HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

NoboruWataya

4,517 karma · joined June 30, 2021

submissionscomments
NoboruWataya··on 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
She had a science/engineering background, more than marketing. Engineers can be frauds too.
NoboruWataya··on Tiny $70 Xteink X3 e-reader
I had only heard about these things on HN, and thought they were primarily popular as a toy for people to hack on. I didn't realise they are so popular amongst "normies".

I have no current need for one as I am happy with my cheap second hand Kobo but it's great that they exist, especially with the open source alternative firmware. Hopefully they don't clamp down on that in future.

NoboruWataya··on We Are Rebuilding Monica
Contacts + calendar app for me, so you can keep on top of birthdays and other special occasions, know when people are away/back, etc.

A personal CRM sounds like a very interesting idea but I would feel weird building profiles on people like that.

NoboruWataya··on AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link
If you can't use their systems for a donation with a sales tax rate of 0%, then per the policy that means you can route users to alternative payment methods for those transactions. So by your reasoning, if donations to OSC are not subject to sales tax, then what the app is doing should be okay.

(As an aside, I have no idea if donations to OSC are subject to sales tax, but I would be surprised if they were given there is no sale or supply happening, and no one here seems to have suggested they are.)

> In any case, whether you think these are easier or harder, and regardless of which cases should be supported from a business perspective, their policy page (at least the one that I'm reading) very clearly says you can't use their system for such donations.

I disagree, because it uses the loose term "tax exempt donations", and nobody, it seems, can agree on whether that means exempt from income tax (ie, recipient does not need to pay income tax on it), exempt from sales tax, or deductible for income tax purposes (personally I think this is likely what it is intended to capture, and the only real basis on which to distinguish between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) organisations, but in fact is the least supported by a literal reading).

NoboruWataya··on AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link
The policy is far from clear cut, and even having read your comments I am still not sure what you think it's trying to say. The policy suggests that an app may lead users to another payment method where the payment is a "tax exempt donation". What tax, specifically, are you suggesting a donation to OSC is not exempt from? You mention sales tax, is it the case that donations are not exempt from (ie, are subject to) sales tax?

Or are you saying the key point is that the donation not tax-deductible for the donor, which is a different thing to being tax exempt (and does not have anything to do with the "taxability of the transaction")?

NoboruWataya··on Fastpotify
Wow, I was going to say I assume the pic in the top right is of the official Spotify client, which seems confusing, but it seems this actually just looks really like the official client. Which is good but possibly makes it more likely Spotify will come after you.

The UI feels a lot less sluggish than the official client (which in my experience seems to have gotten way worse lately) but in many cases I am just sent to a loading page which ultimately takes a similar amount of time to load the content. So it seems a lot of the slowness is coming from the Spotify server side, it's just that the official client seems to freeze while waiting for a response whereas this doesn't.

Hopefully Spotify don't kill librespot. As I understand it you can basically only use it with Premium accounts, so it's not like they aren't getting paid anyway. If some other provider were to come along and offer access to the same content as Spotify with a stable API that you can use with any client, I would pay more for that than I currently do for Spotify.

As an aside, ncspot is another good and more minimalise Spotify client, which is a TUI.

NoboruWataya··on uv: Deduplicate all files in the wheel cache
Exactly my experience, even worse because for me it's 2x256GB drives. Eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded one of them to 1TB, but not the one my root partition is mounted on (too lazy for that), so now I find myself moving various large directories across to my "extra" drive and symlinking them. Funnily enough I don't remember this ever being a problem back when 50GB was considered a lot.
NoboruWataya··on Highlighting My Code Based on How Much I Care
> Just like I can’t remember the code to my apartment building, yet I type it in multiple times every day.

To me it's even less problematic than this. Not being able to remember important codes except via muscle memory is quite unsettling for me because every now and again my muscle memory fails. Like I will get to an ATM and think "wait - what is my PIN?".

With syntax highlighting, even if my muscle memory fails me I still benefit from syntax highlighting (I think). Because I can immediately see the structure of each line. If I am looking through code for a particular thing, I will probably be able to disregard entire lines because they obviously don't have the structure I am looking for. And even within a line, I can just look at the beginning of each "span", immediately know if it's what I'm looking for, and skip to the next span if it's not.

NoboruWataya··on OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally
Indeed, I find it hard to conceive of problems that are:

- too difficult for me to solve but easy enough for a cheap model to solve (if it's going to be running autonomously in the background, I ain't paying ChatGPT/Claude prices), and

- don't involve a bunch of my personal data that I am not comfortable sending off to a random inference provider.

One thing I considered was that it might be good for anything that involves web scraping, given that has traditionally been a fairly difficult thing to do well. But you'd have to be okay with the occasional mistake. (You'd also have to be morally okay with contributing to the epidemic of AI scrapers that websites now have to deal with.)

