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blev

blev on Hacker News

Re:Ask HN: What useful skills can be learned through rote memorization? on Friday January 09, 2026 @05:14PM (#46560162)
The algorithm I mentioned in the OP is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule

I practiced the algorithm by replacing my doomscrolling time on a trainer app (https://whattheday.com/) over the last 3 weeks. I went from taking 2-20 minutes to usually get the wrong result to about 95% accuracy in 10 seconds.

This training app to teach you to play piano by ear and to sight read also got posted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46556210

Ask HN: What useful skills can be learned through rote memorization?

Posted by blev on Friday January 09, 2026 @05:12PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I recently discovered that the algorithm to calculate the day of the week for any given date (e.g. January 1, 2000 was a Saturday) can be easily memorized and, with some practice, one can calculate the day of the week for any date in 5-10 seconds (maybe 2 seconds if you really practice).What other useful/fun skills can be learned through rote memorization? Bonus points if you can provide a...

( Read More... | 3 comments | 4 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: Did your iPhone alarm ring today? on Thursday November 21, 2024 @10:49AM (#42205505)
Mine did not! I distinctly remember setting it last night but it only shows tomorrow's morning alarm. I set my alarm through the "sleep" feature where it gives you a schedule and automatically sets an alarm that you can modify day-to-day.
Re:Interface Upgrades in Go on Sunday June 23, 2024 @10:49AM (#40767840)
The author’s mistake was assuming that interfaces are unique to Go. I think it’s still a helpful article as someone who works frequently with interfaces because, while I “discovered” the interface upgrade idea on my own, I had never considered the proxy problem.
Re:Goto Is Not a Horror on Wednesday March 20, 2024 @10:16PM (#39774286)
Lots of words to say "goto can be good" with nary an example of a good use of goto. Hard to judge the point without a concrete example.

Ask HN: Would you use a .dev domain for a personal email address?

Posted by blev on Friday January 12, 2024 @12:19AM
from the ask-hn dept.

I've got a pretty good and short .dev domain and am considering making a new primary email address with it. However, I've previously seen email deliverability issues with a .life domain where emails sent from the domain would silently be ignored (not even sent to spam). I would definitely not want to get burned by that on a personal email. I also intend to create new website accounts so it...

( Read More... | 4 comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Gemini: Google's most capable AI model yet on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @12:19PM (#38546772)
It's probably hallucinating that versioning. You can't trust LLMs to provide info about themselves.
Re:Htmx Webring on Sunday November 26, 2023 @11:23PM (#38428016)
While clicking around on the htmx website, I noticed that these two examples are broken:

https://htmx.org/examples/sortable/ https://htmx.org/examples/modal-bootstrap/

Neither worked for me in Chrome or Safari

Show HN: Obituary bot eulogizes the long-dead using GPT-4

Posted by blev on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @09:53AM
from the show-hn dept.

https://twitter.com/obituary_bot

I made this Twitter bot a a few years back with the idea of scraping Wikipedia to help people learn about interesting, lesser-known people from history. It used to write obituaries by scraping the information directly from Wikipedia, but I found I was able to get surprisingly high-quality results by just showing GPT-4 the obituary format and allowing it to write everything. I’m pretty happy...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:Getting +1000 Matches on Tinder in 24 Hours by Building a Tinderbot... on Saturday October 08, 2022 @11:22PM (#33138007)
I stumbled on this video around a year ago after being on Tinder for a little while. I was frustrated by the number of spammers on the app and at the same time, got really tired of constantly swiping without much results. This video blew my mind- this guy who supposedly didn't know how to program was able to get over 30,000 matches on Tinder just by creating a simple Selenium bot.

It begs a few questions:

1. Seeing how easy it is to make a Tinder bot, how many people are actually doing something similar? How many spammers?

2. This must be generating many obvious signals of bot-like behavior, and yet Tinder isn't banning his account. Why?

Returning to my experience with Tinder for a moment— after being an unpaid user for around three years, this video convinced me that I was hopelessly outmatched if I didn't at least start paying for any kind of Tinder subscription. I paid for the highest tier subscription for one month and suddenly was getting more matches than I could possibly handle. The pay-for-play is real.

Re:The “Majority Illusion” in Social Networks (2016) on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @12:19AM (#23463599)
Did you consider that perhaps you may be perceiving the majority illusion in regards to the prevalence of rioting as opposed to the prevalence of peaceful protests?