<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: tompark</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tompark</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 29 Oct 2026 23:18:25 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=tompark" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Ask HN: I Need Advice"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What might help is if you had some external entity to be dependent upon you getting work done in order for it to get its work done. A job provides this kind of infrastructure to you.<p>This suggestion only applies if you're a programmer, and assumes you were doing AI-assisted coding before you got laid off... You know how the agentic AI people say you have to get your slow human self out of the ralph loop? Well, put yourself back in the loop.<p>Whenever your agent harness is blocked, waiting for your input, it should periodically wake and nag you to engage with it. Once you've got this, now something is depending on you to get work done.<p>If you need an idea for a project to work on, how about a product/service to help people in your exact situation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Oct 2026 07:07:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50285434</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50285434</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50285434</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Ask HN: What do you believe or not believe about AI?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah. I hate commutes like that. I had a job where the commute was 30 min bike or bus to Caltrain then 1-1.5 hour train. It was expensive and ate 3-4 hrs/day.<p>But after being unemployed almost two years, would do that commute again if I had to.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2026 19:23:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50279421</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50279421</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50279421</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Ask HN: What do you believe or not believe about AI?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're right. It's a belief, could be wrong.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2026 19:13:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50279275</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50279275</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50279275</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Ask HN: What do you believe or not believe about AI?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A belief: Just as human exceptionalism misled us to believe in a geocentric universe, we'll discover we've been wrong about consciousness too. That is, non-human animals have degrees of consciousness, and we'll see that it's possible for machines too.<p>A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.<p>An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree or even in the same direction. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.<p>An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2026 12:17:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50272405</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50272405</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50272405</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Tool book of a Nuremberg knight from 1505"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Also someone made a real crossbow based on the image: <a href="https://loeffelholz-codex.org/en/codex/f014v.html" rel="nofollow">https://loeffelholz-codex.org/en/codex/f014v.html</a><p>(Edited wording to correct for jacquesm's point)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Oct 2026 18:09:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234307</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234307</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234307</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Iran threatens to cut Hormuz internet cables"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The photo credit says iStockphoto but the image looks absurdly fake (transparent cable with glowing lights inside). The istockphoto home page says their library has no AI images but that same site also offers AI-image generation.<p>I know that commenting on meta aspects of an article is discouraged here but that image is just ridiculous.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Oct 2026 05:22:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50191501</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50191501</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50191501</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Denmark set to allow return of 'physical force' in school"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One thing about that show is it explored various aspects of the problem, not just blaming student behavior but also parents, teachers and administrators. It illustrated how the problem is quite complex and not just solved by beating up students.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:59:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50069736</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50069736</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50069736</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Absolutely. I've had the identical experience hiring artists for game art/UI. Every once in a while you find an artist who is stellar but most everyone else is not that good.<p>The TFA is pointing to a prompting skills/creativity issue, but I get equally frustrated with hired artists as with genAI image models. Even with skilled human artists (remote/offshore), I find they're best at copying a particular style so I end up having to google for images of the look that we're targeting, then spend hours painstakingly describing the changes needed. Then iterating many times, and with artists in remote time zones that means each iteration takes a whole day. The process is ironically very similar to using AI image models but can take much longer due to time zones.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:38:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767982</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767982</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767982</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Show HN: Bodily Oddities"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I immediately looked up whether it had "piss shiver" and it did. It was disappointing when Cecil (Straight Dope) refused to investigate it.<p>(Don't suppose you'd include orgasmic quiver?)<p>Synesthesia is multifaceted. When I was a kid I used to feel a shape in my hand whenever I felt a certain emotion. That went away in my 20's. Later as an adult I guessed it was a kind of synesthesia.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:27:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651983</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651983</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651983</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Culture Becomes a Dark Forest"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yup. I'm more paranoid about AI training on my chats than most ppl are. While I use frontier models to do research and to build tools, I've tried to avoid discussing details about my projects (e.g. story worldbuilding) except when using local models like Qwen-27B. Of course this slows down progress and has a real opportunity cost, but it would kill all my motivation if I got "scooped" like that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:31:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49635486</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49635486</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49635486</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "“It works better in the app”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I use various bookmarklets to address this issue. The javascript is easy enough that you can modify it even if you're not a programmer. For example see: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43488943">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43488943</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:42:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49484585</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49484585</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49484585</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[In Japan, 'calf hair harassment' exposes gender-based appearance conflicts]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/08/10/in-japan-calf-hair-harassment-exposes-gender-based-appearance-conflicts-between-women-and-men_6756332_4.html">https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/08/10/in-japan-calf-hair-harassment-exposes-gender-based-appearance-conflicts-between-women-and-men_6756332_4.html</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249835">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249835</a></p>