NoboruWataya··on Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas
My view is that it doesn't really matter, and focusing on it is likely an attempt to distract from the substance of the encyclical, which could be seen as critical of AI insofar as it calls for stronger regulation and more conscientious use of AI. As an aside, I think the arguments put forward in the blog post you link are pretty weak, but again, getting into that would just distract from the actual points being made in the encyclical.
NoboruWataya··on Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas
I think it's a matter of incentives. American billionaires are mostly highly financially exposed to AI, so are not really incentivised to say anything interesting about it except "it's great, you should buy it".
NoboruWataya··on Thoughts on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but Magnifica Humanitas was published earlier this year.
NoboruWataya··on The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now
Well, the guardrails, by which I assume you mean legal and social accountability, were the norm for most of human history, which is why I don't consider the behaviour of anonymous and unaccountable humans on the internet to be "normal". Of course, humans are capable of great evil, but we are also pretty good at building social structures to prevent the worst of it. But those structures don't work so well on the anonymous internet.

> You see this in real life on the streets too.

To nowhere near the same extent, in my experience. Most people in real life are still fairly polite, even to strangers. It's insane to me how rude people can be on social media. Some of the aggressive responses I've received on Reddit (to fairly innocuous comments) I would never in a million years get in real life. (And this is also true of the 90s internet.)

NoboruWataya··on U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective
The "About" page seems fairly clear:

> A/I was born over 20 years ago to provide internet support (through website hosting, e-mail accounts, mailing lists, chat, blogs, and much more) to activists and collectives coming from the world of grassroot and social movements.

NoboruWataya··on That's a Lot of YAML
Surprised TOML didn't get mentioned in the alternatives section, it's probably my favourite configuration format.

I'm working on a project now that uses YAML for configuration (it makes more sense in this context than TOML) and am parsing it using Rust's `serde` crate (via `serde_norway`). It's not so bad if you use `#[serde(deny_unknown_fields)]` everywhere.

NoboruWataya··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
> It’s like some caricature - like an attempt to draw an animal that has never been seen from a description

In my experience this is how HNers see a lot of roles or professions that are not software developer. Finance = Patrick Bateman, lawyer = Saul Goodman, etc.

NoboruWataya··on CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
I use this regularly when I go on long walks out of the city (including the couple of times I've done stretches of the Camino de Santiago). The offline map support and being able to load and display GPX tracks are really helpful there. Not only because you can sometimes find yourself with spotty reception in remote areas, but also because if you are out all day and your phone battery is not the best, you can just stick on airplane mode which massively saves on battery.

CoMaps also makes it quite easy to edit information about businesses etc, so if you spot something that isn't right you can correct it right there.

Also, for long walks/hikes, OSM is excellent. Most people tend think think of OSM as "Google Maps but worse" but IMO it is clearly superior for this use case (at least, for reasonably popular routes). It will display a lot of paths that Google Maps won't and also has far more granular detail, so you can use it to find nearby water fountains, picnic benches, even bins and so on.

NoboruWataya··on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
Yeah. Like most people, my only experience of statistics is studying as part of maths in secondary school. I was really strong in maths generally and most of it came relatively easily to me, but I struggled with statistics. Examples like the Monty Hall problem show just how unintuitive the basic concepts are.

Given how effective stories and anecdotes are in convincing people, it really seems like the human brain is not wired to grasp these concepts easily.

NoboruWataya··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
What is the main use case for X these days? Is it still as popular as it used to be? Clearly the exodus that happened when Musk took it over didn't kill it but I do seem to see fewer links to it than I used to.

Whenever I do see it linked on here it seems to be because one of the big tech CEOs has said something on it.

NoboruWataya··on How much of HN is AI?
> In the first half of the month, roughly 60% of the daily HN lineup was AI-related or AI-generated, tapering off to ~50% as we approached the end of the month. This is up from 40% in February.

This aligns with my much less scientific research. Every now and again, when I remember to do it, I will skim the top 10 stories and count how many are AI-related. I find it is very consistently in the 4-6 bracket. Probably a majority of the time, 5 out of 10 articles are AI-related, and very rarely does it drop below 4 out of 10. It also rarely goes over 6 out of 10, but I can remember it happening a couple of times.

In fact, the proportion of AI representation in the top 10 is so consistent (in my, again, unscientific experience) that I wonder if it is being moderated one way or the other.

Personally I find it boring that one topic gets so much discussion but who am I to argue. I do my bit by making sure to upvote non-AI stories that I find interesting.

