Hacker News Reader

fish45on Zelensky video deepfake

Interestingly Zelensky might be easier to deepfake than other world leaders because there's more footage and a wider variety of facial expressions to train on due to his acting career

fish45on Gaslighting Asian Americans About College Admissions

The thing is that there's two levels of possible discrimination; systemic discrimination and admissions discrimination. Pure test results are discrimination free at the admissions level, but they don't address systemic inequities. To accommodate for systemic inequities, we use admissions discrimination. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing; the author thinks it's a worthy tradeoff.

> Asians are extremely well represented at top schools, i'm not sure what they are fighting for?

The truth is that Asian Americans have to get higher test scores / GPA / extracurriculars to get into prestigious schools. It's true that this might have a positive affect on reducing systemic discrimination in the long run, but it's hard for Asian American applicants to accept that the burden should be placed on them.

fish45on Gaslighting Asian Americans About College Admissions

I just want to point out that this is part of the premise of the original article:

> Harvard’s admissions policies make me especially queasy, because the burden rests so heavily on Asian Americans. Still, it advances the important goals of exposing students to a somewhat broader range of colleagues and helping to lift more underrepresented minorities into positions in the power elite, which remains heavily white.

Generally, going to prestigious schools benefits under represented minorities more than it benefits Asian Americans to an extent that affirmative action can be effective at addressing systemic inequalities, but it's still discriminatory against Asian americans to do so. It's a matter of opinion whether it's a good tradeoff or not

fish45on Show HN: AlexCalc, a scientific calculator with LaTeX equation display

Yeah, I made it to do my chemistry homework where a lot of problems were duplicated with different numbers. The truth is that it's not well tested outside of that though so it's hard to trust for complicated stuff. I might end up using yours :)

fish45on Show HN: AlexCalc, a scientific calculator with LaTeX equation display

Nice project. It's pretty similar to my project CalcuLaTeX (https://calcula.tech) although I think the intended usecase is slightly different

fish45on Ask HN: Which successful startups use 'no code'?

An interesting example is hollow knight. It’s one of the most successful indie games of all time and it’s almost entirely coded visually: https://unity.com/madewith/hollow-knight

Anecdotally it makes my fans spin really fast for a 2D game but that might be because of the fancy shaders

fish45on Cool, but Obscure X11 Tools

I didn't know about Xephyr. That's super useful

fish45on Win-Vind: Become an instant ninja in operating Windows at the speed of thought

at first I was jealous of the GUI navigation, but then I realized I don't use any GUIs other than firefox, for which there are plenty of plugins.

The Vim emulation is pretty cool, the closest alternative I can think of is https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim, but I disabled it a while ago for being kind of clunky

fish45on Pop OS – System76

https://github.com/pop-os/shell

You're wrong

fish45on How I use the Internet in a healthy way

This isn't "How to use the internet in a healthy way", this is "How to not use the Internet in an unhealthy way"

fish45on The Human Side of Elixir

I think many people haven't realized that different paradigms fit different people's brains in different ways; there are better paradigms for a specific person and task but it's impossible to generalize.

fish45on Some Kobo e-readers can now run Linux, becoming inexpensive e-ink tablets

drawing on my kobo using the Plato sketch program is actually super responsive. I'm not sure why but it seems that the refresh rate is fine and e.g. flipping a page or scrolling takes a long time for other reasons than the refresh rate

fish45on Transfer.sh – Easy file sharing from the command line

I think you're agreeing with kwitze. It's ok and even desirable for these services to host illegal, moral content but bad for them to host immoral content

fish45on Slack launches Huddles, Discord-like audio calls you can hop in and out of

you can also use Firefox containers to keep it all within Firefox

fish45on An Elixir adoption success story

A common example I use is an Abstract Syntax Tree, which is essentially a mutually recursive polymorphic tree. In Elixir you might model this with a tuple labelled by an atom. With Haskell you'd use ADTs and pattern matching, which are easy to pick up because they're first class in the language but they're still something to learn. In Java, your understanding has to be a bit deeper; you'd have to learn about abstract classes. In C, you'd need to understand forward declaration and tagged unions.

