Hacker News Reader

tom_on A Chinese LLM attacked our lab, so we made it work for us

The elided part is presumably some command that the llm was coaxed into inserting, even though it'd make no sense to do that and a human operator just wouldn't.

tom_on I ♥ RSS – A directory of people who love RSS

I don't remember ever seeing one before either. Will the floodgates now open?

tom_on Severance

I dunno, man. I just... dunno.

tom_on The C ``Clockwise/Spiral Rule''

I split the difference and write it "int*w".

(Most style guides tell you to declare one name per line anyway...)

tom_on GCC steering committee announces AI policy

It feels like we're witness to the possible appearance of a new archetype: a whole new kind of capital-P-Person! A hitherto-unnoticed plane in personality space is slowly becoming discernible.

(Time will tell. It's possible this will turn out to be just one of the same old People that you've already met, with just some minor tweaks to the specific details...)

This lobsters comment on the topic intrigued me: https://lobste.rs/s/omq8rt/vibecoding_gets_emacs_patch_rejec...

tom_on Yudkowsky and Soares' Book Is Lacking (2025)

It read to me like a book review written by a person.

What do you see as the bot tells? I didn't spot the usual obvious things, and by the time I got to the end I wasn't feeling vaguely suspicious. (But, if this is actually AI-written, and possibly quite transparently so, then I've clearly missed something, and I'd quite like to know what!)

tom_on Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg

Well, rather your ears than mine.

tom_on New rental trend? A $200 'work-from-home fee' tacked on to Bay Area lease

My thinking was that the landlord would be providing the same internet either way, work from home or no, and it costs the same whatever happens. Sure, you'll maybe use it more if you're working from home - but that costs exactly the same as, say, not using it at all.

(It is possible that the landlord will note that you ticked the WFH box, and spend part of the extra $200/mo on upgrading the broadband at the property to 900 Mbit/sec fibre or whatever. But I just don't think this very likely.)

tom_on SIMD for Collision

It looks like it supports NEON: https://github.com/erincatto/box3d/blob/781673be801569a94be7...

tom_on The Dark Night of Mathematics

"Or threaten to hurt them, or their family, or their friends. Then just take the money. What about that option? Didn't think of that, did ya son."

"Don, I..."

"Listen. I think this racket just ain't for you. But you're a good kid - too good, maybe - and I promised your father I'd find you something. I'll ask Giovanni. Maybe he can find something for you in bookkeeping."

tom_on League of Legends designer shares game design field manual

I found it quite tiring to read as well.

tom_on Ah, the Codeberg Drama

I assume "AI people" is in quotes to indicate that it's kind of a term of art. Like Car People. Or Computer People. Some visible, bothersome subset of the (much larger (like, how many people these days don't use a car? (ok, so it's not zero, but it's hardly the opposite either))) category of people that use the thing in question.

tom_on Ah, the Codeberg Drama

It's definitely a theme, but some people are just like that (as has always been the case), and maybe they're the ones most inclined to comment on this matter.

Another theory: https://lobste.rs/s/omq8rt/vibecoding_gets_emacs_patch_rejec... (posted very much not because of the chatbot psychosis aspect, which doesn't seem relevant in this case, more the part about possible minor personality changes from long-term communing with LLMs)

tom_on New rental trend? A $200 'work-from-home fee' tacked on to Bay Area lease

Who pays per byte for internet?!

The other points are well made, though. The lesson, I suppose: bills included is a bad idea. The incentives are misaligned all round.

tom_on Advertise in ChatGPT

You misunderstand. They are going to force everybody to pay $5, then force everybody to use chatgpt. 8 billion times 5 isn't much money, but the advertisers will surely pay a lot for that many captive eyeballs!

(I have no MBA either)

tom_on I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs

I never liked xargs either. My replacement is kind of like "xargs -n 1 -d '\n' -J '{}'", which experience has taught me is almost always what I want. It consumes all of its input before starting, so it knows how many files it has to process, and it can print progress to stderr and/or the terminal title as it goes. It can run each command via the shell if you want. It has --dry-run and --keep-going. It can read the file names from a file rather than stdin. I have a few more ideas for things it could do, but I haven't needed to add them yet.

