HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mahdi7d1

305 karma · joined October 30, 2021

submissionscomments
mahdi7d1··on Explain it to me like I'm ten
With both ELI5 and this title, the hidden assumption which is generally correct is that "I don't remember much from my education specifically middle and highschool".

Well I do remember my highschool subjects and I feel like there is a chasm between highly detailed technical content created for other profesionals and watered down versions for 5 year olds.

I don't see that many "explain to me like I've finished highschool" content.

mahdi7d1··on Mathematics in the age of AI
In this case won't this oracle also tell you what is the consequences as soon as it tells you RH is true and also much more? At this point what is the point of you knowing what is true and what is not?
mahdi7d1··on What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?
Talk about living a sheltered life style. I did too until doing my obligatory military service. Now I don't even correct a quarter of wrong things I hear.
mahdi7d1··on How the words we teach English language learners changed
Only if you mean llms finding already compiled lists on the internet. Since they would be too inefficient for actually compiling a list themselves.
mahdi7d1··on How the words we teach English language learners changed
After years of reading technical and scientific materials, listening to lectures and youtube tutorials and learning English exclusively through them I hit a wall when I watched a cooking youtube video for the first time.

I was pretty confident in my English but I couldn't understand half of the sentences since I didn't know any of the vocabulary related to cooking. From tools (spatula) to ingredients (parsley) or even actions (frying). My delusions of proficiency shattered as I found out my everyday vocabulary is smaller than an elementary schooler.

mahdi7d1··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
I rambled so much that I forgot to say what I laid all that introduction for.

I'm not part of the market for these products. I don't have access to them nor even if I buy some imported (probably illegally and by single persons) or printed version, am I going to benefit them since I'm disconnected monetarily from yhe author.

Me reading pirated versions of these books has no negative effects on the earnings of the authors.

mahdi7d1··on Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
I live in Iran and the administrative hurdles the op was mentioned are not an issue here because you just can't even buy intwrnationally to begin with so there is no hurdle you might need to circumvent. The few English books I have are largely illegal reprints of a pirated version or some old ancient printed version that have somehow gotten imported (no clue how or is there an actual legal way)

I remember opening "thinking fast and slow" and noticing the weird paging. After checking the official version's page count and seeing how the version in my hand doesn't match, my best guess was that someone had printed a pirated epub version.

mahdi7d1··on Dirty Little Zine – a tool for making an 8 page printable Zine
I didn't know about zines before and they seem interesting but aren't we wasting half of the paper surface (from what I understood looking at some images) A printer spread achieves a similar result without wasting one side of the sheet. (A bit more folding and cutting involved)

* Or does one put additional content pages inside which are supposed to be read by unfolding the zine and folding it the other way?

mahdi7d1··on It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12
It's funny how people talk about macbook neo being the cheapest option that gives you access to macos (If my brain isn't fried that was one of the points mentioned in the video) cause when I was checking macbook neo's price a couple of weeks ago I almost did hit the purchase button then I remembered I can't use macbook and I'm too used to my arch config to change.
mahdi7d1··on Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only
I use this same username everywhere and it's tied to my identity so let me keep it brief. I live in a small town and you wouldn't get much protesting or any political activity in those.

On the other hand, I'm currently serving in the police force (Which all able bodied men of age have to do and serve in one of the three armed forces of my country) and the bigger question since the start of the protests has been "What to do if I was put in a position against people?"

Thankfully that hasn't happened yet but still there is a feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

mahdi7d1··on Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only
I've been moderately happy this morning to find out I can open hackernews. Also Gmail is working. After attempting to get bridges using email and configuring an dozen of them I got 100% connection but then it disconnected without me being able to connect to anything. I would assume some sort of tunneling must be possible cause the services available are varied and not limited to a few websites (We only had access to Google Search for about a week and nothing before that) now even Nintendo Store opened to my complete surprise.
mahdi7d1··on Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy
If it's not painfull you are not exerting enough effort at least that's the case in the gym. People who are refreshed and more energetic after going to the gym are the same people who won't improve beyond intermediate levels. The ones who let go of the any set at the first feelings of unease and never take a set close to failure.