Honestly I can't think of an example of anything which is harder to model in Haskell's type system, but I think the Java and C examples demonstrate that you do have to learn different type systems to model more complex examples.

I totally agree that type systems end up reducing cognitive overhead in the long run though.

fish45on An Elixir adoption success story

> after you know one language well, you know them all instinctively

This isn't strictly true. Elixir, while functional, isn't completely pure and has a dynamic type system which definitely lowers the learning curve.

Developers who know one language well are likely equipped to pick up a language like Haskell faster than even a mathematician, but I can't imagine that a Java one trick would pick up Haskell (or APL, or Scheme, etc.) "instinctively"

fish45on I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

I don't remember much about the installation process. I think I just got to choose between automatic or manual partitioning, which is when I presumably went with automatic and chose the C: drive.

fish45on I Will Never Use a Microsoft Account to Log Into My Own PC

Funny anecdote, I installed Ubuntu on my own laptop to improve my minecraft FPS when I was 9 (~9 years ago).

I googled something like "how to get more fps in minecraft" and the first result was a minecraft forum post to which the only response was "install Ubuntu". At the time, Ubuntu had a .exe installer, so I thought it was just like any other program and installed it to my C: drive along with everything else. I think I did have the concept of other OS since I'd used both Windows and MacOS previously, so I figured it out after the reboot. It did increase my minecraft FPS from ~15 to ~30 on average, so I didn't have any complaints.

I stuck with that laptop until high school, when I got a new laptop and started dual-booting Windows for gaming and Linux for everything else, which is where I'm at now.

fish45on John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

At least part of it, though definitely not all of it, is that a pet dog is immeasurably valuable to its owner.

fish45on John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

I would agree that someone who intentionally killed a dog and doesn't regret it is a terrible person, but I still think you'd be a terrible person if you subject them to death.

fish45on New Elixir 1.12 – The developer’s point of view

Mix.install is super great for me. Personally I vastly prefer Elixir to Python for basic personal scripting stuff so being able to pull in dependencies in a single file is nice. Before I'd been using escript to turn mix projects into a single executable which is pretty inefficient

fish45on Ask HN: Projects for learning a language?

I almost always start with a few of the first eulers problems, followed by flappy bird and/or a sudoku solver, and then a super simple interpreter

fish45on Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

My favorite is https://calcula.tech which I made to help with my physics and chemistry homework. I have a few other users, mostly friends from school AFAIK, but I'm hoping that it can become more useful for more people. I wrote the main interpreter in Rust mostly from scratch, and the site is built with elixir Phoenix and alpineJS.

fish45on Show HN: Kalk, A calculator with math syntax, complex numbers

This is somewhat similar to my project at https://calcula.tech, although the usecase is a bit different. There are a few other calculators around that use Rust + WASM which is kind of interesting

fish45on Rust heads into the kernel?

I'll agree with other commenters that Zig is no where near mature enough for Linux yet. However, I definitely think that it will be a better fit than Rust in a few years. It's a fantastic C replacement.

fish45on Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws

I just replaced my phone battery using an iFixit kit a few minutes ago. It's probably extended the life of my phone by a year.

fish45on Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE

Plugging, my own site, https://calcula.tech. It's not meant to compete with something like Atlas but I like to think it's great for napkin math, even though it's still quite early in development.

fish45on Pyre: A performant type-checker for Python 3

I've started learning Elixir over the week and I can't see myself using Python for scripting again. They're very different languages but th experience feels similar, except I vastly prefer Elixir

fish45on Awk is the coolest tool you don't know

I find that for most of these use cases I'd rather just make a Vim macro. I already know Vim, so I don't have to learn and remember a new language.

For cases where it needs to be automated, Awk is probably the best tool. I don't know it though, and cases are few enough and far between so I've always just used Python.