Hacker News: marsavar

New comment by marsavar in "Turn your best AI prompts into one-click tools in Chrome"

marsavar — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:05:00 +0000

Who wants this?

New comment by marsavar in "UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M"

marsavar — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 01:04:12 +0000

This is absolutely infuriating.

New comment by marsavar in "Show HN: I'm making an open-source platform for learning Japanese"

marsavar — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 07:22:17 +0000

People are reacting quite strongly to this answer, but it is unfortunately correct. OP has essentially created an application for memorising vocabulary, which is... fine, and it's an achievement to be celebrated.

But no amount of flashcards will make you a competent language speaker. There is no substitute for immersion.

What made it really click for me for me was reading. Lots and lots of it. My suggestion is to start with short, easy stuff (stories for kids) and then move on to progressively harder material (short newspaper articles, essays).

I passed JLPT N1 back in 2013, and preparing for the test was just an exercise in memorising vocabulary and grammar patterns. What really made the language click for me was reading novels in Japanese. That alone helped me more than any amount of Anki-style JLPT prep material ever did.

Vocabulary is important, but it's much, much easier to absorb and retain if you learn it in context.

New comment by marsavar in "Yamanot.es: A music box of train station melodies from the JR Yamanote Line"

marsavar — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:17:11 +0000

My favourite, when I lived in Japan many years ago, was the Musashi-Koganei melody in Tokyo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT2xTUPveCw

It stood very much in contrast with all the other jingles, and I simply loved it.

New comment by marsavar in "Lazy-brush – smooth drawing with mouse or finger"

marsavar — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 10:16:55 +0000

OP's personal website deserves its own post! https://dulnan.net/ <3

New comment by marsavar in "Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)"

marsavar — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 23:09:53 +0000

https://plausible.io/ or https://usefathom.com/

New comment by marsavar in "mIRC 7.81"

marsavar — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 12:33:40 +0000

Gosh, that brings back memories! I remember having so much fun coding my own trivia bots in mIRC Scripting Language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language) over 20 years ago.

New comment by marsavar in "Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic"

marsavar — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 17:56:12 +0000

This was a lot of fun to play. Congrats!

New comment by marsavar in "Making Postgres scale"

marsavar — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 19:28:42 +0000

That's amazing! Could you elaborate more on your VACUUM planning?

New comment by marsavar in "Almost one in 10 people use the same four-digit PIN"

marsavar — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 16:02:08 +0000

Beautiful visualisation - I just wish I could hover over the grid and see which PIN my cursor is pointing at.

New comment by marsavar in "Amazon UK to stop selling Bloomsbury's books"

marsavar — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:47:48 +0000

As someone who worked for the world's largest trade book publisher a decade ago, let me tell you that dealing with Amazon is the worst. They squeeze publishers' profit margins to the absolute minimum, and they aggressively force them to accept terrible deals because they have the upper hand.

Amazon has been horrible for the book industry. Please buy your books elsewhere!

Microsoft deepened ties with Israeli military to provide support during Gaza war

marsavar — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 11:13:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/23/israeli-military-gaza-war-microsoft

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42802889

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

New comment by marsavar in "Google brings real-time information from The Associated Press to Gemini"

marsavar — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 21:20:10 +0000

Except when that happens, a clarification is almost always added at the bottom of the article ("This article was amended on [date]. An earlier version said xxx" or some variation thereof). You're not gonna get a second push notification from an AI summary saying "Oopsies, the previous notification was wrong". Once it's out, it's out, and that sort of damage is difficult to repair.

New comment by marsavar in "Working with The Associated Press to provide fresh results for the Gemini app"

marsavar — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 21:16:41 +0000

Anything other than 0% is borderline immoral. Imagine sending a push notification to somebody's phone with a completely made-up headline summary. Even if it happens once in a hundred times, that's too much. Things like that slowly but surely erode trust and make it harder and harder to trust anything that's generated by AI, especially when it comes to news, where trustworthiness is essential, and probably the main reason people pay for news. See for example https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge93de21n0o

AI Opportunities Action Plan [pdf]

marsavar — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 13:24:47 +0000

Article URL: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6784eb3b3ef063b15dca0ec0/ai_opportunities_action_plan.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683166

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by marsavar in "Doing Hard Things While Living Life: Why We Built Vade Studio in Clojure"

marsavar — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 03:46:50 +0000

I was extremely puzzled by that statement too. I would hate to work with someone like that.

New comment by marsavar in "Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce"

marsavar — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 13:52:21 +0000

"We thank Tetsuya Spippayashi for enlightening clarifications on the historical origins of Cacio and pepe"

That surname can't be real...

New comment by marsavar in "Rip2 – A safer, rust-based rm"

marsavar — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 12:13:09 +0000

It's always laudable when OSS projects get some love, but... I'm slightly put off by programs that try to be witty or funny (e.g. flags like --decompose and --seance)

New comment by marsavar in "The Atlantic Did Me Dirty"

marsavar — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 15:41:18 +0000

Absolutely.

> They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences.

This, I think, is the core argument of the piece. I find it depressing that a teacher thinks that books should reflect the readers' lived experiences. It's an incredibly narrow-minded view. Fran Lebowitz sums it up quite brilliantly in "Pretend it's a city": a book is not a mirror, it's a door.

New comment by marsavar in "NilAway: Practical nil panic detection for Go"

marsavar — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 17:30:32 +0000

While this is a great piece of engineering, and will certainly deliver a huge amount of value to any project, the fact that a whole new tool had to be built (and will have to be maintained) to address serious, fundamental shortcomings in the language is really quite sad.