Hacker News: xiande04

New comment by xiande04 in "The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café"

xiande04 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 21:02:53 +0000

Well, I had zero idea you were a non-native English speaker, so it looks like you're doing pretty well!

New comment by xiande04 in "The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café"

xiande04 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 20:27:31 +0000

How did you get on top of the cafe?

New comment by xiande04 in "AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline"

xiande04 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 19:08:09 +0000

It's not just technology that's eating away at console sales, it's also the fact that 1) nearly everything is available on PC these days (save Nintendo with its massive IP), 2) mobile gaming, and 3) there's a limitless amount of retro games and hacks or mods of retro games to play and dedicated retro handhelds are a rapidly growing market. Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again. Will be interesting to see how the video game industry evolves over the next decade or two. I suspect subscriptions (sigh) will start to make up for lost console sales.

New comment by xiande04 in "AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline"

xiande04 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 19:02:39 +0000

I.e., the uncanny valley.

New comment by xiande04 in "An engineer's perspective on hiring"

xiande04 — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 23:41:05 +0000

I like these types of interview problems. I did one in Python once. We also had it so that persistence to Postgres indicated that the DB was in a very de-normalized state, so they could comment on that for bonus points.

New comment by xiande04 in "Software Development at 800 Words per Minute"

xiande04 — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 19:07:03 +0000

Yeah, that bit about each phoneme sounding exactly the same everytime really made a lot of sense. Even if the TTS phoneme sounds nothing like a human would say it, once you've heard it enough times, you just memorize it.

I guess sounding "natural" really just amounts to adding variation across the sentence, which destroys phoneme-level accuracy.

New comment by xiande04 in "Software Development at 800 Words per Minute"

xiande04 — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 16:58:16 +0000

Thanks for the blog post!

I was wondering what TTS voices you use? I've heard from other blind people that they tend to prefer the classic, robotic voices rather than modern ML-enhanced voices. Is that true in your experience, too?

New comment by xiande04 in "Tao on “blue team” vs. “red team” LLMs"

xiande04 — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 16:34:33 +0000

It's called "separation of concerns".

New comment by xiande04 in "Writing is thinking"

xiande04 — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 19:39:35 +0000

I've been saying this for years.

New comment by xiande04 in "Incapacitating Google Tag Manager (2022)"

xiande04 — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 20:47:41 +0000

There's a section in the article titled, "WHAT DOES GOOGLE TAG MANAGER DO?":

> Whilst Google would love the general public to believe that Tag Manager covers a wide range of general purpose duties, it's almost exclusively used for one thing: surveillance.

New comment by xiande04 in "When Did Nature Burst into Vivid Color?"

xiande04 — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 21:46:23 +0000

This tracks with life around deep sea vents where there is no sunlight. It's mostly white and gray.

New comment by xiande04 in "When Did Nature Burst into Vivid Color?"

xiande04 — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:50:18 +0000

That's what I'm getting at. Green was needed to optimize energy absorption from the sun. AFAIK, there are no other advantages to selecting for green.

New comment by xiande04 in "When Did Nature Burst into Vivid Color?"

xiande04 — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:09:34 +0000

I think you're right. A specific example would be chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is green, not because green was selected for. Instead, it's just a side effect of the biochemistry needed to absorb energy from sunlight.

New comment by xiande04 in "Estrogen: A Trip Report"

xiande04 — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 22:43:27 +0000

Ah, the old "it could be worse" fallacy.

So to recap, you're saying, "don't worry about what's going on in the US right now, because you still have it better than most of the world"

Just because something could be worse does not mean that 1. It's nothing to be concerned about 2. That we shouldn't take steps to improve the situation.

Things can always be worse, so this "logic" is always applicable. It's a vacuous argument. Even if you lived in the country with the worst homo/transphobia in the world, you could tell the person, "well, at least your alive."

Moreover, there's nothing constructive about this line of thinking. If people actually lived by this logic, we would live in a static world, because "it could be worse."

New comment by xiande04 in "Nitrogen Triiodide (2016)"

xiande04 — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 22:39:34 +0000

Reminds me of my AP chem class 16 years later. We were always mixing stuff up in the lab. Good times.

New comment by xiande04 in "The Friendship Recession: The lost art of connecting"

xiande04 — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 16:13:31 +0000

You just said all the things that you do while raising kids. What is it that you are doing differently that allows you to do all those things? Is it simply just a matter of hiring a cleaner?

Because otherwise, as the father of a 1 and 5 year old, I completely agree with OP and find your story unbelievable. Like OP I work/exercise/do chores from 6 am to 10 pm. I'm on HN right now only because it's Saturday and I'm relaxing.

New comment by xiande04 in "Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds"

xiande04 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 13:44:08 +0000

Exactly. As ATP is broken down to adenosine and phosphate to produce energy, creatine re-phosphorolates adenosine.

So it gives you more energy at molecular level. But as you said, you have to actually use that energy.

New comment by xiande04 in "The Lost Art of Logarithms"

xiande04 — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 16:16:00 +0000

If you like this approach, I highly recommend Mathematics: It's Content, Methods, and Meaning by Kolmogorov. He uses this same approach, but applies it to many more concepts in math (about 1,000 pages!). In fact, I think I actually heard about that book on this site, so I guess I'm paying it forward.

This approach was to align with the Soviet philosophy of dialectical materialism, which claims that all things arise from a material need. Not sure I'm fully onboard with the philosophy as a whole, but Kolmogorov's book was really eye opening.

New comment by xiande04 in "The Era of Solopreneurs Is Here"

xiande04 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 19:34:03 +0000

What are you working on and how's it going?

I also started a solopreneur gig building apps.

New comment by xiande04 in "The Champion Who Memorized 80 Numbers in 13.5 Seconds"

xiande04 — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 15:43:31 +0000

Gamification and spaced repetition.

Duolingo is really just about combining gamification with spaced repetition.