Hacker News: minmax2020

New comment by minmax2020 in "Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns"

minmax2020 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 06:56:30 +0000

Can anyone explain the rent seeker paragraph? Which companies are playing 0 sum game and which are not? Are all big players not rent seekers?

New comment by minmax2020 in "The Awful German Language (1880)"

minmax2020 — Fri, 16 May 2025 04:43:12 +0000

I would love to read "The Awful English Language" written in an alternative universe where Twain is German.

6th of October (City)

minmax2020 — Tue, 28 May 2024 01:11:19 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6th_of_October_(city)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40496402

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by minmax2020 in "The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language"

minmax2020 — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:20:33 +0000

I'm a Korean currently learning Japanese, and while I do understand that this mash of Chinese characters and kana writing system can be appreciated for its exoticness, as a learner I can't help but feel it's more of a hassle resulting from it being a not yet fully optimized writing system. (I mean, do we really need both hiragana and katakana?)

I'm definitely not claiming that Korean is a more "optimized" language overall, but at least when it comes to the writing system, we had exactly the same problem as the Japanese (if you look at Korean newspapers just a few decades ago they are littered with Chinese characters), and at some point we fully ditched Chinese characters and have no problem going on with our lives. In fact, it made our lives easier in many cases, especially in keyboard typing.

As a side note, we obviously have some side effects from switching to entirely phonetic alphabet system. For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車). I'm not sure how this side effect propagates into some sort of sociolinguistic phenomenon, but at least for average people it doesn't seem to have much significance.

New comment by minmax2020 in "I should have loved biology (2020)"

minmax2020 — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 05:53:35 +0000

Watching Dr. Eric Lander's lectures in MIT OCW Biology course was a watershed moment in my life. I felt exactly the same way as this blog post after finishing the course, two years after graduating from college. Highly recommended if you haven't seen it yet: https://youtu.be/P-Ry4rRdDbk?si=Hp2SEkEKGeeui-pP

New comment by minmax2020 in "Miyazaki has used the art of animation to study the major problem of adult life"

minmax2020 — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 11:19:26 +0000

Nuance-wise I think it's better read as "How will you live your life?"

New comment by minmax2020 in "Show HN: Manabi Reader – Learn Japanese by Reading on iOS and macOS (SwiftUI)"

minmax2020 — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 02:58:18 +0000

May I ask what library you're using for kanji to hiragana transliteration? I'm working on a language product as well and I'm using pykakasi which is certainly prone to errors. I tried your app and noticed similar errors as well (大いばり should show ooibari instead of daiibari, for example). Wonder if we can do better on transliteration.

Ask HN: For users with 10k+ karma, how much time do you spend on HN?

minmax2020 — Thu, 25 May 2023 09:50:18 +0000

Just curious about the economics of karma. For me, it takes so much mental energy just to even read a typical link shared on HN, so I usually skim through it and read the comments. So naturally got curious how much time do people spend if they have active discussions about topics here.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36068750

Points: 41

# Comments: 66

New comment by minmax2020 in "Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”"

minmax2020 — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 09:01:20 +0000

Given enough advances in hardware and software optimization, isn't it reasonable to think that if we connect this level of language model to speech-to-text + image-to-text models on the input side and robotic control system on the output side, and set up an online end-to-end reinforcement learning system, the product will be a convincingly sentient robot, at least on the surface? Or am I underestimating the difficulty of connecting these different models? Would like to hear from the experts on this.

New comment by minmax2020 in "Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?"

minmax2020 — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 08:59:13 +0000

Introduction to Ancient Greek History with Donald Kagan

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL023BCE5134243987

Very engaging lecture. Some parts are surprisingly relevant to this day.

New comment by minmax2020 in "Ask HN: Anyone free to meetup in Tokyo on Xmas?"

minmax2020 — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 22:44:10 +0000

Hey, added my email to my profile. Please shoot me a quick email if you're interested!

New comment by minmax2020 in "Ask HN: Anyone free to meetup in Tokyo on Xmas?"

minmax2020 — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 11:45:41 +0000

I'm curious too. Is there a HN Seoul group?

The underground movement trying to topple the North Korean regime

minmax2020 — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 23:42:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/23/the-underground-movement-trying-to-topple-the-north-korean-regime

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33915438

Points: 25

# Comments: 5

New comment by minmax2020 in "TSMC founder Morris Chang says globalization and free trade 'almost dead'"

minmax2020 — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 02:32:42 +0000

This is a very short-sighted view. Globalization requires certain level of operational efficiencies, such as speed and cost of communication and transportation. We have just recently reached a level where governments and corporations can support demands from billions of population. Technology will keep on progressing unless we end up in an extinction scenario, and at certain level globalization will be just another step in humanity's perpetual drive towards centralization.