Hacker News: tomsmeding

New comment by tomsmeding in "Nvidia OpenShell"

tomsmeding — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 19:35:05 +0000

If it's in AGENTS.md, it's not a statement for a human, but for the LLM. Who knows, maybe they have seen, or think to have seen and now cargo-cult, some behaviour improvement due to the sentence.

New comment by tomsmeding in "Galois Finite Fields and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)"

tomsmeding — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:51:54 +0000

I read the "weirdly" as "unexpectedly", i.e. "you might not see this coming, but it's still true (and there's deep theory behind it)".

New comment by tomsmeding in "Yet another way to invoke functions without parentheses"

tomsmeding — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:02:07 +0000

In ML family languages you also don't have to change the language for this, as function application is naturally "argument-by-argument" (the term is "curried"): the syntax is normally f x y z but (f x y) z and (((f)) (x)) y z are just as valid, and indeed f x y will be a function taking one argument. Thus |> can just take a function of one argument and be done.

New comment by tomsmeding in "Noto means "no tofu": fixing dotted circles in Myanmar text"

tomsmeding — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 19:44:23 +0000

That インウ should likely be インク. :)

New comment by tomsmeding in "Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits"

tomsmeding — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:13:13 +0000

Dialogue is super effective for this, but it's also a skill: you're suddenly a teacher. You should have no judgement of the other not knowing something, and be able to effectively build up that delta in a way that is understandable and interesting to the other. This can be more difficult than it sounds, but it's also rewarding.

New comment by tomsmeding in "Benchmark in Milliseconds"

tomsmeding — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:57:08 +0000

I've been doing some benchmarking recently and I've observed that on certain workloads, my CPU cores are not equivalent. (And this is an Intel CPU from 5 years ago, all cores are the same on paper.) In a particular very bad case I have a reproducible 50% performance difference between (physical) core 0 and core 5.

You might want to taskset to particular cores too, especially if you are looking at computational code with many almost-but-not-quite-random memory accesses.

New comment by tomsmeding in "Claude Code’s suggested message feature: I think the real customer is the model"

tomsmeding — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:44:14 +0000

This is hilarious as someone who hasn't used the gmail composition interface in years. I left it to use my own domain, but it seems like I get to enjoy this mess with popcorn too instead of tears.

New comment by tomsmeding in "Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story"

tomsmeding — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 11:35:51 +0000

Possibly, but at least a cursory internet search of the person's name doesn't being up this article. Which is a good thing.

New comment by tomsmeding in "Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard"

tomsmeding — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:33:41 +0000

It's an existing joke: https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/

New comment by tomsmeding in "Asking authors about their own papers"

tomsmeding — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 09:25:00 +0000

Similar experience to sibling: a disinterested human isn't going to ask for 30 different detailed things to add to, or change in, the paper that could technically be improved but aren't worth the additional page real estate. An LLM reviewer definitely does this.

New comment by tomsmeding in "The most official water costs $120k a gallon"

tomsmeding — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 23:33:42 +0000

I can't help but read VSMOW as Very Standard Mean Ocean Water.

New comment by tomsmeding in "Perforce charges $500 for training training videos.. and it's AI narrated"

tomsmeding — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:40:27 +0000

It ought not to, indeed. However, if you want "save my file" to include awareness of other developers concurrently working on the same project -- even the same file -- with a decent way to handle conflicts, it suddenly becomes complicated. Git is probably not the optimal way of designing a UI around this, but it's not like this is an easy problem.

New comment by tomsmeding in "A tale of two path separators"

tomsmeding — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 19:48:41 +0000

scḧon

New comment by tomsmeding in "Nanopass Framework: Clean Compiler Creation Language"

tomsmeding — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:44:52 +0000

Egraphs fundamentally require a first-order language, i.e. no lambda functions, because they do not handle scoping well. There are workarounds that work in some circumstances, but no general solution (that I'm aware of).

Additionally, egraphs express rewrites on a single language. Compilers are fundamentally translators between different languages; how do you write typechecking as an egraph rewrite rule? Or conversion to assembly?

New comment by tomsmeding in "A two-person method to simulate die rolls (2023)"

tomsmeding — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 21:39:38 +0000

The method proposed is just A - B mod n. The two are entirely equivalent.

New comment by tomsmeding in "Addressing the adding situation"

tomsmeding — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 14:47:53 +0000

Do you really think that `*(a + i)` is clearer than `a[i]`?

New comment by tomsmeding in "The realities of being a pop star"

tomsmeding — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 08:48:03 +0000

It is thoughtful, that's not the problem. It's just not written in the standard language "written English", but instead in "spoken English" with some attempts towards the former ("My final thought on ...") that sound like someone trying formal writing for the first time.

New comment by tomsmeding in "`satisfies` is my favorite TypeScript keyword (2024)"

tomsmeding — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 23:37:41 +0000

Well, it is the type of that, in TS syntax. Few are the statically-typed languages that can even express that type.

New comment by tomsmeding in "Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux"

tomsmeding — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 11:34:25 +0000

Hypothesis: that Qualcomm and that Macbook have higher memory bandwidth than your i9 system. This is dependent on your memory and your mainboard, not so much on the CPU itself. Perhaps Teams just uses way too much memory, and actually uses it all the time.

New comment by tomsmeding in "The disguised return of EU Chat Control"

tomsmeding — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 22:05:25 +0000

> According to Breyer, the existing voluntary system has already proven flawed, with German police reporting that roughly half of all flagged cases turn out to be irrelevant.

A failure rate of only 50% is absurdly good for a system like this. If we have to:

> Imagine your phone scanning every conversation with your partner, your daughter, your therapist, and leaking it just because the word ‘love’ or ‘meet’ appears somewhere.

then apparently either there are so many perpetrators that regular conversations with partners etc. are about as common as crime, or such regular conversations don't have such a high risk of being reported after all.

I don't think chat surveillance is a good idea. But please use transparent and open communication. Don't manipulate us just like the enemy does.