Hacker News Reader

I always wished this site had the option to include the original Chinese

pringk02on Ask HN: What are you reading?

I just got done with a second read of 2666 by Bolaño.

There was an article on HN a month or two ago about how some books drive people to the kind of madness that would make them do a degree in literature. This is probably the one for me. Excited to read it again in 5 years and see it differently again.

pringk02on We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

Yeah, I can't claim I wouldn't live in it if given the chance (even if I'd redecorate). I think you are correct about the wood. If I reflect on it some amount of it is that everything looks like the same yellow laminate I am most used to seeing on office furniture, and have spent a bunch of time sat at. Maybe darker wood tones would completely change the effect this has on me

pringk02on We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

I think you are correct about the lighting. It was seeing the kids bedroom that made me feel the most taken aback, but I think with some warmer light the effect would be less stark

pringk02on We built our house for LAN parties (2024)

[flagged]

pringk02on Emily Wilson to retranslate the Odyssey from scratch

There is no such thing as an objective translation, especially not across thousands of years.

pringk02on AI-written code is still your code

I have started to wonder to what degree programming discussion online is astroturfed. The financial incentive to flood programming discussion (any discussion related to work) with pro-AI messaging, and the simultaneous ease with which AI makes it to do so, makes it hard not to ponder what amount of seemingly organic pro-AI sentiment is not.

I'm sure there is some that is indeed genuine. It could even be most. But I'd be surprised if it is all.

pringk02on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)

Out of curiosity, can you link to a publicly available furry work to help someone curious get into it? And help to know what to look for to appreciate it.

pringk02on AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users

> weakness of democracy

What do you suggest as an alternative?

pringk02on The Human Is the Loop

I kind of love the idea of everyone suddenly talking and writing in the cringey stilted style of Japanese media translated into English.

pringk02on What sort of maths are LLMs good at?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...

Wikipedia is maybe the narrow end of a wedge into this topic but the controversy revolves around a very large and very complex paper that few people are equipped to understand and some of those who are able believe the proof is false.

pringk02on The Human Is the Loop

I’m also interested in a study as I also have ADHD and this is also my work loop. I tend to cut up and serialise rather than parallelise. I can not deal with the degree of context switching described in this blog post. I’d have felt frayed within two weeks.

pringk02on The AI Billboards Are Killing SF

Great performers, great band

pringk02on Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

It is meant to offset not knowing why everything degrades and you can't make progress after the first month. Is that OK for you?

pringk02on The Shape of Things to Come

> But my Wyvern development has been burning the equivalent of $87k/month of API token burn, or about 69 billion tokens in July (96% cache hits, fortunately). So I do have to worry about it. I don't care how much money you have; your spouse is not going to let you spend almost ninety thousand dollars a month on your hobby game. I didn't even bother asking.

> My solution has been to create a token tap on $200 Max accounts, which for me work out to ~30x the list-price equivalent. So in reality I'm only spending about $2800/month out of pocket for my $87k "worth" of tokens. Though that number keeps growing alarmingly.

But how much does the game bring in?

pringk02on Don't be a meat proxy

I think you missed that the actual intelligence knew that it was a typo, and that the joke they made riffed on pretending that they did not know.

pringk02on They Stole Your Attention

People use markers of effort as a proxy to gauge the quality of a resource.

AI prose is low effort, even if your gathering of statistics and making charts was not. So that effort is undermined by the marker of AI prose which leads to an implication the rest of the data could be also, even if that is not actually the case.

pringk02on They Stole Your Attention

The data seemed like it could be interesting but I found it tough to engage with the “stylish” AI prose and UI flourishes.

Is there a human-written long-form article to go with this?

pringk02on Show HN: The Occult Gatsby

I want to believe, but scanning the bibliography I couldn’t find the source that suggested Fitzgerald’s following of Orage.

An interesting reading all the same, though I’ve only scanned it a little

pringk02on How to Train a Gen AI Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop with 6GB VRAM

I just wish it had samples! I want to hear it

pringk02on Farage left fighting a trash can as the UK populist's election gamble backfires

His plan is to move to the constituency and serve seriously as an MP. Whether he does or does not do the whole thing in costume is another question

pringk02on The AI Marketing Backlash: Why 'AI-First' Brands Are Starting to Fall Flat

I just can't see myself ever going to a venue to see an AI artist perform. Would it just involve watching a video?

pringk02on 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

One of the best educational videos on any topic ever imo. I can't help but watch it again each time. So incredibly well paced and accessible

pringk02on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests

> It's unclear on how this "punishes normal developers" in any shape or form.

There are, of course, no normal Chinese developers

pringk02on Artificial

This seems to have been flagged or something, but I enjoyed it, if just for the conversational framing

pringk02on Malus – Clean Room as a Service

> per package = max( $0.01, size_kb × $0.01 )

> order total = max( $0.50, sum of all packages )

> $0.50 minimum applies per order (Stripe processing floor). No base fee.

Not sure I can trust their output if this simple thing is fluffed

pringk02on Beyond agentic coding

I would be interested to hear you elaborate on this more. I feel like I almost get what you are saying but am not confident I actually understand.

pringk02on TikTok Sold for $14B

> No representatives from ByteDance were present at the signing, and the company hasn’t acknowledged that a transaction is taking place. No purchase price was mentioned, and there’s no indication that the Chinese government has made changes to laws that would be necessary for a deal to take place.

> President Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping gave the deal the go ahead. Vance said the Chinese government put up some resistance before the agreement

I find these two paragraphs particularly interesting

pringk02on ERP Therapy Sucks

> So for me, there are many many successful point therapies, and much much fewer higher level successful therapies where chatgpt or low skill therapists won't really help.

I definitely agree. I think I was very fortunate to find someone who specialised in and only did ERP and had a lot of experience. I hear a lot of stories in support groups of well-meaning therapists making things worse. The closest I came to killing myself was after three sessions of psychodynamic therapy (after getting sick of a lack of progress with CBT). All of that therapy was before I understood that I was suffering from OCD.

pringk02on ERP Therapy Sucks

I think this is absolutely true. My OCD was minimised greatly by treatment, but I am still prone to returning to certain patterns and have to put in active work to maintain my current state