Hacker News: abecode

New comment by abecode in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

abecode — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:31:53 +0000

I listened to the audio book version of War and Peace. I think it was something like 25-30 hours. The audio format helped keep the pace going and also it helped with the names. Although for some things, the audio format made it harder to look up in the dictionary, like I kept hearing agitant instead of adjutant, so that part didn't make sense in a lot of the military scenes. I agree with the parent that the book was very engaging, parts even felt like I was watching a movie, e.g. the drunken party tying a bear to a police officer, the foxhunt scene, the duel, the battles like when Petya gets shot, and the burning of Moscow. I even liked the abstract ending when Tolstoy relates human history to calculus so that each individual person has an infinitesimal but real contribution to history.

New comment by abecode in "Hindenburg’s Smoking Room"

abecode — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:20:07 +0000

Corsica to Marseilles has an overnight ferry, at least back in 2000, but I don't think it's has sleeper cabins, more set up like an overnight flight, but a big cruise ship form factor. Instead of cabins they had space for cars. They had the option of getting a ticket without a seat so you just roam around the boat and find an open space, including outside on the decks.

New comment by abecode in "I’ve banned query strings"

abecode — Sat, 09 May 2026 21:45:01 +0000

My use case for this is making separate bookmarks in different folders for a single URL:

Example.com/interesting -> bookmark folder one

Example.com/interesting?dummy=t -> bookmark folder two

New comment by abecode in "DeepSeek v4"

abecode — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:49:34 +0000

As a resident of MN I'm very proud of what fellow Minnesotans did to stop ICE's violent and illegal detentions here. Unfortunately the non-violent protest and anti-ICE techniques were met with violence from ICE, but the protests themselves were non-violent and well organized.

New comment by abecode in "A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place"

abecode — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 17:26:22 +0000

Fall, Or Dodge in Hell (Neil Stephenson) and The Waves (Ken Liu) are two other good stories about brain scanning and transhumanism. The first one is a ridiculously long novel about a future where the cloud is increasingly used for uploading souls of scanned brains, and the second one is a short story where people on a spaceship eventually evolve into noncorporal beings.

New comment by abecode in "EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear"

abecode — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:38:48 +0000

Maybe they could bury the clothes and call it carbon sequestration. I assume that clothes are made of mostly hydrocarbons.

New comment by abecode in "The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein"

abecode — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:48:53 +0000

I just had a nice trip to Venice and I was curious about it's history. Supposedly, the Venice republic lasted almost 1000 years, basically from after the fall of Rome to Napoleon based on a weird lottery system for choosing the Doge.

New comment by abecode in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

abecode — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:05:48 +0000

I think you need to change it to https://, ie, https://google.com/ads/preferences . It resolves to https://myadcenter.google.com/home?hl=en&sasb=true&ref=ad-se...

New comment by abecode in "Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes"

abecode — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:37:14 +0000

In Chinese one word for potato is "earth bean" 土豆 (the other word is "horse bell tuber" 马铃薯)

New comment by abecode in "Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model"

abecode — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 21:18:06 +0000

At ECAI conference last week there was a panel discussion and someone had a great quote, "in Europe we are in the golden age of AI regulation, while the US and China are in the actual golden age of AI".

New comment by abecode in "Why Wisconsin's county highways are lettered, not numbered (2019)"

abecode — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 20:52:28 +0000

one of my favorites is County Road AF, near Fall Creek and Augusta

New comment by abecode in "Counterculture legend who invented bell-bottom jeans dies at 84"

abecode — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 16:33:57 +0000

Yeah you're right, I guess it was more the general fashion motif of long baggy pants being associated with revolutionaries/bohemians/anti-aristocrats.

New comment by abecode in "Counterculture legend who invented bell-bottom jeans dies at 84"

abecode — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 05:04:16 +0000

Actually if you want to find the origin of bell bottoms, according to a museum exhibit on men's clothing I saw, it was the sans coulottes in the 1700s. They protested the aristocrats, who wore high-legged pants, and eventually led to the French revolution and the association of bell bottoms with revolutionary/countercultural things.

New comment by abecode in "Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization?"

abecode — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 17:36:15 +0000

Good discussion on this article. I went to a Vampire Weekend concert last night and they used the 45 minute encore to play covers that were requested by the audience. They got through about 10 songs (a verse or two and chorus), everything from Talking Heads, to Creed, Sublime, Beastie Boys, and Prince and Bob Dylan (the concert was in Minneapolis, so they probably rehearsed the last two). So basically the band knew/memorized the tune for hundreds/thousands of songs from the past couple decades and the singer knew/memorized the words. So I think that this example supports the authors premise that creativity comes from some form of memorization.

New comment by abecode in "Court approves 3M multi-billion dollar settlement over PFAS in drinking water"

abecode — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 19:09:31 +0000

Actually I heard the opposite... I was a premed student and I did and internship at a hospital and one of the doctors said it's actually fairly difficult to kill someone by accident, ie you have to mess up very badly or the patient must already be gravely ill for an accident to result in death. Still, the comment implies that doctors do in fact make mistakes and it was one of the experiences I had in that internship that made me decided to switch majors.

New comment by abecode in "Saffron: The Most Expensive Spice"

abecode — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 02:07:52 +0000

grind saffron in a mortar and pestle, then add it to yogurt with some salt, pepper, and diced onions (maybe some thyme or coriander or other spices if you are feeling fancy). Basically get the yogurt to a nice color and flavor, slightly on the salty side. Then use the yogurt mixture to marinate the chicken, preferably overnight. Cook on a grill or bake and finish with broiling to brown it.

New comment by abecode in "Shinzo Abe's Assassination"

abecode — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 22:22:14 +0000

yes, you presumed correct, it was a guy who had studied in the US.

New comment by abecode in "Shinzo Abe's Assassination"

abecode — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 16:01:29 +0000

I went to a conference in Nara last year and at one of the receptions I told a Japanese attendee that I was sorry to hear about the assassination. I joked that my name is pronounced Abe like Abe Lincoln, not like Shinzo Abe. He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him.

The article makes it seem like people discovered about the cult connections after the fact. I wish I had known more about it to ask more questions. If anyone has more insight about it, I'd be glad to learn more.

Ironically I was reading 1Q84 at the time, which is about a cult in Japan.

New comment by abecode in "LLM Powered Autonomous Agents"

abecode — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 14:41:46 +0000

If you think about the attention mechanism in LLMs, it may not work the same way as the brain, but there should be some functionality of the brain that also deals with attention. And if you think about that, you might also think that attention has some role in consciousness: you need to pay attention to things to be aware of them, and you need awareness of the self for consciousness, etc...

New comment by abecode in "Show HN: I created a game to memorize the fretboard"

abecode — Fri, 26 May 2023 21:55:49 +0000

or make the neck vertical instead of horizontal. I found myself craning my neck to look at it that way.