It's actually fascinating how an ancient proverb could line up with modern science so perfectly.

mahdi7d1··on Dear AI Companies, instead of scraping OpenStreetMap, how about a $10k donation?
There is no reason to protect against bots using regular captchas (Seems like I'm weaker than your average bot in passing those). Brave search has a proof of work captcha and everytime I face it I'm glad it's not google's choose the bicycle one. Having a captcha be a hevy process ran for a couple of seconds might be a nuisance to me who needs to complete it once a day but to the person who has to do it a lot of time for scraping, the costs might add up rather quickly. And the foundamental mechanism of it makes its effectivenes irrelevant to how much progress AI has made.

Also maybe the recent rise in captcha difficulty is not companies making them harder to prevent bots but rather bots twisting the right answer. As I know it captcha works based on other users' answers so if a huge portion of these other users are bots they can fool the alghorithm into thinking their wrong answer is the right answer.

mahdi7d1··on Mermaid Gantt diagrams for displaying distributed traces in Markdown (2023)
Graphviz is hard. I only need a graph making tool three or four times a year and when I go back to mermaid, only 5 minutes of going through the documentation get's me up to speed. But graphviz is much more complex in a way I often don't need. It's also pretty verbose; You first need to define nodes then the connections while in mermaid both are done in a single line.

However mermaid's experience and output is definitely subpar. Under the saved graphs section you find randomly saved graphs and there is no way to organize multiple graphs in the web editor.

I've even thought of writing a simple script to translate mermaid charts into dot language.

mahdi7d1··on Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure
There is no solution. The problem is not in the lack of funding or interest from investors. The public itself is not interested in preventing. They think the probability of something bad happening for them is low (for example heart attack) thus they are not willing to put in the effort and proactively try to prevent it (for example by exercising). This can be either from a lack of accurate data or even when the data is accurate and available someone might still interpret it differently. For me a 3 percent chance might be insignificant for someone else 1 percent is still high.
mahdi7d1··on Report: YouTube adding user-traceable ID tag to links shared off-platform
Damn. I noticed this happening a while back and I didn't think much of it. I just deleted the si= part because I knew it's not necessary for a Youtube link to work! I was curious about why this has been added and figures there's been something nefarious going down.
mahdi7d1··on How did people deal with punch cards?
About four days ago our professor was talking about how easy we have it and how he had to use punched cards to program. I didn't believe him (not knowing the history of punch cards, I thought they were much older than they actually were so in my mine he couldn't have been using them) but just yesterday he brought a pack of them with himself and showed them to us shattering all doubts.
mahdi7d1··on SumatraPDF Reader
I remember reading a blog post from the author of sioyek boasting about search performance.

Haven't personally compared the options but for me sumatra zathura and sioyek all feel fast enough to not notice any problems.

https://ahrm.github.io/jekyll/update/2022/09/11/pdf-viewer-t...

"Now I must admit, the reason sioyek is so fast is because it creates a search index when you open the document."

mahdi7d1··on SumatraPDF Reader
This piece of software is one of the few joys I have when using Windows. While reading ebooks you almost forget how bloated and slow Windows is.
mahdi7d1··on Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal
People who are capable of learning on their own pace are already doing it and the ones that can't use this approach shouldn't hope that a software system is going to allow them to. For me the questions of which professor explains better or the suggestions of not taking a course because the proffesor can't explain, were always meaningless. I never relied on a professor's lecture for learning (but had to sit through them) and my method was possible because engineering is not opinion based (Obviously I did terrible when the course was a amalgamation of different subjects from multiple books). But people who don't have the motivation to start reading a 1000 page textbook by themselves wouldn't have the will to watch 100h of videos around the same topic. In fact it might be even worse for them just watching the videos and not paying any attention.

