Hacker News: xhevahir

New comment by xhevahir in "AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying"

xhevahir — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:55:04 +0000

> Lobbying is cheap because it’s just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers.

No. It is not. For starters, ask anybody who works at a DC restaurant or sporting venue.

New comment by xhevahir in "Em dashes are amazing"

xhevahir — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:27:51 +0000

I'm reminded of a remark I read somewhere that the em dash is "almost excessively versatile."

> As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash

All that energy spent on punctuation, and still: comma splices. ):

New comment by xhevahir in "My falling-out with the rationalist community"

xhevahir — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:21:57 +0000

> One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route.

Why does the formation of correct beliefs, a topic people have been discussing for millennia, require such exotic jargon? It's things like this that give off cult vibes.

New comment by xhevahir in "LinkedIn is a cesspool of scammers and identity theft"

xhevahir — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:18:34 +0000

That doesn't sound to me like a consequence of their free-as-in-beer business model. It sounds like an accurate reflection of business culture and the way people talk in that sort of milieu.

New comment by xhevahir in "Agnes Callard’s theory of the uni-context"

xhevahir — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:37:34 +0000

As far as I can tell neither Callard nor anyone else talk about this concept anywhere outside this interview. Odd.

New comment by xhevahir in "Agnes Callard’s theory of the uni-context"

xhevahir — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:36:25 +0000

What about "Germanic" society are you saying is incompatible with this? (English is a Germanic language, by the way.)

New comment by xhevahir in "Turn your singing voice into printable notes (in the browser)"

xhevahir — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:00:40 +0000

What technology is this using? pYIN? Deep learning? I don't see any indication.

New comment by xhevahir in "Turn your singing voice into printable notes (in the browser)"

xhevahir — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:59:47 +0000

I was able to do that using SoundHound on my Windows Phone 10 years ago.

New comment by xhevahir in "MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years"

xhevahir — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:05:14 +0000

It's an arbitrary metric that creates an illusion of rigor. That looks to me like an instance of the quantitative (or McNamara) fallacy, and a pretty typical application of pseudoscience.

New comment by xhevahir in "MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years"

xhevahir — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 02:39:49 +0000

Smells like EA. The "Evidence stance" measure in particular, which purports to gauge a study's rigorousness as a simple percentage, is rank pseudoscience.

New comment by xhevahir in "A love letter to flashcards"

xhevahir — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:06:16 +0000

> Most of my cards are handwritten by me and accommodate my brain.

I'm guessing from all the talk about Anki that people are missing this part. I think these frictionless, digital replacements for note cards are solving the wrong problem. You're never going to spend more time on a given flashcard, and better absorb the information on it, than the first time, when you're sitting there making the thing. Making this step as brief as possible is a bad idea.

New comment by xhevahir in "Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again"

xhevahir — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:56:37 +0000

I spent a day or so traveling through Germany with my parents a few weeks ago as part of a (much longer) trip and a common refrain during that day was, "So much for German efficiency." Frankfurt's airport was a tiring and frustrating experience, with long delays on the tarmac, at baggage claim, at the check-in counter, etc. One rest stop on the highway was half way dismantled, with restrooms filthy enough that everybody who got a look at them turned right around and went back to their cars. And so on. I was surprised, having expected that things would be generally more functional than in the States. (I will say that the roads were in a much better state of repair.)

New comment by xhevahir in "The Doom Justifies the Valuation"

xhevahir — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 03:59:54 +0000

The English article for "let it rot" (or a related phrase) seems to be here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping

New comment by xhevahir in "Social Animus"

xhevahir — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:00:30 +0000

More like demanding cash. This looks like a manic episode.

The post was flagged, and now it's gone back to not being flagged, which I don't understand.

New comment by xhevahir in "Social Animus"

xhevahir — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:08:07 +0000

There's plenty of reading material about her controversies:

https://unherd.com/2019/02/techs-dark-overlords/?edition=us

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rogue-occupy-wall-street-account-...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140802022307/http://valleywag....

Then there's her interview with Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes: https://youtu.be/LXVWLA5eKO0?si=V37wz5NicRd0r_wD

New comment by xhevahir in "Anthropic acquires Stainless"

xhevahir — Tue, 19 May 2026 05:09:49 +0000

The candidate you're describing is a unicorn. Even assuming that this acqui-hire routine is a good way of finding such people, that doesn't answer the question why they're needed for "some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring" (as you suggested above).

I think you're overestimating the rationality of this game.

New comment by xhevahir in "Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian"

xhevahir — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:53:10 +0000

The few mentions of plugins lead me to believe that Files.md won't have them, and this:

>Do we really need this feature? Will it help us to do the real job, or does it just give dopamine?

Makes me think that requests for features generally will be turned down. So, No, thank you. Sometimes less is less.

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

xhevahir — Mon, 18 May 2026 06:59:48 +0000

> Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)

This is enough to discredit the whole infographic in my eyes. No matter what the CPC or anybody else may claim, these are distinct languages, and not dialects. Not only that, but in some of these places a lot of Chinese speak other regional Chinese languages, such as Fuzhounese, rather than Mandarin or Cantonese. (I remember a blog from twenty or so years ago by a NYC Chinatown native who mapped his building by language; something like a dozen Chinese languages were spoken by residents of that building's apartments.)

New comment by xhevahir in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

xhevahir — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:12:51 +0000

JD isn't a terminal degree. There's two higher degrees I think.

MDs and JDs are professional professional qualifications, which makes their situation a bit different from purely academic degrees. For example the ABA acts kind of like a cartel.

I don't think I disagree with you, by the way. I'm just more unhappy about it. All of these sclerotic, even corrupt, institutions acting like aging vats for talented youth, all to exclude newcomers and to maintain hierarchies...they're not ideal.

New comment by xhevahir in "Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7"

xhevahir — Thu, 14 May 2026 09:07:17 +0000

There's a lot of them. Just search for Frutiger Aero on GitHub.