperfect exising version will be wasted.

New comment by tomgp in "Product and design are the new bottlenecks"

tomgp — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:07:44 +0000

Yeah, this matches my experience, line by line I can probably write code quicker but producing lines of code has never really been the bottle neck, nor infact the point, in software development.

New comment by tomgp in "I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor"

tomgp — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:33:46 +0000

The issue is that whilst the warning exists and is there front and centre, the marketing around ChatGPT etc - which is absolutely deafening in volume and enthusiasm - is that they're PHD level experts and can do anything.

This marketing obscures what the software is _actually_ good at and gives users a poor mental model of what's going on under the hood. Dumping years worth of un-differentiated health data into a generic chatGPT chat window seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths of large language models.

A reasonable approach would be to try to explain what kind of tasks these models do well at and what kind of situations they behave poorly in.

New comment by tomgp in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

tomgp — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:35:57 +0000

>Accept that most people flake

This is a thing that's always surprised me when I've been in the US. How common it is to enthusiastically arrange to do some activity together, get a meal, play a game, have a drink, whatever, and then for people to just call it off at the last minute. It seems much more socially acceptable to do so than either the UK (where I live) or France (where I have lived and still visit regularly).

The loneliness thing seems common across Europe too though so I'm not suggesting this is the root of the problem. But I do think that whilst this is a global problem the solutions are likely to be local, working with and leveraging different cultural norms.

New comment by tomgp in "The highest quality codebase"

tomgp — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:53:09 +0000

HTML, CSS, Javascript?

New comment by tomgp in "Your data model is your destiny"

tomgp — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 08:22:57 +0000

As a customer I often look for the data model without a "moat". I want to be able to move my data to a different supplier without too much hassle

It's Giving Enron: On the AI bubble, and the various echoes of the dotcom crash

tomgp — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:46:32 +0000

Article URL: https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/its-giving-enron

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45604674

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by tomgp in "The gaslit asset class"

tomgp — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 06:06:00 +0000

I think the reason is that Bitcoin et al were sold as having practical uses but their ‘success’ has been as a vehicle for speculation. Though the two things are linked (hype for the former drives adoption for the latter) and it’s possible to both hold that crypto currencies are of no practical use and a great investment opportunity. (FWIW, with a long enough time span I believe neither of these is true)

[edited to correct a couple of typos]

New comment by tomgp in "The GitHub website is slow on Safari"

tomgp — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 11:07:42 +0000

This is a very accurate and concise summary of why I can't work in tech companies anymore. Recently I returned for a quick contract to develop a proof of concept app and almost immediately my stress levels whent through the roof. Just the whole thing is a recipe for erroding peoples's ability to produce anything of value.

New comment by tomgp in "GDPR meant nothing: chat control ends privacy for the EU [video]"

tomgp — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 06:34:30 +0000

the behaviour was already bad (sharing your personal information with 1000s of “trusted partners”), companies just want to keep doing it even if it inconveniences their users.

New comment by tomgp in "LLM's Illusion of Alignment"

tomgp — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:02:35 +0000

yes! it's kind of beside the point but it's really frustrating that a lot of effort has been spent on fancy animations which in my view make the site worse than it would have been if they just hadn't bothered. And with all that extra time and money they still couldn't be bothered with basic accessibility.