My buttom line is personalized learning has existed for centuries and changing its medium from books to videos won't make it possible for more people.

mahdi7d1··on Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art
I guess people only care and notice theire own prefrences. I never thought about 42" eink display but I'm constantly wishing for the price of 10" and 13" modules to drop cause that's the usecase I'm interested in. I think their demand would be much much more compared to a 42" panel (what even is the use of such thing) so they can benefit from scale.
mahdi7d1··on Niri: A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
If you have more than say like 5 windows, trying to navigate to the desired one can be hellish. Here every windows have it's own place and by remembering it, you can navigate to it very easily. Scrollable and traditional Tiling are not related at all (at least for me) and try to do different things.

I've been using paperwm for a couple of days and my laptop track-pad doesn't even support three finger scrolling so I'm currently using keyboard to navigate.

mahdi7d1··on Niri: A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
For me (been using paperwm since ) the real point of having them is that a lot of windows don't really benefit from extra width (heck even hacker news website shows white bars in the sides) so by having 67% windows not only I'm not losing anything but now I have a context of which windows are to left and right of currently focused window and that helps me to remember where everything is located in this big wall of windows. I remember installing something using apt and looking for when it's going to be finished in the remaining 33% of screen (This use case is not that prevalent and is really limited in how much information of the other window can be perceived)

Another benefit is how sick it looks (In my opinion). Anyone looking would be interested.

mahdi7d1··on Niri: A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
Anyone questioning the usefulness of this method probably don't need it. Although I haven't tried Niri itself but through this thread I got introduced to paperwm and been using it for the last 5 days and I don't think I'm going to need anything else. At some point I had real plans to make a sophisticated sway config based on my needs (and a couple of ideas I had) and I have found this solution to be perfectly inline with my ideas. My problem with TWM is that I don't need small windows because I use a small laptop and cutting the height in half is not an option. My main idea was every windows should span to full height and have meaningful width with an easy way to navigate between them and these STWM seem to be pretty on point. With just limited options to chose (when resizing a window) changes can be made in seconds (I mainly only use 4 default sizes 38% 50% 62% 100% width all spanning to take full height of the screen) Before I had to alt-tab to infinity trying to reach my desired window (I have disabled dock and top bar in Gnome and maximizing for me is the same as full-screen) and thus my greediness to use all pixels of my screen made navigating with more than three or four windows impossible. But now I have my solution. I wonder how other people are using these because I understand my use case is kinda crazy and to some extent stupid.
mahdi7d1··on Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
This legacy system in likes of Harvard boggles me. If someones parents went to Harvard it might be actually logical to be harder for him to get into not easier. His educated parenting is already a huge plus for him and if he is unable to get into the same university it's on him.
mahdi7d1··on Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
I never understood why are people against standardized testing. I would rather fail test than be judged by someone then deemed not worthy.
mahdi7d1··on Switching from QWERTY to Colemak and Back
I switched from Qwerty (40wpm) to workman (80wpm after a year) but ultimately I returned to Qwerty and now I'm again on 50wpm. It's not good at all and feels stupid compared to workman but I don't want to type using my two index fingers when I'm using systems other than my own. It felt stupid that I had to type using my two fingers with less than 20wpm speed whenever I was typing on someone else's machine. Only solution seems to be learning two keyboard at the same time but now I think I have already forgotten workman (When I returned to Qwerty I could only type with 20wpm speed while my previous speed was well above 40)
mahdi7d1··on Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork
"who removes history entries by selecting thousands of them manually? Okay, this guy, but who else?" Me too. When I read the first guy's comment I was like "Goddam it's not just me"
mahdi7d1··on Layers of change: How buildings and software are alike
It was just hunch that the article is about that book and after skimming the article seems like my hunch was right.
mahdi7d1··on Layers of change: How buildings and software are alike
I think it's a reference to the book "How buildings learn". I haven't read the whole book but as far as I have read it goes like this: people try to guess what the good building supposed to be and build it but later they have a change of heart or either some other people move to that building and have completely different outlooks of what their home should be like. Author argues there is levels to buildings and we should build bottom levels in a way that won't hinder later changes to upper layers because the bottom levels are unchangeable and you would be better off destroying and rebuilding it if you want to change those bottom layers. Software seems to be related in a sense that the bottom layers of your app should be developed in a way that won't be in the way of developing new features because if that happens you would need to rewrite from ground up.
Page 1 of 2Next →