(For enumerating files, I use find or dir/b/s, possibly combined with grep, then pipe the result in.)

People moaning about avoiding non-basic use of xargs and bash (and inadvertently demonstrating in many cases why some of us think that xargs sucks) miss a large part of the point, which is that it's nice to have a tool that does exactly what you want, and works in a way that's convenient for you, and isn't so widely used that you have to worry about modifying it. If you find the tool doesn't work the way you like, you can just change it. You don't have to be answerable to anybody else. I think tptacek's quite good essay could be relevant: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/05/12/emacsification/

(You don't have to use LLMs for this! I wrote my program by hand, it's only like 250 lines of Python, and you could write one too. But, whichever barriers to entry prevent you from creating your own tools for yourself, using an LLM would probably lower at least some of them.)

tom_on I Stopped “Creating Content”

tom_on Fake food delivery site for the dopamine

The link is to the BingeEatingDisorder subreddit. From the link,

> I know that at least for me, the actual process of ordering food delivery is part of the addiction

tom_on Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left

Visual Studio Code asks you if you trust the files in the folder you open, or at least it always has done for me. Presumably this stuff stops working if you don't?

tom_on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

Nuance quietly surfaced.

tom_on Mawlynnong, India, transformed by tourism, bans visitors on Sundays

The new editorialised title is an improvement, given that most of HN's readership is probably not in the UK, especially not at time of writing: 0130 BST on a Tuesday.

tom_on Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

So need to think about it now. Our future selves will be much better placed to deal with it.

tom_on Mawlynnong, India, transformed by tourism, bans visitors on Sundays

The article is on the BBC site, so Asia means India/Pakistan/Bangladesh/etc.

Japan is Japan.

tom_on Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

A problem for us to deal with when we encounter it.

tom_on Weightlifting beats running for blood sugar control, researchers find (2025)

Running is harder work than walking. Try it!

tom_on AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)

Centiseconds was one of the ways time was measured on the BBC Micro. Your convenient options for accurately measuring the passage of time were vsyncs (50/sec), centiseconds (100/sec), microseconds (1,000,000/sec), or cycles (2,000,000/sec).

tom_on Your code is fast if you're lucky

    else{
        *rwr--=x;
    }

tom_on In Emacs, everything looks like a service

It's just less effort all round to have everybody using the same supported set of tools. I don't know if I've ever worked on a project that's gone so far as to actually mandate this, but a "should" (possibly in the RFC sense) is fair enough I think. Every project I've worked on has ended up with everybody eventually settling on using the same tools, because it's just overall less hassle that way.

(Regarding Emacs, I'm typically using it anyway for org-mode, so if I need to do some one-off edit or other - probably some keyboard macro thing - then I can just load the problem file into Emacs and save it back out again afterwards. I've only once been in the situation of neither being allowed to install it nor remotely connect to another machine to use it.)

tom_on Almost Always Unsigned

Add -1.f, or pick another handedness.

tom_on A bug which affected only left handed users

The iPhone is normal phone size width and depth, but it's meaningfully shorter than just about everything else. It doesn't sound like much on paper but I've always found it adds up once in a pocket. (All dimensions height x width x depth, in mm, rounded up to the nearest mm)

* iPhone Mini: 132 x 72 x 8 (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/111877)

These two alternatives are noticeably larger:

* Vivo X300: 151 × 72 × 8 (https://www.vivo.com/in/products/param/x300)

* Oppo X9S: 157 x 74 x 8 (https://www.oppo.com/en/smartphones/series-find-x/find-x9s/s...)

In fact, they're more like the size of the full size iPhone, which, if you're sticking with your iPhone Mini because the iPhone is annoyingly large, means they're too large.

* iPhone 17: 150 x 72 x 8 (https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone-17/specs/)