Hacker News Reader

mathieuhon English: A vs. An

It’s actually something that is changing in English right now. In some languages like German all word-initial vowel sounds are pronounced with a glottal stop at the start (a so-called “hard attack”) but English generally doesn’t (or didn’t) do that, resulting in “thee apple”. Younger speakers are starting to use hard attack before word-initial vowel sounds so the “thee” variant isn’t present for them.

I’m not sure if this also affects “a” vs “an” (i.e. I don’t know if younger people are starting to say e.g. “a apple”) because that obviously makes an orthographical difference so it might be more persistent. Although I suppose they coud say both “an” and begin the next word with a glottal stop.

Keep an ear out if you’re listening to a younger native English speaker and you might be able to hear it.

mathieuhon Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age

https://www.youtube.com/@wallingtonw

There's a channel on YouTube where the guy demonstrates how they might have built Stone Henge and the Egyptian pyramids using only technology that they would have at the time

mathieuhon Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future

As Locke said: "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."

What organisations say are their principles and what their actions reveal them to be are often very different.

Even at my own job the CEO claims to be a big environmentalist yet the company is spending huge amounts of money on LLM tokens and the "leadership" team is jetting off around the world for "off-sites" constantly.

Seems to me that the vast majority (I leave off saying "all" simply as I have not surveyed all of them) of these claims are nothing more than greenwashing.

mathieuhon Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

Also isn't a huge (maybe the largest?) audience for gaming these days children playing games like Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite etc? For whom it's parents buying the equipment, so unless you have a tech-savvy parent they're likely to just buy a console.

mathieuhon Why I Stopped Arguing with People

Check out the sceptic Sextus Empiricus. Hackett has a collection of his writings. Admittedly he was strongly opposed to the stoics as he considered them dogmatists, but at its heart scepticism is the idea that we should hold all arguments about non-evident things in suspension of judgement, because against any argument put forward we can balance an equally plausible argument. Instead, we should "turn our back upon the whole dispute and go back to talking and acting like a civilised, common-sensical man instead of a pedantic dogmatist".

I personally wasn't too convinced by scepticism but it was an interesting read nevertheless and I did take some bits away from it.

mathieuhon I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

As you say, often you check up on the LLM's "reasoning" and it doesn't follow at all, or you can easily get it to contradict itself with just as much certainty as it had about its previous convictions.

It is very scary to me that people are entrusting potentially life-altering decisions to these things.

mathieuhon Dostoyevsky isn't difficult

The first time I worked with Polish people I had this problem a lot until I noticed the pattern. Someone told me to go and talk to "Maciek", it was only on asking Maciej where to find him that I found out they were the same person

mathieuhon Investors get real-time view of UK bond market activity for the first time

The irony is the top three tax havens are overseas territories of the UK and subject to legislation which should curtail their tax-haven status but which the UK is unwilling to enforce

https://taxjustice.uk/blog/worlds-top-tax-havens-are-british...

mathieuhon Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch

I guess you can get a bit of an idea of what this is like by listening to French people speak English. French doesn’t have phonemic syllable stress like English does and so French people often make mistakes with this. For a native English speaker the syllable stress is an integral part of the word and being phonemic it actually distinguishes between two words that otherwise sound the same. The commonest category of this would be words that change between verb and noun depending on the stress, like “reject”, “protest”, “transfer” etc. And there are other minimal pairs like “insight” vs “incite”.

The native English (many other Indo-European languages also have similar systems) speaker is very unlikely to make a pronunciation mistake in this manner but even very accomplished francophone speakers of English struggle with it even after being corrected.

For example here’s French cabinet minister Bruno Le Maire pronouncing “damages” as “daMAges” https://youtu.be/qKWFsg5uHKo

mathieuhon EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

It's not just a Catholic thing, in Book II of Plato's Republic (written ~2,400 years ago) Adeimantus mentions that some people say there's no point in acting justly because you can just act unjustly and sacrifice to the gods later to make it up.

mathieuhon Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

It’s known that repeated exposure to allergens can cause allergic symptoms in people previously without them. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_fancier%27s_lung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer%27s_lung

I actually seemed to grow out of hay fever when I was in my early 20s. Perhaps coincidentally this is also around the time I developed an allergy to cannabis from overuse. Wonder if they’re related somehow.

mathieuhon A mushroom that makes people have the exact same hallucination

DMT also commonly induces visions of elves (the so-called "machine elves"). Having tried DMT several times I can't say it's something that ever happened to me personally but lots of people report seeing elves on DMT.

mathieuhon Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions

> The later ones are sharp. They connect NASA redundancy systems to African kinship funeral economics.

wat

mathieuhon We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

My phone network provider ran some "12 days of Christmas" promotion last year which entailed a spam email trying to hawk me crap I don't need every single day. When I tried to opt-out they told me it would take a month. I emailed the ICO and the network provider's complaints team and miraculously they were able to remove me from the mailing list immediately.

mathieuhon Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy

Semitic languages are Afroasiatic, not Indoeuropean.