NoboruWataya··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
I think this may be a translation issue, as I would always have understood "modern art" to refer to the movement that began in the 1860s, and (English) Wikipedia appears to back this up. Like others have said, "contemporary art" means art of the current time.

> I've seen a lot of contemporary art museums, but few modern art museums.

My experience is the opposite, I have seen plenty of modern art museums, most famously (probably) the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Some modern art museums also feature contemporary art but nevertheless their main focus and brand is modern art (eg, the Tate Modern).

NoboruWataya··on Why some US restaurants are banning tips
If you are a foreigner I imagine your accent can give you away pretty quickly. Europeans would be far less likely to tip (or tip generously).
NoboruWataya··on Why some US restaurants are banning tips
If the price increase is actually linked to higher wages for the staff, there should be no increase in taxable revenue for the restaurant, because the wages are deductible expenses. But there is still the matter of sales tax (paid by the customer), and the tax payable by the employee on their wages (not sure if tips are technically taxable income already, but regardless, you can bet most staff aren't paying taxes on them).
NoboruWataya··on Rural Village in Spain Is Welcoming Digital Nomads with Open Arms
As I understand it, these attempts to use digital nomad money to revive impoverished areas tend to become controversial when the impoverished locals realise what it means to compete with (from their perspective) extremely wealthy blow-ins. Maybe in particular circumstances it can work, like if the locals actually get most or all of the money spent by the newcomers (rather than going into the pockets of absentee landlords or large corporations).

The article opens by noting fears about Spain's "vibrant culture" dying out. Needless to say, this won't help with that problem and may well accelerate it, unless Spanish culture is coding workshops and padel (per the article).

NoboruWataya··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
I gave up trying to read plays shortly after school. There's no point to me, they are supposed to be performed. I still think it's worth studying some of the more famous ones in school, but any study should absolutely involve actually going to see the play at some point.
NoboruWataya··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
> So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture

A lot of school is like this though. English is basically my only language, I have taught myself some very basic Spanish over the years but it is a struggle when you are busy and don't have a consistent routine. I can't believe that for years the state paid a professional to spend hours each week trying to teach me not one but two languages and I completely wasted it. I just had no interest.

In school they basically teach you a bit of everything (maths, science, languages, arts, history, etc), if you are lucky you will take to one or two of those subjects and view the rest as a chore, but all of them are potentially valuable if you really embrace them.

> So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?

Ideally, a good English teacher will explain these things, and/or you will also be learning history which may touch on them. Sure, maybe that isn't enough, but I still think it is better for people to be exposed to these things at a young age. Many young people do actually really take to these works and get a lot of value out of them.

NoboruWataya··on Hacking with Claude on a $27 smart watch
> Although I’ve been saying “Claude”, I actually did most of the work in OpenCode with some of my favorite open weights models. Kimi K3 & K2.6, and DeepSeek v4 Pro & Flash.

... This seems needlessly confusing/misleading? Author continues to use "Claude" throughout the article.

NoboruWataya··on Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera
It's a bleak situation. I don't have a Fairphone (after much agonising, I went instead with a used Pixel when I finally decided to retire my previous phone). I love Fairphone's mission and hope they succeed but indeed it is very difficult to justify spending that much on a phone with those specs, particularly when the company is young and so its promises of replacement parts, extended updates, etc, are difficult to assess.

I have played around a bit with pmOS, originally on an early Pinephone (the "Braveheart" model, which was plagued with hardware issues) and more recently on an ASUS MeMO Pad 7 (which at the time was in the "Community" support category but appears to have since been archived by pmOS). Even on devices where it "works", it tends to be slow, buggy, very heavy on battery and some peripherals like GPS and camera very rarely work.

This is absolutely not intended as criticism of the Fairphone, Pinephone or pmOS teams - on the contrary they are doing fantastic and important work. I think the problem is just really hard when you're working against the interests of some of the wealthiest corporations on earth (and governments seem to have zero interest in helping solve it).

NoboruWataya··on Deus Ex creator Warren Spector is retiring from game development
> The idea that you were affecting and interacting with the world. The idea that you had a full gamut of options of how to achieve a mission. These were promises that weren't well kept, but they kept the imagination alive.

Yes, looking back at the game in hindsight - having since played games like Morrowind - Deus Ex seems relatively linear in comparison, but at the time it felt completely different to any FPS I had played before.

NoboruWataya··on Fairphone is now officially available in the United States
I'm sure their concerns are valid but just because GrapheneOS don't consider the Fairphone to meet their standards for security doesn't mean it is not worth considering for other people who may have different priorities. Fairphones have certain advantages over Pixels such as better repairability and more ethically sourced labour/components. IMO it's good to see the Fairphone do well (and I hope GrapheneOS's partnership with Motorola also goes well).
← PreviousPage 2 of 34Next →