Hacker News: niek_pas

New comment by niek_pas in "All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes"

niek_pas — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:06:37 +0000

Unless I'm missing something, there's also nothing in the paper to indicate this is "all of human ingredients"? It looks like it's 11 data sources covering a bunch of common cuisines, with the English + Chinese sources accounting for 90% (!) of the dataset. Among others, Africa and the Arab world are not present in the data (good for about 25% of the global population).

Also, all non-English terms were AI-translated to English which is methodologically understandable but surely leaves room for error.

New comment by niek_pas in "Italy region: +200% tax on datacenters built in green/agricultural areas"

niek_pas — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:17:57 +0000

> Yeah agriculture is bad for the environment, but at least it feeds us to keep us alive

This is true, but don't forget a _lot_ of agriculture feeds _animals_ that we in turn eat. If you want to make optimal use of land for human needs, most modern agriculture is not that.

New comment by niek_pas in "Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy (2025)"

niek_pas — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:33:58 +0000

Genuine question: do you add 'please' and 'thank you' to Google searches? If not, what sets them apart?

New comment by niek_pas in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

niek_pas — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:49:12 +0000

"Update your priors" is a common expression in English: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/update_one%27s_priors#English

New comment by niek_pas in "Haskell Foundation 2026 Update"

niek_pas — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:45:35 +0000

I don't mean to sound elitist, but in a way, Haskell's difficulty is kind of the point of the language.

The thing that's so elegant about Haskell is that it allows you to express programmatic constructs at a very abstract level. Abstraction is almost by definition difficult to grasp. That's why it takes a decade and a half for (most) people to go from arithmetic to calculus.

New comment by niek_pas in "How fast is N tokens per second really?"

niek_pas — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:14:00 +0000

RIP my browser history, I guess

New comment by niek_pas in "America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish"

niek_pas — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:19:50 +0000

What in the world is “other native” supposed to mean? Those languages don’t have names?

New comment by niek_pas in "I don't think AI will make your processes go faster"

niek_pas — Sun, 17 May 2026 14:18:42 +0000

What's even worse is that when dealing with human software teams, a vague requirement will (at least in a well-run org) receive demands for further specification. "What do you mean by 'get data'?", etc.

An LLM will just say, "Sure! Here's the fully implemented code that gets the data and give it to the user. " and be done with it.

New comment by niek_pas in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

niek_pas — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:07:52 +0000

Bit off topic but why in the world are people still posting on medium? The reading experience is abhorrent; I couldn’t even finish reading this article before a full screen popup literally blocked the sentence I was reading.

Is there some incentive I’m not seeing?

New comment by niek_pas in "Getting arrested in Japan"

niek_pas — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:08:39 +0000

And I’m sure the boundary on what constitutes ‘badness’ is something everyone can agree on!

New comment by niek_pas in "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI"

niek_pas — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:44:11 +0000

My take is that music _can be_ an art but it can also be other things, the same way sequential photos played back quickly can be an art but can also be a screensaver.

(I say this as a musician if that gets me extra cred somehow.)

New comment by niek_pas in "Grok 4.3"

niek_pas — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:56:12 +0000

> If you need to ask about what people on Twitter are talking about, Grok is really good for that obviously.

Isn't that why OP was asking about racism?

New comment by niek_pas in "The Prompt API"

niek_pas — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:15:49 +0000

Man, that before-after slider on the home page makes me so sad... YouTube used to just be random people sharing cool stuff, and those de-sensationalized titles really brought me back to that time for a second! Cool stuff.

New comment by niek_pas in "The Classic American Diner"

niek_pas — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:05:02 +0000

That hasn’t gone away, so I don’t think that’s the difference that makes a difference here.

New comment by niek_pas in "Show HN: Tolaria – Open-source macOS app to manage Markdown knowledge bases"

niek_pas — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:55:44 +0000

I will, thanks!

New comment by niek_pas in "Show HN: Tolaria – Open-source macOS app to manage Markdown knowledge bases"

niek_pas — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:37:55 +0000

A lot of people are posting their similar projects in this thread. Is there anyone making a markdown knowledge management app that feels truly Mac-native, i.e. written in AppKit or SwiftUI rather than as a web page with an Electron/Tauri/whatever wrapper?

(No offense intended to OP, this looks like a cool project; I'm just looking for something else.)

New comment by niek_pas in "DeepSeek v4"

niek_pas — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:18:36 +0000

Hong Kong? Taiwan? Uyghurs? Tiananmen Square? Tibet?

New comment by niek_pas in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

niek_pas — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:44:24 +0000

Maybe I'm stupid and naive but I just don't really see how any of this is _fundamentally_ different from Photoshop. Trusting the images you're looking at on the internet has been impossible for a long time. That's why we have institutions and social relations we place trust in instead.

New comment by niek_pas in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

niek_pas — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:30:11 +0000

> Australians (and I presume other Commonwealth countries) default to paracetamol

The same is the case in the Netherlands.

New comment by niek_pas in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

niek_pas — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:45:53 +0000

Or just chromebooks with a web address blocklist.