MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rossdavidh | 2025-05-24 15:59:10+00:00
So, this would seem to be fairly easy to test empirically. Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing, and use it on something where you know if it's true:

1) court testimony which we know (from outside evidence) is either true or not true 2) scientific papers which we know to have been reproducible, or not 3) stock pundits predictions about the future of some company or other, which we know with hindsight to have been accurate or not

Much more convincing to me than any amount of good writing about writing, would be to have some empirical evidence.
by dynm | 2025-05-24 15:59:28+00:00
(author here) This wraps JAX and JAX's version of NumPy. It would surely require some development to keep up, although it's quite short and simple (only 700 lines), so I don't think it would be a big burden. That said, I should be clear that my goal here is just to show that this is possible/easy, and possibly inspire existing array packages to consider adding this kind of syntax.

I like your alternatives! I agree that having to write

X = dp.Slot()

before assigning to X is unfortunate. I settled on the current syntax mostly just because I thought it was the choice that made it most "obvious" what was happening under the hood. If you really want to, you could use the walrus operator and write

(X := dp.Slot())['i','j'] = ...

but this cure seems worse than the disease...

Actually, doing something like

X = new['i','j'] = ...

could simplify the implementation. Currently, a Slot has to act both like an Array and a Slot, which is slightly awkward. If new is a special object, it could just return an Array, which would be a bit nicer.
by nthingtohide | 2025-05-24 15:59:42+00:00
I have borrowed some "wisdom" in how particles interact. They exchange particles back and forth which strengthen their interaction. That's what I do generally in real life. I sort of share happenings in my life as a sort of nano-influencer within my group of friends. I would say the advice in the blogpost works, sort of. Even if my "contributions" go into a blackhole, I think atleast the ephemeral Universe is watching what I do.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-24 16:01:09+00:00
> Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing

There are objective features of writing, but quality is subjective.

Of course, as to the thesis of the essay, it is both trivial and uninteresting that people, including PG, tend to have views of the correctness of an idea and the quality of the presentation that are correlated.

It is interesting that PG thinks that this is anything more than a cognitive bias to be cautious about, though.
by nodewrangler | 2025-05-24 16:01:31+00:00
The problem is that even if you pin to a version, at some point you’ll need to update node, typescript, or some other package, and then if this package doesn’t update, then you may have to migrate from it to something else. While js tries to enforce backwards compatibility, and npm, etc. help with the complex landscape, in practice with node, typescript, etc., even with LLMs helping, it can be a pita and hours or days of work to update at times. It’s just not worth it for things you could’ve just implemented yourself. There are exceptions to this, though.
by sitkack | 2025-05-24 16:03:56+00:00
It was the worst of studies, it was the best of studies ... (everything else stands).

I would reject publication until serious issues are addressed in experimental design and analysis.

The take away, that high school students don't read critically enough and give up easily is supported by higher quality research.

Actually, I am not even sure it supports that. The study shows that there is variance in the understanding of the passage, that is about it.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-24 16:04:27+00:00
There've always been companies that crash and burn chasing unrealistic dreams of future profits. I think what Twitter and LinkedIn have created is the false perception that these kinds of things are representative of the industry. Another recent unicorn startup in the UK is Tripledot Studios, which has much more revenue and has made bigger investment deals than Builder.ai at its peak. But they're in mobile gaming and not AI trendy wave of the future stuff, so you don't hear so much about them.
by munificent | 2025-05-24 16:04:56+00:00
My weird take on fiction is that much of the appeal is that the entire story is just an elaborate analogy to explain true facts about human nature that are otherwise hard to make clear.

You could try to write a non-fiction essay about how being a parent sets you up for potentially the worst pain and most intense grief you can imagine but yet also the experience is so meaningful and rewarding that it's worth it. But that essay would be abstract and wouldn't really hit you in the gut.

Or you could read Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" or watch Arrival which is nominally completely made up about aliens that don't experience time like us and it will convey the same concepts more effectively than an essay could.
by twic | 2025-05-24 16:04:56+00:00
It's made from something which can generate magnetic fields, since Jupiter has a very strong magnetic field with a lot of distinct inhomogeneous features, resulting in some interesting radio emissions:

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/science/jupiters-mag...

https://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/library/sci_briefs/decametri...

The rotation of these features is the basis for the "system III" definition of longitude on Jupiter.
by ath3nd | 2025-05-24 16:05:45+00:00
I don't know if it's jusst me, but a company with 8000 devs having 1000 PRs per day doesn't look impressive at all? That means...a dev is producing a PR less often than a once a week on average? That's not only underwhelming but downright bad. Their uptime is much more impressive here, but it still doesn't strike me as anything exceptional.

If you use tooling like renovate/dependabot and run them daily over a large list of repos, you already get your 1000 PRs automatically, without humans even looking at the codebase.
by danenania | 2025-05-24 16:05:48+00:00
Great post.

Another benefit of this approach is it’s simply much easier. If you’re trying to act like some smooth corporate salesperson or be overly formal or whatever and that’s not really you, interacting with customers and prospects and… everyone… will feel tiring and painful.

But if you drop the pretense and just act like yourself? Minimal extra energy required. As a bonus, it opens you up to make real connections with people who you click with as you run your business.

