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TJSomethingon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2026)

  Location: Reno, NV
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: TypeScript, PHP, C++, Scala, C#, AWS
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-james-kelly/
  Email: info@thomaskelly.co

TJSomethingon Colorado House passes bill to limit surveillance pricing and wage setting

If you can do traffic interception, there's a pretty good chance there's going to be traces of price levels in the API and the analytics. Especially since it's probably going to be bolted on to the side of anything PCI compliant. If there isn't, then it's probably going to be really easy to subpoena to prove mens rea, because getting that right is tricky and requires a fair amount of review and coordination.

TJSomethingon Regular army and reserve components enlistment program: Summary of change

Given Sec. Hegseth's record, I don't think he really wants women in the military.

TJSomethingon Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about

I'd assume the point is that they think that the possibility of serving the website to an individual physically within a prohibited country constitutes unacceptable liability.

TJSomethingon A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification

Is this a weird attempt at device verification?

TJSomethingon The Everdeck: A Universal Card System (2019)

I actually own this, but I find that, in practice, remembering the mappings is tricky for most players. Also, it's surprisingly annoying to not have rotationally symmetric cards, or needing to hold the cards in a different way.

TJSomethingon The Everdeck: A Universal Card System (2019)

It's not the delivery that takes that long. It's the printing. It's a print on demand item, printed in the United States. The decks don't currently exist and the current print queue is just that long. If you want to jump the queue, that will be extra.

TJSomethingon Exe.dev

It's not interactive. It's just an extremely brief brochure for the actual service, which is available via SSH. All the useful copy is under the About link at the bottom, which is so light as to fail WCAG contrast standards.

TJSomethingon X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

It matches my usual reading pretty closely. Society gives names to things that aren't real and then argues about them. Twitter is a microcosm of this with their own categories and assemblages of ideas that are even less real than those present in broader society.

TJSomethingon I want a good parallel language [video]

It seems like there are two sides to this problem, both of which are hard and go hand in hand. There is the HCI problem of having abstractions are rich enough to handle problems like parsing and scheduling on the GPU. Then you need a sufficiently smart compiler problem of lowering these problems to the GPU. But of course, there's a limit to how smart a compiler can be, which loops back to your abstraction design.

Overall, it seems to be a really interesting problem!

TJSomethingon Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

While more power may not make sense, less weight is an easy way to get more efficiency. And if you can keep the same power at a lower weight, that's a win.

TJSomethingon You Don't Need Anubis

I know it's beside the point, but I think a chunk of the reason for many of the security measures in airports is because creating the appearance of security increases people's willingness to fly.

TJSomethingon What we talk about when we talk about sideloading

I can get a six pack by doing exercises in my house everyday with some weights and resistance bands for 20 minutes a day and by spending 5 minutes a day tracking my food for a year. I don't think that there is a place I can go to make single payer health care happen, even if I spent 40 hours a week for a decade at a 60% pay cut.

TJSomethingon Show HN: Autism Simulator

I played one day and I had to quit because it was stressing me out too much. Good job!

TJSomethingon Show HN: Autism Simulator

Seconding this. Additionally, I'm likely to fumble speaking tactfully as a result.

TJSomethingon Comparing Rust to Carbon

I've been using F# and there are actually several roadblocks for AOT F# [0]. However, a self-contained .NET JIT executable is still surprisingly small (18 MB for an ASP.NET minimal API written in F#), easy to build, and easy to deploy.

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/issues/13398

TJSomethingon DSM Disorders Disappear in Statistical Clustering of Psychiatric Symptoms (2024)

Just looking at this specific paper, it suggests that eating disorders are part of a general emotional dysfunction spectrum. In practice, we're probably not talking about confident people.

From my anecdotal experience with people I've known, it makes sense that the other symptoms in that spectrum, like bloating and anxiety, could make someone more receptive to unrealistic body standards and "solutions" to achieve those standards and regain control. That's what it's really about: not feeling in control.

TJSomethingon Everything from 1991 Radio Shack ad I now do with my phone (2014)

Practically speaking, you can also replace a radar detector with the Waze app.

TJSomethingon Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

While I agree on those counts, the debugger in Chrome handles large files of minified code, deep framework stack traces, and stopping in dysfunctional code better.

