Hacker News: tkot

New comment by tkot in "Inventing Cyrillic"

tkot — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:23:57 +0000

> it really is also a tool to best codify spoken language of the Slavs (in a sense, it is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics — some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead

I've heard this claim many times but never the reasoning behind it - by what metric is "ш" superior to "š" and so on?

New comment by tkot in "Our European search index goes live"

tkot — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 09:46:14 +0000

If a search engine (be it Ecosia, Qwant, DDG or Google) is used by someone who is running uBlock Origin, does it benefit the company running the engine or does the cost of queries with no chance of displaying an add to the user outweigh the benefit from the meager amount of data collected (IP address? Interest in given keywords? Some more data for tuning the search results?)?

New comment by tkot in "Deciphering language processing in the human brain through LLM representations"

tkot — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 06:57:40 +0000

> For example, the German "Ich sehe die Frau mit dem Fernglas" (I see the woman with the binoculars) is _unambiguous_ because "die Frau" and "mit dem Fernglas" match in both gender and case. If this weren't the case, it could be either "I see (the woman with the binoculars)" or "I see (the woman) with [using] the binoculars".

My German is pretty rusty, why exactly is it unambiguous?

I don't see how changing the noun would make a difference. "Ich sehe" followed by any of these: "den Mann mit dem Fernglas", "die Frau mit dem Fernglas", "das Mädchen mit dem Fernglas" sounds equally ambiguous to me.

New comment by tkot in "Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts"

tkot — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 15:18:57 +0000

Are there any advantages to using the official Reddit app instead of something like RedReader?

https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader

New comment by tkot in "My favorite coding question to give candidates"

tkot — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 10:58:25 +0000

The noun is not the issue but rather the scope of uniqueness:

>Now, given two log files (log file from day 1 and log file from day 2) we want to generate a list of ‘loyal customers’ that meet the criteria of: (a) they came on both days, and (b) they visited at least two unique pages.

It appears to me that the requirement could be interpreted as either:

"(visit on day 1) AND (visit on day 2) AND (total unique pages count > 2)"

a clearer way to put it would be "visited at least two unique pages in total"

or "(visit at least two unique pages on day 1) AND (visit at least two unique pages on day 2)"

a clearer way to put it would be "visited at least two unique pages on each day"

New comment by tkot in "URL Explained – The Fundamentals"

tkot — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 10:57:24 +0000

> Host: (always present, not always visible)

Hostname can be skipped in file URI and localhost will be assumed, maybe that's what the author meant.

New comment by tkot in "My favorite coding question to give candidates"

tkot — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 10:53:15 +0000

Does visiting pages A and B on day 1 and visiting page A on day 2 also make the sentence true? I think that's the source of ambiguity (or maybe it's ambiguous to me only because English is not my native language).

New comment by tkot in "Spacedrive: Unify files from all your devices and clouds into one explorer"

tkot — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 14:14:54 +0000

Yup, it's also very useful for doing stuff like checking archive integrity after upload (got bitten by it once when uploading some archives via FTP) and syncing with cloud - I've had a dedicated client remove files from my PC instead of the cloud after desync, rclone makes it easy to check what will be done and works with pretty much every service available.

New comment by tkot in "Spacedrive: Unify files from all your devices and clouds into one explorer"

tkot — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 14:09:41 +0000

I specifically mentioned mounting (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/ which may use some additional storage space depending on the caching configuration) whereas you seem to be talking about mirroring the data in the cloud and on other devices.

New comment by tkot in "Spacedrive: Unify files from all your devices and clouds into one explorer"

tkot — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 09:17:37 +0000

What is the advantage of using Spacedrive over mounting the network disk with rclone (https://rclone.org/) and using any other file explorer?

New comment by tkot in "The WebP 0day"

tkot — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 13:46:45 +0000

Slightly off-topic but I can't resist the urge to ask.

Why is the logo (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/wuffs/main/doc/logo...) no longer shown in the readme?

I was pretty sure I had heard of the project before but I had to find the logo to be absolutely certain, it's truly one of a kind.

New comment by tkot in "Full Text of the Federalist Papers"

tkot — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 22:42:52 +0000

>in your opinion what is the difference between a Republic and a Democracy?

To keep things simple: democracy -> majority rule

republic -> majority rule + no inheritance of public offices (so no monarch)

Of course it can get more complicated than that - democracies can differ in terms of who can and cannot vote, freedom of press, how exactly the separation of powers is handled (or if the powers are separated at all), what method is used to distribute seats in the parliament, how much power is held by the president and how much is held by the prime minister etc.

By that definition US and UK are both (representative) democracies but of these two only the US is a republic and UK is a parliamentary ("constitutional" sounds pretty weird in this context given that there is no codified constitution) monarchy (while still being a democracy).

New comment by tkot in "Full Text of the Federalist Papers"

tkot — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 13:37:09 +0000

Isn't it a matter of words changing meaning over time? Could it be that what James Madison called "democracy" corresponds to "direct democracy" in modern understanding and "republic" corresponds to "representative (indirect) democracy" in modern parlance?

If not, then what are the differences between republic described by Madison and representative democracy?

New comment by tkot in "Tell HN: Yahoo Mail deletes all emails due to inactivity"

tkot — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 15:50:59 +0000

Would adding the account to a mail client so that it logs into the account via IMAP on PC/phone startup help or does Yahoo require a login via the web interface?

New comment by tkot in "Some were meant for C [pdf] (2017)"

tkot — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 14:43:47 +0000

What are the 'gotchas' that Java has but C does not?

New comment by tkot in "Improbably Right"

tkot — Mon, 01 May 2023 17:37:33 +0000

I was responding to the person mentioning 100km/h as the correct answer (firstlink).

New comment by tkot in "Improbably Right"

tkot — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 20:28:26 +0000

I think you are thinking about a case where someone goes 120km/h for 1 hour and then 80km/h for 1 hour instead of going over a fixed distance at 120km/h and then going over the same distance at 80km/h.

New comment by tkot in "Z Garbage Collector: The Next Generation"

tkot — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 18:02:12 +0000

Wouldn't UseCompressedOops flag alleviate the issue for smaller heaps?

New comment by tkot in "Idiot Proof Git"

tkot — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 21:31:42 +0000

I'd probably suggest --force-with-lease just to be sure ;)

New comment by tkot in "List of Creepypastas"

tkot — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 09:01:09 +0000

It won't work in cases where the stories require images or interaction but for text-based stories I use

curl | html2text | less

Just to be sure ;)