Hacker News: zupatol

New comment by zupatol in "What is “literate programming”? (2024)"

zupatol — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:46:13 +0000

Another successful example of literate programming is fastHTML, and probably most of the code written at fast.ai and answer.ai. https://fastht.ml/docs/

Here's Jeremy Howard explaining why he loves doing everything in notebooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q6sLbz37gk

New comment by zupatol in "A Love Letter to People Who Believe in People"

zupatol — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 14:39:18 +0000

There's a healthy way to be a critic, which is helping people find and enjoy works they didn't notice.

There are also unhealthy ways of being a fan, for example if you admire someone there's probably someone else you despise. It's much better to follow the title of the post and believe in people in general.

New comment by zupatol in "Tencent's 'Hunyuan-T1'–The First Mamba-Powered Ultra-Large Model"

zupatol — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 20:47:23 +0000

I asked it what are some famous squares around the world, and it gave me a list of squares "with historical significance" that included Tienanmen. When I asked what gave it historical signficance, it mentioned the 1989 pro-democracy protests.

Deepseek wouldn't name any squares in Beijing.

New comment by zupatol in "Whose Weil? Simone, Patron Saint of Everyone"

zupatol — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 14:58:11 +0000

According to wikipedia, it's not certain she converted to christianity. She was raised as an agnostic, so was only jewish "ethnically".

New comment by zupatol in "Whose Weil? Simone, Patron Saint of Everyone"

zupatol — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 14:50:21 +0000

I read some of her books and it also sounds weird to me. The only thing that struck me is that she saw the tribe of Israel in the ancient testament as a nasty example of one group crushing another, something she also didn't like in the roman empire, and also in how french regions were culturally crushed at the expense of the center.

Googling turned up this criticism: - Simone Weil, whose life was devoted to witnessing oppression and injustice, and was almost silent about the persecution of Jews by Nazis — chose to instead focus on the fate of France at the hands of the Germans https://levecenter.ucla.edu/mary-gordon-2013/

It seems a stretch to call her antisemitic.

New comment by zupatol in "Web components are okay"

zupatol — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 15:28:24 +0000

Without the shadow dom, your component can still have children.

If you need several slots, there's an example duplicating that functionality with javascript in the second comment of this blog post: https://frontendmasters.com/blog/light-dom-only/

New comment by zupatol in "A mathematician who finds poetry in math and math in poetry"

zupatol — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 14:03:35 +0000

It's not very surprising to find math in Perec's work, he deliberately put it there.

New comment by zupatol in "Easter eggs on Swiss maps (2021)"

zupatol — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 14:28:08 +0000

This joke, that the Germans or the Swiss have no sense of humor, I never found it funny. But maybe that's just because I'm Swiss.

New comment by zupatol in "Permutation City (1994)"

zupatol — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 17:40:41 +0000

I justs finished reading the book and the idea that a simulation universe need not have another universe simulating it indeed baffled me. How do you make sense of that? I was disappointed there wasn't a clearer motivation for it.

New comment by zupatol in "Ask HN: Daily practices for building AI/ML skills?"

zupatol — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 11:28:28 +0000

Ah, visual anagrams, that was exactly the idea I had for a project that would allow me to learn. I hadn't dared looking if it already existed. I will try to pretend it doesn't and try to find my own way...

New comment by zupatol in "Flaubert's letters are as hilarious and humane as his best fiction"

zupatol — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 15:05:22 +0000

We don't seem to have the same taste, but you made me really curious by mentioning comics.

What are your recommendations for bandes dessinées that are stronger than Flaubert?

New comment by zupatol in "Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]"

zupatol — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 17:25:08 +0000

Haven't read all of that, but it strikes me that some of these authors like Freud and Levi-Strauss are perfectly understandable without much background. Haven't tried Kant but other authors consider him very methodic and logical, about the opposite of Deuleuze, and he's a big inspiration for the very readable Schopenhauer.

Maybe Hegel and Heidegger are where things get complicated.

New comment by zupatol in "Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]"

zupatol — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 11:31:08 +0000

I read a few pages of thousand plateaus and I didn't get the impression he really wanted the reader to make sense of it.

It's full of quotations of works you would certainly know if you had enough culture. It feels like an violent attempt to humiliate the reader into submission. Apparently the english version came out with a lot of footnotes to provide context. This probably betrays the spirit of the original.

I'll try to listen to the podcast though, maybe some civilized people did manage to find something valuable in his writing.

New comment by zupatol in "Emacs Bedrock: A minimal Emacs starter kit"

zupatol — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 09:33:53 +0000

I've been using it for years on windows. Magit is much slower but still great. Some people run emacs inside wsl, and I've done that once or twice to try out unix-only modes, but they were never good enough to convince me to use them.

My life improved a lot when I switched to Doom emacs, which takes care of a lot of emacs stuff I don't know that well.

New comment by zupatol in "Spirituality of Science: Implications for Meaning, Well-Being, and Learning"

zupatol — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 17:06:34 +0000

Their first point is that saying the values are already there. The most obvious value of science is truth, which can be reached by the scientific method, which allows paradigms to change. Giving so much importance to truth is a matter of faith, you don't derive that from somewhere. It's interesting that they're going further than that and apparently find awe and meaning even just from the scientific method. Awe and meaning are in short supply in this world, so it's worth asking if we can get more of it from science, instead of pretending it's not there.

New comment by zupatol in "Awesome Music Theory: books, links, videos, research, visuals, composition"

zupatol — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 08:07:30 +0000

Which one of your resources would be most relevant if I would like to start as you recommend by learning to hear harmony qualities and then to hear them within a key?

New comment by zupatol in "Ask HN: Performance psychology in the workplace?"

zupatol — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 19:06:12 +0000

I'm surprised to find very positive question about pushing yourself.

I'm not at all into sports, and from the title I expected a psychology of competition and wanting to beat the others, which sounds horrific in the workplace. Instead it almost sounds like people would even do sports without medals.

How much of sports would remain without striving for worthless tokens and aggressivity?

New comment by zupatol in "Ask HN: How to be less opinionated?"

zupatol — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 11:56:55 +0000

Paul Graham wrote a great essay that's related to this: keep your identity small http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

New comment by zupatol in "Kurt Vonnegut on the “shapes” of stories"

zupatol — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 13:29:27 +0000

Life is ambiguous so we make sense of it with stories. Stories all have a point, life just is.

New comment by zupatol in "Alain de Botton on existential maturity and what emotional intelligence means"

zupatol — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 08:43:00 +0000

"He was a decent man" sounds like a worthy ambition. I'd be proud of "He wasn't a dick".