TJSomethingon FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

I think you've got the logic backwards. It defaults to assuming that user agents that have "Mozilla" in them might be bots. Uncommon browsers don't get challenged. It wouldn't make sense for bad faith bots to use uncommon, easy to block user agents.

TJSomethingon It seems like the AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges

The problem here is that some websites, in this case independent open source code forges, can't be put behind paywalls and cannot maintain availability under the load of scrapers.

TJSomethingon NIST Finalizes 'Lightweight Cryptography' Standard to Protect Small Devices

Rijndael (now AES) wasn't even the strongest finalist in the 2001 AES evaluation. It partially won on dint of being faster on contemporary x86 processors than Serpent or Twofish. Nowadays, it's faster on x86-64 processors because there's dedicated silicon for running it. Modern small platforms don't have this silicon and have different performance characteristics to consider. Also, without that dedicated silicon, implementations tend to be vulnerable to side-channel attacks that were unknown at the time.

TJSomethingon The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

In Nevada, it's a percentage (approximately 0.5%, varying from city to city and with other conditions, like commercial usage) of its assessed value, which is 35% of taxable value. Taxable value is the market value of the bare land plus the replacement cost for all improvements on the land, less depreciation.

TJSomethingon Prompting LLMs is not engineering

Under this idea, most engineering isn't engineering. Some of the oldest engineering is ad hoc battlefield engineering to construct siege engines and building tunnels to deliver explosives. That frequently only needed to work one time.

With bridges, you only need that high confidence because there are high costs and risks. Also, the stakeholders are usually governments, who require very predictable results. All that effort is worth it because the artifact will be useful for a long time for a lot of people.

It might be okay if some widget only lasts for 6 months. So, you empirically shave off material until it's as cheap as possible while failing at an acceptable rate.

The cost of shipping is low for software, so the risk profile is even more different. This can be shifted for high stakes software and I think there are some social issues there, but many things are shaped more like Facebook than aircraft control systems. They can fall over and no one's going to actually die.

I think the core of engineering is in evaluating these tradeoffs and figuring out where you can expend effort most efficiently.

TJSomethingon Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet

While that works for attacks that are like spam, bot detection for high margin attacks like show ticket scalping really wants an identity-oriented solution.

TJSomethingon Estrogen: A Trip Report

Florida and Missouri have been working on it, to some success. Florida's laws have decreased access by requiring in-person appointments with doctors instead of telehealth or nurse practitioners, which has eliminated access for 80% of transgender adults [1]. Missouri has banned Medicaid funding for transgender care for adults. [2]

At the national level, The One Big Beautiful Bill Act as passed by the House cuts all federal funding for transgender care for adults via Medicaid [3], though that's still pending what the Senate does.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/florida-transgender-health-care-a...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/missouri-governor-signs-...

[3] https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/jun/02/medicaid-bill...

TJSomethingon Why quadratic funding is not optimal

I don't think the author was claiming that significant number of people hold those assumptions. I thought the assumption was that the most people implementing QF believe that QF is optimal for their use case. However, the author's observed use cases tend to not match the preconditions for QF's optimality.

TJSomethingon A new class of materials that can passively harvest water from air

Another part from the paper that a lot of people here seem to be ignoring: "Specifically, macroscopic water droplets isothermally form when the NP size is ≤22 nm, RH is >~90%, and ϕPE ranges from 0.05 to 0.35." and "Initial water droplets that are observable under optical microscopy (~1 μm in size) appear within a few seconds after being exposed to 97% RH."

This is really moist air that's only barely short of forming dew. A lot of people are focusing on sensational "violation of physics", when it's an incremental improvement on process that happens naturally.

TJSomethingon NSA spied through Angry Birds, other apps: report (2014)

If the pressure is a direct bribe, then TikTok could get in hot water with China for accepting that bribe. With a US corp, the US government can make any criminal liability go away.

TJSomethingon OCaml's Wings for Machine Learning

My issue with REPLs is that they're often too transient. Sometimes I make a mistake on step 2 that I realize while iterating on step 10 of exploring some data. Then I need to iterate on step 2 a little, taking advantage of the ability to easily just run some of the calculations. Once I've got that, I can run the whole notebook again and make sure all my intermediate graphs look good.