Hacker News: kalid

New comment by kalid in "Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today"

kalid — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 23:30:38 +0000

Congrats Paras, really happy for you!

New comment by kalid in "GNU Units"

kalid — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:34:02 +0000

Not a full spreadsheet, but I have a passion project that can support units:

https://instacalc.com/56734

I wanted a quick, shareable "back of the envelope" tool.

New comment by kalid in "Show HN: Learn a language quickly by practising speaking with AI"

kalid — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 22:30:13 +0000

Happy to help! To give some context: there was a GPT prompt which was something like "Act as a language tutor. I'll have a conversation with you, and you reply back. If I make a grammar mistake, keep the conversation going, but put the correction in a parenthetical statement."

I was using that for a bit, but typing in another language was enough friction (vs. speaking) that I didn't use it that much.

For this, audio is perfect -- all I need is the gentle reminders about what to fix, and why. GPT could probably have a parenthetical part in the official transcript too.

Anyway, hope that helps give context.

New comment by kalid in "Show HN: Learn a language quickly by practising speaking with AI"

kalid — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 19:52:14 +0000

I've been meaning to brush up on Spanish and the app worked great to just hop in! The best part about using GPT is being able to talk about whatever is on your mind.

I noticed the transcription APIs clean up my mistakes (which is good for the transcript) but I wonder if there is a way to show the raw and corrected transcript to help guide corrections? Either way, it's already useful as is, looking forward to using it more.

New comment by kalid in "Proof you can do hard things"

kalid — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 03:21:19 +0000

You probably understand logs intuitively. Don’t worry about notation, here’s the idea: sometimes we count digits, not values.

When we say someone has a 6 figure salary, we are counting how many 0’s (10s) to takes to get there.

For memory, we say something has 32 bits and can have 2^32 possible values. It’s more graspable to talk about the “address size” vs the “number of possible values”, especially for things that grow fast (like storage).

I’d suggest starting with your intuitions and slowly translating them to math.

(Without being a shill, I wrote about real world logs here, it may help: https://betterexplained.com/articles/using-logs-in-the-real-...)

New comment by kalid in "Show HN: SineRider - A game about love, math, and graphing built by teenagers"

kalid — Fri, 19 Aug 2022 15:48:29 +0000

Congrats on the prototype! Signed up and looking forward to checking it out once it's launched =).

New comment by kalid in "Ask HN: Higher order derivatives in everyday life?"

kalid — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 02:04:45 +0000

y(t) = bank balance

y'(t) = income

y''(t) = raises

New comment by kalid in "BetterExplained: Clear, intuitive lessons about mathematics"

kalid — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 01:56:49 +0000

Glad the site was helpful! Helping spread the word with people it could help (educators, students, curious autodidacts) is great. There are BetterExplained books/courses you can get as quick stocking stuffers, though helping support local businesses now may be even better :).

New comment by kalid in "BetterExplained: Clear, intuitive lessons about mathematics"

kalid — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 01:53:25 +0000

Hey Chris, thanks for the support! =)

New comment by kalid in "Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old"

kalid — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 16:00:11 +0000

Appreciate it Paras! I remember our exchanges fondly as well :).

New comment by kalid in "Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old"

kalid — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 19:14:23 +0000

Congrats Paras, it's great seeing far VWO has come!

New comment by kalid in "Ask HN: Best resources to gain math intuition?"

kalid — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 18:50:01 +0000

That's awesome to hear, thanks for helping share it :).

New comment by kalid in "Ask HN: Best resources to gain math intuition?"

kalid — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 05:22:53 +0000

Wow, that's awesome to hear! One of my fears is having to keep blogging continuously, but luckily math is pretty evergreen, so my intermittent writing schedule doesn't punish me too much.

New comment by kalid in "Ask HN: Best resources to gain math intuition?"

kalid — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 05:21:19 +0000

Thanks, one of my favorite aha! moments :).

New comment by kalid in "Ask HN: Best resources to gain math intuition?"

kalid — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 05:17:54 +0000

Thanks, appreciate it!

New comment by kalid in "Ask HN: Best resources to gain math intuition?"

kalid — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 23:47:49 +0000

Plug, but I have a blog for exactly this. As an EE/physics student you may appreciate this one on Euler's Formula:

https://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-understanding...

New comment by kalid in "Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator"

kalid — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 18:46:34 +0000

Shameless plug, I made https://instacalc.com (pastebin for calcs) for back-of-the-envelope number crunching. Fast, free, gets out of your way.

New comment by kalid in "Have a personal web site"

kalid — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 17:19:39 +0000

Have you checked archive.org for a backup? It's saved me a few times.

New comment by kalid in "An Analysis on Deepmind’s Starcraft 2 AI’s Superhuman Speed"

kalid — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:51:01 +0000

That's a great point. I think you could train a network on what clicks were meaningful or not by looking at whether the future game state was changed by the presence of the click. (I.e., if you click to attack 4 times, but clicks 2 3 and 4 don't change the impact of the battle when they are removed, they were likely spam.)

New comment by kalid in "'Mindful people' feel less pain"

kalid — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 22:25:58 +0000

Is it necessary for the realization you've torn a muscle to be unpleasant? (It's that realization you're reacting to, not the pain.)

Ultimately, we're making a prediction: my life is guaranteed to be worse off because my muscle was recently torn. Is this true?

https://sivers.org/horses