Hacker News: ahaferburg

New comment by ahaferburg in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

ahaferburg — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:03:19 +0000

Except that billionaires don't hold cash but assets. And they did not necessarily pay taxes on the value of those assets. The idea that billionaires have vaults of cash in mountains is not a sensible basis for any argument.

New comment by ahaferburg in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

ahaferburg — Sun, 24 May 2026 23:31:46 +0000

The point of a tax is to steer society, not to compute some sort of equivalence. Billionaire wealth has increased by way more than the 5 % mentioned over the last couple of years. This oxfam article [1] says 81 percent in 6 years. Wealth for the middle class means safety and stability. Wealth for the richest of the rich means power, and that threatens any democracy. The goal should be to prevent extreme inequality. It's supposed to be one person=one vote, not one dollar=one vote.

The example mentioning $100 is just tasteless. Wealth taxes are relevant only to people for which $100 means absolutely nothing whatsoever.

The article carefully avoids clear words. What's your conclusion here, dear Paul? Why are you intentionally staying vague? Nobody asked how to convert between wealth and income tax. So exactly why are you educating the public about this topic?

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-wealth-j...

New comment by ahaferburg in "Key, in sight – A guide, of sorts, to keyboard customization"

ahaferburg — Sun, 24 May 2026 23:02:17 +0000

Will check out keyd and wtype, thank you for the pointers! If you don't mind, could you go into a little more detail on your journey? What do you use it for? What roadblocks did you encounter that made you try out different tools?

On Windows I was a happy Autohotkey user. For the same functionality I'm using kmonad+bash+ydotool+systemd now. I use it to make CapsLock a modifier key. Mostly for navigation, e. g. Caps+HJKL for arrow keys, Caps+E/R for Ctrl+🡰/🡲, i. e. jump to the next/prev word. Also moved some special keys closer to the home row, e. g. Caps+F=Backspace, Caps+D=Delete, Caps+V=Enter.

I do not like kmonad at all. The configuration language seems poorly designed, and OS integration is non-existent. Last week I spent about 90 minutes with Copilot trying to get the kmonad script to autostart. And it still doesn't work properly. I have a macro that types the current date, and I just couldn't get it to work when running as a systemd service. Umlauts also don't seem to be working anymore.

New comment by ahaferburg in "Grand Theft Oil Futures: Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense"

ahaferburg — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:53:47 +0000

Yes. It's a conditional probability.

P(W | You're a sucker) = 0.5

New comment by ahaferburg in "OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family"

ahaferburg — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:00:49 +0000

Fun project. The article is a bit light on details. I find it astonishing that a project like this runs into performance issues. I would have liked to learn more about what these resource-constrained widgets looked like, what they did, and what caused the performance issues.

New comment by ahaferburg in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

ahaferburg — Mon, 04 May 2026 14:16:04 +0000

There is no valuable information in that comment.

New comment by ahaferburg in "A desktop made for one"

ahaferburg — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:47:23 +0000

I think some of these obstacles are documented here. https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode

I found the asm skill file quite interesting. Gives a glimpse into a world I didn't know still existed. Very cool! https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/skills/x86_64-...

Thank you for sharing!

New comment by ahaferburg in "Before GitHub"

ahaferburg — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:17:48 +0000

A uni prof of mine insisted on hosting the work group's SourceSafe repo on his laptop. You could not commit changes when he was out of the building.

New comment by ahaferburg in "Before GitHub"

ahaferburg — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:13:01 +0000

For the name: Use something with amber in the name.

New comment by ahaferburg in "It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)"

ahaferburg — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:33:29 +0000

Maybe you could try to find somebody to take over or help you maintain it?

New comment by ahaferburg in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

ahaferburg — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:46:20 +0000

Can be explained with one word: Inequality. America being rich is a smokescreen. Some Americans are very rich. Most are not. The very rich Americans are not sad, actually.

New comment by ahaferburg in "Arguing with Agents"

ahaferburg — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:18:21 +0000

I'm not a native English speaker, so I don't really have much of an opinion about LLM writing. It probably doesn't stand out to me that much. Your reply made me curious though, so I asked a bunch of "is this AI writing" websites about this article, and they landed on about 7-8 % AI writing, so pretty unlikely.

On the article itself, I found the title quite relatable. When coding agents became a thing, I kept arguing with LLMs before realizing how pointless it is. I really liked the turn the article took, relating the communication breakdown to neurodivergence, and the inherent bias that current models bring.

It reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model

According to this communication model, there's four aspects to communication between humans. Apart from the factual and the appeal layers, it highlights other aspects, which it calls self-revealing and relationship layers. It is somewhat surprising, and definitely remarkable, that these also matter when communicating with an LLM.

Thank you for posting the article!

New comment by ahaferburg in "Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)"

ahaferburg — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:25:57 +0000

I liked this series of lectures on Youtube.

Compilers - Alex Aiken | Stanford

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEAYkSg4uSQ3yc_zf_f1G...

Mentioned in another comment, but with a different link.

New comment by ahaferburg in "Arguing with Agents"

ahaferburg — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:03:01 +0000

> Autistic person writes article describing a mismatch between communication styles of autistic people with non-autistic people.

> HN commenters express their anger about the writing style and how it was probably generated by AI.

Peak HN.

In all seriousness, I really liked the article. For me, it was well written.

New comment by ahaferburg in "The Case for Apolitical Tech Spaces"

ahaferburg — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 13:55:51 +0000

Totally missed that. Thank you!

New comment by ahaferburg in "The Case for Apolitical Tech Spaces"

ahaferburg — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:09:39 +0000

What happened to Andreas Kling?

New comment by ahaferburg in "The Case for Apolitical Tech Spaces"

ahaferburg — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:07:37 +0000

Why?

New comment by ahaferburg in "Parakeet.cpp – Parakeet ASR inference in pure C++ with Metal GPU acceleration"

ahaferburg — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 14:10:33 +0000

Agree about the latency requirement.

There's https://kyutai.org/stt, which is very low latency. But it seems not as hackable.

New comment by ahaferburg in "US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land"

ahaferburg — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:27:12 +0000

It's not AI, it's AI companies, at the behest of their stewards and owners.

People with money have been competing with you for your assets for a long time. And they will keep outcompeting you.

New comment by ahaferburg in "Audio is the one area small labs are winning"

ahaferburg — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:18:44 +0000

Yes, but, you see, guns are merely tools. If you give these guns to the right people, they will actually create more work for the doctors, and everybody wins.