mathieuhon How to get better at guitar

Same, I finally managed to stick with learning standard notation this year after several false starts and I’m kicking myself I didn’t start earlier. There were a few tough moments where it seemed like I’d never get (learning about key signatures, moving past 1st position) but now I’m starting to get comfortable playing up to the 7th position. It’s so nice being able to just buy a big book of Sor or Giuliani or Carcassi studies or even some Bach transcriptions and play them straight out of the book instead of needing to listen to a performance first and then look at the tab.

mathieuhon AI Won't Replace You, but a Manager Using AI Will

The way I look at it is I just need to get through the next year or so. I also don't believe AI is going to replace everyone, but I do believe that a lot of "leaders" are going to make cuts. They all read the same blogs and listen to the same podcasts and once one makes a move they seem to tend to follow each other.

Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part but I still don't see AI replacing absolutely everyone. As someone who I'd say tends to be in the upper 20% of performers but not setting the world on fire I'm not too worried about my job completely disappearing but I am worried in the short term about layoffs and chaos when loads of people are trying to find jobs at the same time.

mathieuhon You are not your job

Isn't this exactly Marx's criticism of capitalism through the theory of alienation? Human relationships get mediated and hidden as relationships between commodities and money.

mathieuhon The engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage [video]

As Marx put it: "there is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

mathieuhon In a genre where spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games?

Have you tried the Talos Principle (and it sequel)? I also didn't like The Witness but the Talos Principle games are some of my favourites

mathieuhon 4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin

Maybe targeted at Americans and using US customary short tons (which is 907 kg)

mathieuhon Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

Mobile digital mapping was already a useful thing though. Even though Apple Maps was initially a failure I still came back to it every so often to see how it was progressing and eventually it ended up pretty good.

Maybe I'm weird but mobile assistants have never been useful for me. I tried Siri a couple of times and it didn't work. I haven't tried it since because even if it worked perfectly I'm not sure I'd have any use for it.

I see it more like the Vision Pro. Doesn't matter how good the product ends up being, I just don't think it's something most people are going to have a use for.

As far as I'm concerned no one has proved the utility of these mobile assistants yet.

mathieuhon Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks

I saw the writing on the wall when they recently removed the facility to download your own books. I downloaded all of them, removed the DRM with Calibre, and now obtain e-books through other sources.

mathieuhon Lording it, over: A new history of the modern British aristocracy

The southeast of England is well-off, everywhere else is less so. It has basically always been like this. There have also obviously been repeated hammerblows since 2008, with austerity (which is still happening), Brexit (a remarkable self-own), and then covid (an unprecedented upwards transfer of wealth). The political and economic establishment is also essentially monopolar, a process begun with Blair and now approaching culmination.

People just don’t have the money to spend on things. Wage growth is non-existent and prices have risen dramatically. For my own part I have get a real “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” feeling. All we ever hear on the news is how spending will have to be cut yet again and taxes will have to go up.

Being from Northern Ireland I personally hope for unification with Ireland, although without significant changes I worry nothing much will change as Ireland has its own very similar issues.

mathieuhon Who needs Git when you have 1M context windows?

I frequently (basically every conversation) have issues with Claude getting confused about which version of the file it should be building on. Usually what causes it is asking it do something, then manually editing the file to remove or change something myself and giving it back, telling it it should build on top of what I just gave it. It usually takes three or four tries before it will actually use what I just gave it, and from then on it keeps randomly trying to reintroduce what I deleted.

mathieuhon The elegance of movement in Silksong

Sekiro was so good at engendering this feeling. The first time you fight Genichiro you will probably die within seconds. The next fight it might take you 20+ tries to beat him. And then the last time you fight him you can basically no-hit him.

mathieuhon A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

I actually don't think I've ever had AI solve a non-trivial problem by itself. I do find it useful but I always have to give it the breakthrough which it can then implement.

mathieuhon Das Problem mit German Strings

https://datafusion.apache.org/blog/2024/09/13/string-view-ge...

> The concept of inlined strings with prefixes (called “German Strings” by Andy Pavlo, in homage to TUM, where the Umbra paper that describes them originated) has been used in many recent database systems (Velox, Polars, DuckDB, CedarDB, etc.) and was introduced to Arrow as a new StringViewArray[^3] type. Arrow’s original StringArray is very memory efficient but less effective for certain operations. StringViewArray accelerates string-intensive operations via prefix inlining and a more flexible and compact string representation.

Seems to be nothing more than they were invented at a German university. I spent quite some time thinking it had something to do with German’s sometimes-SOV word order.

mathieuhon Calling Their Bluff

In the UK this happens with tax rebates. For the vast majority of people your tax is calculated by HMRC and taken out of your pay and if they make a mistake you just tell them and they will adjust your tax code so you pay less/more tax until it works out.

Some shady companies set themselves up as middlemen and pocket a large proportion of the rebate when you can do it yourself in minutes through an online portal.

mathieuhon Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

I pay £22 per month to rent a seedbox and I would happily pay more.