I'm surprised by the explanation of the 8 in the "real de a a ocho" because "* traders counted gold doubloons on their fingers, skipping their thumbs."* (and the link to investopedia has a similar explanation).
> Spanish American gold coins were minted in one-half, one, two, four, and eight escudo denominations, with each escudo worth around two Spanish dollars or $2. The two-escudo (or $4 coin) was the "doubloon" or "pistole", and the large eight-escudo (or $16) was a "quadruple pistole"
I think it makes more sense that some time ago it was possible to split some coins in half and quarters, so someone decide to continue the tradition and use base 2 to move up.
hm, I don't have any other ways to prove it. The thing is - I thought this is something LLM can't write about.
Just imagine a prompt: "Hey Claude, go ahead and come up with idea why GnuCash stores numbers as fractions and come up with an article for HN". I actually tried it and god damn thing came up with something very similar :D
I am a native English speaker, and I find accusations of LLM-writing exceedingly annoying – to the point where I sometimes intentionally write in that style, just so I can hit back with a profanity.
I used GNUCash years ago in Argentina while we had high inflation. Some operations were in local currency and other are Dollars. The currency exchange changing hourly. Tracking finance is a nightmare, since you basically need an exchange rate for every operation.
I would like to use finance tracking products like GNUCash. But I don't have the patience to download the csv for half a dozen every month (Products like plaid are a no go from a basic security perspective). I am in Canada, and there seems to be no hope that I will have API access to my bank accounts anytime soon.
Also, did I mention how much it annoys me that the transaction description differs between the CSV and the PDF statement for pretty much all banks I use.
There needs to be a lot of investment in training and safe defaults though. Most people are not ready to automate even a little of their banking like that.
I would even prefer banks had the option to push data to trusted feeds than having open APIs you could call on your own.
I strongly disagree. I found the whole article interesting and enlightening – I certainly wasn't aware of the topic before, and I'm glad it was posted on HN.
Furthermore, it didn't feel LLM-generated to me. Quirky, yes; nothing wrong with that.
Your title promises a story about the spanish traders. It does not deliver, but talks about 3 other different topics that I'm not interested in and jumping between them to test my nerves. If it is about the architecture of whatever you are doing, put the architecture in the title and don't make your title an offhand comment somewhere there. Fucked up clickbite.
Yeah this one is my attempt to write without LLMs rewriting my thoughts.
P.S. Came to the decision after going through https://thebullshitmachines.com/
I'm surprised by the explanation of the 8 in the "real de a a ocho" because "* traders counted gold doubloons on their fingers, skipping their thumbs."* (and the link to investopedia has a similar explanation).
But from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubloon
> Spanish American gold coins were minted in one-half, one, two, four, and eight escudo denominations, with each escudo worth around two Spanish dollars or $2. The two-escudo (or $4 coin) was the "doubloon" or "pistole", and the large eight-escudo (or $16) was a "quadruple pistole"
I think it makes more sense that some time ago it was possible to split some coins in half and quarters, so someone decide to continue the tradition and use base 2 to move up.
But then why didn't they cut it into 10 pieces - https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/40600/40610/pie_01-10a_40610.htm ?
Thing is - I'm not a English speaker. But I chat a lot with Claude/ChatGPT - i feel like I'm picking the style from them unintentionally.
Just imagine a prompt: "Hey Claude, go ahead and come up with idea why GnuCash stores numbers as fractions and come up with an article for HN". I actually tried it and god damn thing came up with something very similar :D
Also, did I mention how much it annoys me that the transaction description differs between the CSV and the PDF statement for pretty much all banks I use.
But I used to actually pull the CSV once a week and feed it to GnuCash. It's pretty good at auto-categorization.
Also I simplified my finances to only a couple of checking accounts and only one credit account (for car rentals).
There needs to be a lot of investment in training and safe defaults though. Most people are not ready to automate even a little of their banking like that.
I would even prefer banks had the option to push data to trusted feeds than having open APIs you could call on your own.
There's also a `Surprisingly written by a human :)` at the bottom.
Furthermore, it didn't feel LLM-generated to me. Quirky, yes; nothing wrong with that.
Article ends with this
Keep up the good work!