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itsadok

185 karma · joined May 13, 2010

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itsadok··on AI Guesses Your Accent
The app this is advertising helps non-native speakers with their accent, I assume to sound more American. This is a great goal, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who would be willing to pay the $200-$300 yearly subscription cost. Apparently the AI part is not even the main function of the app, that's what the extra $100 are paying for[1].

I would be interested in an AI-only product that would help me learn to passably immitate various English accents, like Australian, Irish and so forth, for fun. I know that ChatGPT Voice can do accents pretty well, I've been wondering if it would also be able to help me with mine, but I haven't tried it seriously.

[1] https://www.boldvoice.com/frequently-asked-questions

itsadok··on Show HN: LLM-aided OCR – Correcting Tesseract OCR errors with LLMs
In your assess_output_quality function, you ask the LLM to give a score first, then an explanation. I haven't been following the latest research on LLMs, but I thought you usually want the explanation first, to get the model to "think out loud" before committing to the final answer. Otherwise, it might commit semi-radndomly to some score, and proceed to write whatever explanation it can come up with to justify that score.
itsadok··on The Quirks of Gmail UI
This is kind of like how http sites look totally fine in most browsers, but an https site with a self-signed certificate will cause a "DANGER! ENTER AT YOUR OWN PERIL" screen to be shown.
itsadok··on Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Stack Overflow
These were literally the first 3 questions on my review queue:

* https://stackoverflow.com/q/59344615 - A question by an absolute beginner, trying to do something that they have no clue how to start with. Already closed.

* https://stackoverflow.com/q/59341242 - A question about parsing a JSON response with jQuery. Two votes to close. The asker clearly does not know the word "parse".

* https://stackoverflow.com/q/57969318 - Someone trying to figure out an error message they're getting with kubernetes. This is exactly the kind of thing you get at the top of your google results when you hit the same error, and with one more vote to close, it will be forever locked with no useful information. Some asshole even downvoted the one answer that is there without adding any comments.

None of these questions are good, but they could be made better, and they all represent people with real problems that deserve help. Getting mad at people for "being lazy" (because if I, the expert, could easily find the answer to this, then why didn't you?!), is not productive.

Here's what I don't understand about all these SO deletionists: how is closing the question helpful in any way? If you don't find the question answerable, then don't answer it! But why block other people from trying to help? It's not like you're somehow "teaching" these people how to ask by blocking them. The user from question 59344615 (which got closed) did not post another question with better details. They just left the site, one more developer that doesn't have anywhere they can ask newbie questions. It sucks.

itsadok··on Gnome has moved to GitLab
The last time I evaluated GitLab, you needed the paid version to use features that I considered pretty basic, like merge request approvals and multiple code reviewers[1]. I'm wondering now if the GNOME people consider these unnecessary, or if I misunderstood what was possible with self hosting.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

itsadok··on Open Source License Business Perception Report
Are there any downsides to multiple-licensing? What happens if I say "This software is released under every license listed in https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical"?

Just curious.

itsadok··on St – A simple terminal implementation for X
Not OP, but some cool features I haven't seen in Linux:

- Quadruple-click smart selection

- "Selection respects soft boundaries" for selecting within a tmux pane

- "Rum coprocess" on keyboard shortcut, which allows doing stuff like http://brettterpstra.com/2014/11/14/safer-command-line-paste...

I just checked, and gnome-terminal doesn't even have split-pane. What do you guys use, anyway?

itsadok··on Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
While people still drive themselves, there's a huge incentive to come to work early or late, to avoid traffic. I don't see that incentive increasing with autonomous cars. If anything, I predict that more people will join rush hour traffic if they don't need to do any actual driving. However, this might be mitigated by the better driving of autonomous cars.
itsadok··on How liars create the ‘illusion of truth’
This is similar to the "Contamination" effect, of how completely false statements can affect a person's judgement, even if they are told the statement are false.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/k3/priming_and_contamination/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/k4/do_we_believe_everything_were_tol...

itsadok··on How to Make Python Run as Fast as Julia
I'm pretty sure everything you used is already supported: http://buildbot.pypy.org/numpy-status/latest.html
itsadok··on 1/999999999999999999999998999999999999999999999999
A common warm up question in a coding interview is to write (on the whiteboard) a program that prints the Fibonacci numbers in sequence. Arguably, you can write this fraction and claim this answers the question, though I don't know any programming language where this would actually work without a bunch of more code around it.

Edit: other comments have examples in Python, Clojure and bc.

itsadok··on Language choices for long-term projects
Obligatory: http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
itsadok··on Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]
A slightly easier to read version here: http://le-cretin-transnational.ch/wp-content/uploads/2014/04...
itsadok··on HTTP "Prefer:Safe" – Making Online Safety Simpler in Firefox
I was with them until they mentioned "one less thing for kids to try to circumvent to disable this control". If a kid is actively trying to circumvent the parental controls, this is no longer about "protection" but about control.

