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dsizzle

755 karma · joined August 6, 2013

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dsizzle··on A road to Lisp: Why Lisp
My first thought was that the article was redacted lol
dsizzle··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
Libraries spend like $2B / year buying books https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/2021-08/fy19-pls-re..., which is like 10% of the total book market. So even if no one ever bought a book because they first encountered the book, author, or genre in the library that's already a signficant difference
dsizzle··on How to defer US taxes
If you take a loan against your larger capital pool, inflation helps you (to the extent it wasn't incorporated in higher lending costs).

But yeah that's a second order effect. There aren't really any scenarios where you have a fixed nominal tax that can be deferred without locking up the money, so I think you're mostly right that it comes back to lower tax rate and step-up.

dsizzle··on How to defer US taxes
Yes, and when you do pay it's a lower "real" tax (due to inflation)
dsizzle··on Cormac McCarthy's tips on how to write a science paper (2019) [pdf]
Yes, I came here to say this sounds a lot like Strunk & White
dsizzle··on Trying to send a sticker in Steam Chat burned through a month of mobile data
fwiw the substack app did this to me too
dsizzle··on Message from CEO Andy Jassy: Some Thoughts on Generative AI
Jassy suspects AI will reduce jobs:

> As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.

dsizzle··on Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)
It's also bad because of the time value of money (deductions in the future are worth less than deductions now).

But I agree that much of the outrage seems due to a confusion that 80% of the deduction is lost completely (vs deferred).

dsizzle··on Merlin Bird ID
Not sure what you mean - both the "Explore" part and the Life List both have the pics and the calls together?

It is indeed a good app, but my beef is how bad it is at adding birds to your life list. After ID'ing a bird by sound or picture it'll ask you where/when you found it with the worst defaults -- it'll know where you are and what time it is, but it sometimes randomly picks some time/place you've been at months ago (even ignoring that you may have just entered several at your current location)!

dsizzle··on Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden
More like he says the affirmations result in stock market premonitions. For example, he said after his "I will get rich in the stock market" manifestation he woke up in the middle of the night thinking "buy Chrysler" before it went on a rally.
dsizzle··on Hot take: GPT 4.5 is a nothing burger
This guy always finds a way to claim victory for his AI pessimism. In a few years: "AI's Nobel Prizes aren't even in the top 10, just like I predicted"
dsizzle··on LLMs Aren't Thinking, They're Just Counting Votes
I just asked Claude what would happen if the Earth rotated in the opposite direction, and it correctly told me the sun would rise in the West, which is indistinguishable from an answer by someone who understands the way the Universe works.

I don't understand why this article is #1 currently

dsizzle··on Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read?
Can you summarize what kind of responses you get? I'd like to believe I'd quickly figure out this too-on-the-nose response wasn't serious and it'd lead to a laugh and more interesting discussion
dsizzle··on Tortured by regrets? A new study details how best to overcome them
https://archive.is/GazXf
dsizzle··on Ever used Google Chrome in incognito mode? You could be entitled to up to $5k
Similar energy lol: https://theonion.com/ob-gyn-assures-woman-he-respects-doctor...
dsizzle··on Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist
You should read about compatibilism, e.g. the work of Daniel Dennett, which argues that the parts of free will worth wanting are consistent with determinism. He definitely doesn't believe in magic or god!
dsizzle··on Confessions of a Theoretical Physicist
Why would you assume it's all or nothing? Will (free or otherwise) implies something like effort and clearly we're not constantly applying effort. Believing in free will doesn't mean believing that everything results from it.
dsizzle··on Transformers in music recommendation
I feel like all recommendation systems already do similarity well -- and it's not what I want. True, similarity matters to some extent, but my dream is something that can accurately predict what I'd like. Often I'll only like a song or two from a given artist, so finding artists similar to this artist are often useless.

Related question: I wonder if identical twins are good at recommending each other music

dsizzle··on The Raspberry Pi 5 Is No Match for a Tini-Mini-Micro PC
The "noise level" heading is spelled "noice level" and at first I thought the author meant "nice" spoken like an Australian lol
dsizzle··on Designing a website without 404s
Do you have any evidence that redirects are bad for SEO? Redirects are a normal part of the web and Google tells you they are fine with it https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
dsizzle··on Designing a website without 404s
I don't understand why you think this is a bad idea - 301 redirects exist for a reason. Redirecting to what the user probably wants is better than a 404 page.

That said, typically most people are going to find a site via search or clicking a link, which is why I think basically no one bothers doing this.

dsizzle··on Designing a website without 404s
Except there's no duplicate content - the site redirects
dsizzle··on The hail in Texas was so big Tuesday that it required a new description
The flat part wasn't confusing, was just quibbling about the odd over-explaining of the size (fwiw in the video the person says "baseball" and "softball", and indeed I didn't see any DVD-sized ones).
dsizzle··on The hail in Texas was so big Tuesday that it required a new description
>Forecasters warned of “DVD-size hail” as stones larger than grapefruits...

Not sure what "DVD-size" adds in this subtitle beyond the grapefruit reference, especially since a DVD is flat and the hail is not

dsizzle··on We're Watching Facebook Die
Here's the specific link that OP cites and quotes from: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/... You don't think the author misread this in the referenced paragraph?
dsizzle··on We're Watching Facebook Die
Yeah, fixing that undercuts a lot of the article. I guess the worst thing that's left is that it's suspicious to aggregate everything, which maybe reflects a lack of confidence that Facebook.com will continue growing or whatever?
dsizzle··on Free time, curiosity and playfulness has led to young orcas bumping boats
We could send out this Kiwi orca body slammer haha https://www.outdoorlife.com/conservation/video-body-slam-orc...
dsizzle··on Free time, curiosity and playfulness has led to young orcas bumping boats
Idle fins are the devil's workshop!
dsizzle··on Show HN: I built a website to create financial models for any stock online
"Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket"
dsizzle··on Students invent quieter leaf blower
Haha I came here to make the same comment
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