AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

Top comment by vldmrs

I've noticed that my son spends way too much time on YouTube or playing Minecraft and one of the few offline activities he enjoys doing on his own is coloring. And since he comes to me every time he wants a new coloring book and we spend about 10 minutes together searching for each picture, I made a website with a collection of coloring books for him. The site is very simple, but to be honest, I haven't had so much fun with the process of creation for a long time.

https://colorango.com/

2. Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

Top comment by chomp

Ok yes this guide is fine, a lot of things are up for negotiation, and I think it’s a lot more widely known these days to negotiate for stuff.

But man, a lot of the people out there absolutely still do not grok negotiating. They know it’s something you’re supposed to do, but they will try and negotiate things that are not negotiable (like making it a hard ask for extra contributions per paycheck for healthcare to match their former employer, rather than just ask for more money to cover the difference) or they’ll make demands for things we already offer if they had just paid attention and read the benefits packet we emailed them, and it takes a bunch of back and forth to figure out what they’re asking for (nothing, in the end). Or they’ll ask for weird PTO accrual and cash out schemes that just leaves us asking “why didn’t you just ask for more cash and more PTO up front because now HR is pulling people into meetings to try and figure out this demand”.

People need more than knowing to negotiate, they need to know how to negotiate, and that means partially knowing what is negotiable. (We’ll change a lot actually in negotiations, but not everything)

3. Ask HN: What ist your AdBlock strategy?

Top comment by marssaxman

Firefox + uBlock Origin works well for me! It's all I use.

4. Ask HN: Real-time speech-to-speech translation

Top comment by v7n

It's not exactly what OP wants out-of-the-box, but if anyone is considering building one I suggest taking a look at this.¹ It is really easy to tinker with, can run both on devide or in a client-server model. It has the required speech-to-text and text-to-speech endpoints, with multiple options for each built-in. If you can make the LLM AI assistant part of the pipeline to perform translation to a degree you're comfortable with, this could be a solution.

¹ https://github.com/huggingface/speech-to-speech

5. Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game?

Top comment by mrob

I'm not convinced that current generative AI is a good fit for this kind of game. IMO, the heart of the text adventure game is the world model, and LLMs are notably lacking here. It's hard to believe the game is simulating a real place when it doesn't even have object permanence.

That said, my favorite human-authored text adventure game (I prefer that name to "interactive fiction" because I'm primarily looking for entertainment, not literary value) is Lost Pig:

http://grunk.org/lostpig/

Playable online with a Javascript-based interpreter at:

https://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A//mirror.ifarchive.org/if-...

It's a comedy, and just as with graphical adventure games, I think the whole adventure game concept works best with comedy. Even human-authored world models are inevitably flawed, and the resulting absurdity best matches the tone of comedy. I also recommend another comedy, Brain Guzzlers From Beyond!:

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=f55km4uutt2cqwwz

Both these are relatively modern games, written after the commercial collapse of the genre. They were the winners of the 2007 and 2015 Annual Interactive Fiction Competitions respectively. More information about this:

https://www.ifwiki.org/The_Annual_IF_Competition

6. Ask HN: Local RAG with private knowledge base

Top comment by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe

I've made wdoc just for that: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/WDoc

I am a medical student with thousands of pdfs, various anki databases, video conferences, audio recordings, markdown notes etc. It can query into all of them and return extremely high quality output with sources to each original document.

It's still in alpha though and there's only 0.5 user beside me that I know of so there are bugs that have yet to be found!

7. Ask HN: Can calculus be taught without differentiating or integrating by hand?

Top comment by GistNoesis

Depends if you want to teach a mathematician or an engineer or a physicist.

If you only need an engineer, numerical approximation is good enough. You teach about slopes, and area under the curve. Automatic differentiation and numerical quadrature.

Alternatively you can teach about function representation, by introducing Taylor and Fourier series, and then you have an easy closed formula to integrate and differentiate a function.

If you want to teach a mathematician, integration by part is a great first introduction to the freedom of choice that you encounter when playing the find the proof game. There may be multiple paths to the solution.

If you want to teach a physicist, you have to teach change of variables, and how to strike the infinitesimals to simplify them. Also teach them variation of constants and separation of variables.

If you want a statistician or financier, just teach Monte-Carlo integration and Ito's formula.

Education is pick and choose, depending on what you need it for.

8. Ask HN: What do you think would happen if Google and YouTube split?

Top comment by andrewla

It wouldn't be the work of a couple of hours and changing DNS records. Youtube runs on Google hardware in Google datacenters running proprietary Google software that integrates throughout the Google proprietary ecosystem. Everything will break.

Realistically, once the division is somehow negotiated through, Youtube will have to find a way to make enough money to support its operations, and would find itself in the same bind that every other video site has hit in terms of balancing adoption with income.

The only barrier they will not have to face is competing against Youtube, the big free elephant in the room.

9. Ask HN: Learning to interact correctly in online communities as a neurodivergent

Top comment by gtirloni

Actionable suggestion that I use for myself: ask yourself mutiple times WHY you're posting something. If you're satisfied with your reason(s), go ahead, be yourself, learn to have a thicker skin.

This has helped me to not post when it was simply me having a knee jerk reaction. It also help to consider what you're getting from it and what you're giving others.

When you reset to your default habits and possibly get bad reactions from people, be honest and evaluate how you communicated and whether their reaction is really not warranted (in your perspective). At times, I've been inconsiderate and obnoxious and got bad reactions. I try to accept that because any other reaction would actually be unexpected. Yes, we all mess up sometimes.

10. Ask HN: Hacking your brain after trauma and mental health crisis?

Top comment by runjake

You've been diagnosed with mental health disorders, so any plan you create should involve guidance from mental health professionals with no exceptions.

That said, know that what you are experiencing is NORMAL and that many of the rest of us are or have had very similar struggles and there is a path forward and there IS sunshine on the other side.

In terms of my own experiences with grieving dying parents and murdered friends (within months of each other, oddly enough), it's taken me years to get beyond what I would consider "severe grief". It still affects me quite a bit, but I've learned to manage it and put it in perspective. There is no fast track out of it. It seems to just take time.