Hacker News: tomtheelder

New comment by tomtheelder in "Introducing MicroLighter"

tomtheelder — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:42:45 +0000

The site linked to is a blog post about the app. The actual site is linked in there, and if you follow that link there are examples.

OP probably should have put an example in this post. That said they look like... syntax highlighted code.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

tomtheelder — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:03:01 +0000

Then compare, say, Massachusetts to high functioning north Europe systems. You will shrink the lifestyle and climate factors down to a pretty minuscule difference, but you will still find that the spending is dramatically higher.

You're not wrong at all that the US has some systematic issues that place additional strain on the healthcare system, but it's a "yes and" situation here. Even accounting for those, we spend far, far too much because our system is extractive.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Meta faces 'astronomical' consequences as legal fight reaches critical moment"

tomtheelder — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:53:19 +0000

On the basis that public corporations are exclusively a legal construct which can, and indeed already do, have arbitrary rules. Should the individual wish to maintain control over their company they can simply keep it private indefinitely.

New comment by tomtheelder in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

tomtheelder — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:23:32 +0000

100%, I thought about writing that out explicitly. I really feel like we are extremely close to reaching that kind of breaking point for most folks LLM use cases.

New comment by tomtheelder in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

tomtheelder — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:41:58 +0000

> Fable is probably at least as good as the average software engineer and costs $50/wk on the max plan vs a software engineer who would cost closer to $4000 a week.

That's because the max plans are _massively_ subsidized. At API pricing the kind of usage to replace the value of a SWE is going to be way, WAY more than $50/wk. Orders of magnitude more. And to remain a frontier model org that kind of pricing has to continue in perpetuity.

New comment by tomtheelder in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

tomtheelder — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:33:17 +0000

I think the question is even a bit more nuanced than that. Even if frontier models can maintain a big gap that gap has to actually _matter_. If a local model satisfies my everyday use cases adequately then I may not really care that a frontier model is 5, 10, 100x better at ultra high order reasoning tasks.

I think that reality is probably not all that far off for a huge swath of use cases.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Decoy Font"

tomtheelder — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:51:20 +0000

Zoom out and you'll see the hidden message

New comment by tomtheelder in "Resetting Xbox"

tomtheelder — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:10:19 +0000

You know sorta feels to me like some new physical tech would be warranted here. Something with a good amount of storage, very quick I/O, and read/writable. More like a fancy thumb drive than a disk. Let the version on it be updated by the system to stay current, gain add on content, etc.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Resetting Xbox"

tomtheelder — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:01:21 +0000

Xbox makes an enormous amount of money from a few long running properties (the letter in question mentions Mojang and King), but basically every big move and acquisition they have made for the past 10 years has been catastrophic.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Resetting Xbox"

tomtheelder — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:54:08 +0000

I don't really have an opinion on Sharma since she's very green, but Phil Spencer's tenure was an unmitigated disaster. The strategy of rolling up studios and trying to grow through GamePass both completely backfired, with the studios producing few and generally unsuccessful games, and GamePass failing to convert casual players while demolishing your take from your hardcore players.

Was definitely time for major change at XBOX. Is this the right direction? I have no idea.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Resetting Xbox"

tomtheelder — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:50:06 +0000

Well it was Phil Spencer, who got fired. They basically cleaned house in management already.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Gleam v1.9"

tomtheelder — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 19:00:27 +0000

Gleam and Rust are really not alike at all aside from the most superficial ways. A couple bits of syntax, and the use of toml are about all I can come up with.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"

tomtheelder — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 19:29:43 +0000

I'm an American and it definitely seems like we are in a significant and worsening loneliness crisis. I have no idea to what degree any of it is unique to Americans. Social connectedness, socialization rates, and companionship have all been declining for quite a while now. Lot's of potential causes and theories about it. [1] is a decent overview.

Like personally I'm doing great, and so are a lot of people I know, and I'm sure you as well. But I think a lot of Americans are struggling badly with their social lives.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9811250/

New comment by tomtheelder in "The Northeast is becoming fire country"

tomtheelder — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 21:21:15 +0000

The Northeast doesn't have a dry season, and I don't think anyone seriously thinks it's going to develop one. It just has occasional dry periods because precipitation is pretty chaotic, and is getting more chaotic due to climate change. When one of those happens there's some fire risk, like has just happened. "The Northeast is becoming fire country" is just unabashed scare mongering.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Wonder is acquiring Grubhub"

tomtheelder — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 19:49:40 +0000

Local grocery stores have basically been extinct for decades- and realistically that isn't that surprising given they mostly sell commodity products. We don't need to let restaurants suffer the same fate.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Monorepo – Our Experience"

tomtheelder — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 21:00:03 +0000

The dependency graph is no different for a monorepo vs a polyrepo. It's just a question of how those dependencies get resolved.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Monorepo – Our Experience"

tomtheelder — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 20:58:47 +0000

I mean it works for Google. Not saying that's a reason to go monorepo, but it at least suggests that it can work for a very large org with very diverse software.

I really don't see why anything you describe would be an issue at all for a monorepo.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid"

tomtheelder — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 20:48:40 +0000

I still have a cast iron skillet, but I mostly stopped using it once I got some carbon steel pans. In my experience they beat cast iron in nearly every way. I only use my cast iron now if I need a huge amount of thermal capacity (like pre-heating it to make pizza on or something) or for the presentation value.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Rust needs a web framework"

tomtheelder — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 12:13:13 +0000

I like OCaml a lot as a language, but the tooling is very, very poor by modern standards. Poor enough that I think it’s a total blocker on wider adoption.

New comment by tomtheelder in "YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup"

tomtheelder — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 13:23:29 +0000

For sure- it's just that YC didn't used to operate like that. They have morphed from an interesting higher-touch incubator whose involvement was a strong positive signal into a scattershot VC, but not everyone realizes that so being "YC backed" still carries more prestige than is warranted.