<p>Points: 12</p>
<p># Comments: 12</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:13:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/08/10/in-japan-calf-hair-harassment-exposes-gender-based-appearance-conflicts-between-women-and-men_6756332_4.html</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249835</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249835</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Prominent Haskell defector pilloried by anti-AI purists"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is "one of its most prominent users" a typical LLM phrase? Doesn't seem like it to me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:28:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48931772</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48931772</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48931772</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Ask HN: Opinionated Agent Setup?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Most developers I know don't seem to care about the "right way" to run agents. They either yolo it on their primary dev machine, or setup a separate box (VM, VPS, Rpi, Mac mini) and let it run there with minimal protection. You could simply do the same, running Hermes or Pi on a VPS (e.g. Digital Ocean). Note that Pi has no protections so you probably ought to take extra steps. Hermes uses a container.<p>My setup took a long time to build and I don't know any devs personally who go thru the trouble.<p>* I use a custom harness in a podman container run by a non-sudoer system account. File access is limited to specific ZFS datasets. I don't use Anthropic models for agentic work.<p>* You can find an open-source network proxy that injects credentials into the network requests, I made a custom one.<p><pre><code>   https://github.com/onecli/onecli
   https://github.com/smart-mcp-proxy/mcpproxy-go
   https://github.com/mcpharbour/mcpharbour
   https://github.com/bglusman/calciforge 
</code></pre>
* I made a custom shell (nearly posix-compliant) and don't give it access to regular bash, thus no need to filter its shell commands. You could use an open-source one if you care about this: `<a href="https://github.com/search?q=agent+bash+shell&type=repositories" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/search?q=agent+bash+shell&type=repositori...</a>`<p>* Same story for agent memory, context management and token reduction/compression, but this requires a lot of constant tweaking. Again, there are a lot of open-source repos addressing these aspects. Just search github, hn.algolia.com, and/or look at subreddits like /r/agentsofai /r/ai_agents<p>* Also the agent must be able to run/test the generated code, so if you're targeting another platform you need a MCP or deployment tool that'll allow testing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:36:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844928</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844928</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844928</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Costco and Safeway are getting housing built where others fail"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Huh. I thought it the opposite of AI writing. A smart-and-bored human writer who assumed the reader already knew what the writer did, and cleverly avoided conveying any direct points, forcing the reader to try to read between the lines. Very frustrating.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:43:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547395</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547395</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547395</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Appreciating Exif"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A few years ago I wrote an exif parser too, solely for reading/editing text comments, which is much simpler than what you did. Even then, yes, it's not pretty, very frustrating. There are multiple places to put text in exif, and it took a while to find most (all?) the edge cases.<p>But now it's quite different with LLMs. I recently updated my code and Claude had useful recommendations.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2026 01:37:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523346</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523346</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523346</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Ask HN: What was it like for programmers when spreadsheets became ubiquitous?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's possible that mainframe Oracle DBAs working on glass house HP 9000s looked at PC databases as toys, but within the PC industry these tools were considered powerful. Any growth of PC usage was a rising tide that lifted all the boats in the PC industry. If you had some experience programming in C, it was pretty easy to get a job. There weren't 100's (or 1000's) of job applicants for each position. If it was a niche segment, you could even know all the other candidates for an opening, as in "No Other Choice". (I was in a niche like that, developing architectural and facilities mgmt PC CAD software, then later cartography, for Microstation.)<p>I think the production shift from agriculture to manufacturing, or manufacturing to services, is probably a better way to understand what's happening now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:46:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389826</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389826</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389826</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Model is 6'2" wearing size Medium"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><i>sigh</i> American car culture.<p>I have the same problem and I'm only 5'11" (177 cm). Size "Small" might fit at the neck/shoulders but with lots of extra fabric around my midsection, but most retailers don't carry much inventory for Small, and almost never have Extra Small. In the SF Bay Area, the small items are always out of stock.<p>At one point I found that clothing boutiques in the Castro tended to stock clothes for skinny guys, but those stores disappeared during the pandemic.<p>Now I have to go shopping in Seoul or Tokyo or NYC, but if the pants fit in the waist, they're usually too short.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Feb 2026 04:37:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097546</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097546</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097546</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Transparent Toilets Take Tokyo's Culture of Hygiene to the Next Level"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Nice, was kind of curious about these after seeing them recently in "Perfect Days" (2023, Wim Wenders).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:49:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873462</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873462</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873462</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by tompark in "Ask HN: Pivot from SWE to What?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm guessing I'm over twice your age but my situation is similar to yours in a couple aspects. What I decided to do is focus on exploring the new capabilities that AI will allow individuals to do (especially those of us who can code). There are a lot of ppl who are justifiably frustrated with the current state of the tools. But don't get discouraged by that. I've seen A LOT of tech waves. It's still early in the AI era. I won't suggest any particular approach but recommend giving it some thought.<p>BTW, being an old timer, I also hated the leetcode thing when it became a widespread thing after Google adopted the practice in the wake of The Joel (Spolsky) Test. But you know, years later when I had to go through some interviews, I did spend a few months studying it and it turned out to be pretty fun. But passing technical screenings didn't help me land a job... only connecting via my network seemed to make any difference.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2025 21:20:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46387108</link><dc:creator>tompark</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46387108</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46387108</guid></item></channel></rss>