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curo

484 karma · joined March 4, 2014

Building a daily history app
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curo··on Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?
This page embeds the exact payload of the original including campaignVersion: "v5", candidateSetVersion: "mendelsohn-2025", all eight private excerpts, contexts, profile copy, and internal IDs. And it doesn't cite the original. I.e., infringement.
curo··on Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?
There's a section in the report "what's the most accurate translation" - tldr it's complicated. Presumably the top 8 translations by popularity pass some threshold of credibility.
curo··on Whimsical Animations Course Open House
Nice lesson on animation performance, i learned a lot by reading this.

As someone trying to build animated, edutainment-rich courses I'm a big admirer of Josh's work. Another banger

curo··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
An interactive Greek & Roman Mythology course: https://www.scrivium.com

If we can nail this one, then an entire Oxford-grade education in the same style.

curo··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
This is really fun — have you played with making the tile position opinionated (not agnostic)?

i wonder if have the clues point to a starting square (e.g., "E5") would be better than the current "reveal" aid. The spatial information would become more helpful toward the end when the player is dealing with the words they need help on.

curo··on Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents
It's at the end of the interview. He wants to build Starfleet Academy for technical fields. Physical with a digital equivalent. Thinks education will become like a gym (self-educate to look sexy) by the time AGI gets here.
curo··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
Building a Duolingo-like app to "learn from the greats, daily." (https://www.scrivium.com)

Until recently, it was cost-prohibitive to gamify topics with indefinite answers and progressions. As a result, "left-brained" topics have been gamified for years, but "right-brained" topics have resisted gamification. LLMs and generative AI unlock game economics for unstructured text.

Casual gaming is only category outpacing passive, social media. The most direct way to elevate humanity's media appetite is to turn human greatness into casual games.

curo··on How the U.K. broke its own economy
Real GDP per capita growth for US vs UK was almost identical until 2008. The last 3 years have been terrible for the UK, but if you're looking for the start of UK's stagnation you have to go much farther back than Brexit.
curo··on Tesla recalls 380k vehicles in US over power steering assist issue
The fact that this thread is full of people who envisioned a physical recall is evidence enough the word is misleading. If reuters was an industry journal, sure.
curo··on Tesla recalls 380k vehicles in US over power steering assist issue
Or it's just a misleading headline
curo··on Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian apologetics? (2024)
Not scripture. Passages from the "Great Books" (literature, philosophy, poetry...)
curo··on Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian apologetics? (2024)
We tried to partner recently to co-create interactive books with a well-known classical education influencer on X.

His job was to select passages from books and provide some commentary. Ours was to turn that material into an interactive title.

We tried tirelessly to look up the passages he'd send to us in the original text. The only quotes that matched were the top 5% short and famous quotes. The rest was made up completely, presumably by AI.

His 1 million+ followers consider him a world-class subject matter expert. But he doesn't read any of the books he's teaching. Eye opening.

curo··on The Four Theories of Truth as a Method for Critical Thinking
Would "pragmatic-universal" and "pragmatic-consensus" count as a fifth and sixth? I.e., "what's useful for the group?" and "what the group thinks is useful for them?"

An example of the first category might be a parent deciding it's better for their kids to believe in Santa Claus. An example of the second is to create a society on some maxim that's rendered true by group-consensus, "everyone should have an equal say."

curo··on The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework
I'm curious how education or entertainment companies fit into this framework, or how they think about PMF in general.

Was Duolingo targeting customers who accepted the "hard fact" that passive audio was the only way to learn a language? Was MasterClass a "future vision" because people didn't believe celebrities would spend their time teaching? Or is it that we NEED education and entertainment, so these two providers just differentiated from a crowded market.

curo··on Does offering ChatGPT a tip cause it to generate better text?
I like this idea, although preference-tuning for politeness might negate this effect
curo··on Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
I'm bootstrapping https://www.crone.ai and making a small amount of money.

I've bootstrapped a few companies. B2B apps are easier since you can do custom work for business clients while you perfect your software.

Crone AI is much harder. It's my first edtech consumer app. It's been live for 3 months and we've made $1,500 so far (lol).

My previous business startups made $200k ARR and $1M ARR. Iterating on consumer apps is more fun and you can still extrapolate growth from small numbers.

curo··on Internet Sacred Text Archive
are there others? (besides Project Gutenberg)
curo··on Ask HN: What is your favorite FOSS WYSIWYG editor?
I've had a lot of fun working with both:

1. Lexical

2. ProseMirror/Tiptap

Both of these are very extensible, actively developed, and well-built. Tiptap is indy and pushes its pro product now (fair). Lexical is supported by meta. Pros and cons to both of these FOSS types.

curo··on Show HN: Odin – the integration of LLMs with Obsidian note taking
One alternative. If you live in VS Code, consider Foam which gets you Roam/Obsidian like flows alongside an LLM (Github Copilot).

I have no affiliation to Foam. It's just awesome.

curo··on The new science of meditation
Ramana Maharshi says anything transient is false

CBT and other psychotherapies challenge X or Y as false

curo··on The new science of meditation
It seems they're using the term to distinguish "meditation for emotional regulation" (v1 research) from "meditation for itself" (v2 research)
curo··on The new science of meditation
> the pursuit of "states" can be a trap in of itself

Fully agree although a lot of devotees of Ramana Maharshi said they fell into silence just sitting in his presence. Improbable but it would be hilarious if scientists could make little "mouna wifi hubs" where practitioners got a silence handicap by sitting around it.

In the end though, I'm also skeptical that anything about self-inquiry can be replicated by an additive approach.

curo··on 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans
Fyi, CNBC (a news site) is citing a figure in a white paper by Envoy, an employee analytics platform, that leaders regret not having more employee analytics.

> "73% workplace leaders believe that easier access to data would enable them to drive smarter decisions about their space, programs, and policies... "

> "80% of executives say they would have approached their company’s return-to-office strategy differently if they had access to workplace data to inform their decision-making.

Here's the source:

https://envoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Workplace_Data_...

curo··on Ask HN: How are you improving your use of LLMs in production?
OpenAI open sourced their evals framework. You can use it to evaluate different models but also your entire prompt chain setup. https://github.com/openai/evals

They also have a registry of evals built in.

curo··on Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
Good find. My mistake
curo··on Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
I was going off the 2010 date but you could be right. I didn't mean to jump to conclusions; just seems like I'm missing some details that leads to the author's convictions. Probably I'm missing the police portrayals mentioned in the article.
curo··on Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
I'd love a link to the SFPD statement if you have it (I cannot find it)
curo··on Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
> The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew.

I commented below but the IT consulting LLC in the bio is inactive (both in the division of corp website and online). Is that the only evidence here for the statement above?

curo··on Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech
Is the "Expand IT, Inc" on the LinkedIn profile the only evidence that the "alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew."

There's comments is this thread of amazing journalism but the LLC shows as inactive on the Division of CA website (entity 201008110204) and the Expand IT website itself is dead. For all we know, this is a Lyft or Uber driver. Unless I'm missing some SFPD statement known to the journalist?

EDIT: got an old filling; see njstraub608's comment. My mistake

curo··on A trick to reaching flow: Leave your work broken
Similar to this "leave things broken", I like to start the day with some lightweight refactoring. This allows me to pay down technical debt while I warm up my brain to the code.
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