In other news, the Feynman lectures on QED are blocked in "safe" mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvl6TBGEoO0

itsadok··on C++ patterns using plain C
Yon mean "non idiomatic", right? I don't think he used anything non standard.
itsadok··on Floor – Web development with Rust
Can somebody shed a light on what the ''a means in the Request type?

  pub struct Request<''a> {
      pub origin: &''a Request,
      pub params: HashMap<String, String>, 
  }
itsadok··on HTTP/1.1 just got a major update
Python's requests library maintainers insisted on sticking with this annoying and surprising rule (default charset of ISO-8859-1), because that's what the RFC says they should do. Hopefully, they'll reconsider now.

https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/issues/1737

https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/issues/2086

itsadok··on Finch – local port forwarding
You'd need to tweak the server for this to actually work. By default, remote forwarded ports are not accessible from other hosts, and non-root cannot listen on port 80.

http://serverfault.com/a/133440/1726 http://serverfault.com/a/285617/1726

itsadok··on Ask HN: Idea Sunday
Michael Stipe had that idea back in 2004: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/28/electric_car_rington...
itsadok··on Why I like Java
A corollary: we use Java and Python mostly, and when interviewing candidates, the vast majority of them choose to give their answers in Java. I don't ask particularly hard questions, but I find that I usually get a good sense of the candidate by just talking to him as he's working out the answer.

This one guy chose Python, which delighted me since it's so rare. He then proceeded to produce answers much more easily than the average candidate, and he was able to make changes as I suggested them without too much effort.

We hired him but had to let him go after a month, when it became clear that he wasn't as good as I'd thought he was. Turns out it was Python that just made him look smart.

I like Java for actually getting things done, but it's such a vast ocean of TMTOWTDI that interviewing in it seems harder than in smaller languages.

itsadok··on About Python 3
> The converse problem is having to write iterator versions of map, filter, and other eagerly-evaluated builtins

Well, in Python 2 you just use imap instead of map. That way you have both options, and you can be explicit rather than implicit.

> That's not a list of numbers... that's a list of bytes!

The point being made here is not that some things are not possible in Python 3, but rather than things that are natural in Python 2 are ugly in 3. I believe you're proving the point here. The idea that b'a'[0] == 97 in such a fundamental way that I might get one when I expected the other may be fine in C, but I hold Python to a higher standard.

itsadok··on Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
Somebody else already had, a month ago.

http://stackoverflow.com/revisions/11318414/4

itsadok··on About Python 3
Using a binary package with pip requires "a compiler and all of the development libraries", which GP said he doesn't want to do. Personally I gave up a while ago and now I do "apt-get build-essential python-dev" on every new server, but it's not ideal. I really like the approach outlined in https://hynek.me/articles/python-app-deployment-with-native-... , but haven't gotten around to implementing it.
itsadok··on A basic guide to when and how to deploy HTTPS
IsTom's comment was about how an HTTP-served page might be modified to make the "secure" links actually point to a non-HTTPS fake login page (for example). This assumes the user will not notice that the connection is not secure (which I think is a fair assumption).

Given that, another attack might be to mitm DNS and serve an entirely fake Amazon site, all in HTTP, and the user will not notice there's anything wrong.

I think that's the point mro and troels were trying to make.

The only way I can imagine to mitigate this would be to use HSTS on the amazon.com home page.

itsadok··on We Need a Basic Income Guarantee
The main value one receives from buying a lottery ticket is not the statistical expected value of return on investment, but the sense of hope for a better life that you get when you but the ticket. This hope is much more valuable for someone struggling with poverty than for someone who's relatively well off. Therefore, it's perfectly rational for poor people to put a higher dollar value on a lottery ticket.
itsadok··on How zsh is more useful than bash
I use Alt+# in bash to do something similar. It comments out the current line and gives you a new prompt. Then you can run whatever you wanted to do first, and then scroll up, delete the hash sign and hit Enter.

Esc-Q sounds easier, though.

itsadok··on Why Isn't Gatsby in the Public Domain?
Mr. Destiny: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100201/
itsadok··on Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files
You can read the entire blog from the RSS feed. Can't say that about Google+, though.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/OfficialGmailBlog

itsadok··on Non-hiring Practices
Back when we were looking for developers, I did my best to contact everyone we decided not to hire. There was one guy that simply would not accept my rejection and demanded that I explain why we felt he wasn't a good match.

I got rid of him eventually, but I can easily see such a conversation ending in lawsuit-enabling remarks by me. Hiring, especially non-hiring, is a lot about gut feelings, and those might be tricky to explain legally.

So I would say it's definitely safer to keep quiet.

itsadok··on Where the fuck is my Ari Gold?
This post reminded me of this old (and long) rant: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/blogs-are-godless...

Relevant quote:

"The Hollywood job market doesn't work the way Joel thinks it does. It barely works at all. If you thought Google and Microsoft interview questions were ridiculous, wait until Joel Spolsky has us all dressing up in Catwoman suits just to get a job, after we've established ourselves as stars."

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