So it works, it’s easier, and it’s more fun. And has basically no downsides. But still something that most founders seem to have to learn the hard way for some reason.
by firejake308 | 2025-05-24 16:05:51+00:00
After experimenting with 1B models, I am starting to think that any model with 1B parameters or less will probably lack a lot of the general intelligence that we observe in the frontier models, because it seems physically impossible to encode that much information into so few parameters. I believe that in the range of very small models, the winner will be models that are fine tuned to a small range of tasks or domains, such as a model that can translate between English and any other language, or a legal summarization model, etc.
by nkurz | 2025-05-24 16:06:54+00:00
Thank you for posting your reasons for flagging it! I'm on the exact opposite side. I thought it was a decent article, flawed but worthy of discussion. I was surprised to see it flagged dead, so I vouched for it. When this didn't bring it back alive, I emailed Dan to see if he could resuscitate it. He said that it was already alive due to enough other people having vouched for it.

Your criticisms are all reasonable, but they are exactly the sort of things I'd hope to see discussed in the comments. And they are! I think the article is a good starting point for a discussion on what's possible. I'm nowhere near as extreme as the author of the piece, but I live a life much closer to what he describes than most people here.

Rather than being soured by the response, I'm glad to see both the pros and the cons being discussed. Yes, there are lots of ethical issues about living the way he suggests. There are lots of things you'll be doing without. But there are also lots of upsides about living in a way that you have time to do things besides just work and sleep. Which parts of the response did you find souring?
by jader201 | 2025-05-24 16:07:07+00:00
I think this is basic competition.

For example, in board games, there are several types:

- Competitive games: every person for themselves; there’s one winner, everyone else loses

- Co-op games: every human vs. “the game”, often in the form of AI opponents, or environmental conditions; everyone wins or everyone loses

- Team games: X vs. Y players (and sometimes more than two teams); one team wins, everyone else loses

I feel like work is meant to be a co-op game, but just like co-op games, even though you’re supposed to be on the same team, you often still want to feel like “the best”. Not to the point of bringing the whole team down, but to the point you can secretly feel like you carried the team.

In some hostile work environments, it can actually turn into a team game (inter-departmental competition), or even a competitive game (intra-departmental competition). I’ve been in all of these types of companies, and the co-op ones are obviously the best, especially the ones that care more about the elevation of the team over individual success.

In the military, it’s very much a team game. You are clearly on the same team, and if you don’t cooperate with your team, you will (likely) lose. Obviously, with military — particularly in war — there can be actual life and death at stake, which elevates this to an extreme level.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-24 16:07:58+00:00
> We don't listen to median human music either.

Don't we? What about the music that plays in the elevator, or while you're on hold on the phone?

Similarly for writing, I would imagine you read plenty of emails that are of more-or-less median writing quality. And yet, these emails may discuss pivotal decisions, where it is very important whether their arguments are logically correct.
by turtletontine | 2025-05-24 16:08:34+00:00
Pretty sure Numpy’s einsum[1] function allows all of this reasoning in vanilla numpy (albeit with a different interface that I assume this author likes less than theirs). Quite sure that first example of how annoying numpy can be could be written much simpler with einsum.

[1]: https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.einsu...
by ednite | 2025-05-24 16:09:07+00:00
I agree with your comment and couldn’t agree more with this article. It’s solid advice for anyone just starting out with a product or service.

Speaking authentically and admitting you don’t have all the answers is genuine, not weak. That kind of honesty has always worked best for me.

People respond better to real conversations, concrete examples, and the feeling that you’re building with them, not just selling at them.

In my experience, working with smaller businesses has opened more doors than chasing big corporate clients. Smaller companies tend to be more curious, open to new ideas, and quick to take action.

That said, “dress to impress” can work, but in my experience, it’s often a short-lived win. It grabs attention, but rarely builds lasting trust or real traction. Not a playbook I buy into.

For example, I recently sat through a 3-hour pitch from a so-called “AI consultant.” The presentation was packed with buzzwords, vague promises, and a sleek slide deck. Every time someone asked how AI would actually solve a specific problem, the answer was basically: “AI will handle that,” followed by name-dropping a popular AI company like it was the solution to everything. It was clear the consultant didn’t fully understand the tech, but the leadership team still ate it up.

This article was a great reminder that trying to sound big and impressive might get attention early on, but it often backfires later. Being honest and straightforward has always been my real strength, even if it keeps me small.
by asmodeuslucifer | 2025-05-24 16:09:15+00:00
That one trick is a honeypot text field in my 'write a comment' form. This field is normally hidden by CSS, and in any case the label for the field says not to put anything in it. However, for a very long time now, automated comment spam systems seem to operate by stuffing some text into every (text) form field that they find before they submit the form, which always trips over this. I log the form field's text out of curiosity; sometimes it's garbage and sometimes it's (probably) meaningful for the spam comment that the system is trying to submit.

Good idea, they would have to customize the scripts for your site.
by layer8 | 2025-05-24 16:09:48+00:00
I’m not sure about that. Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently? While clarity of thought facilitates clarity of writing, that’s in principle orthogonal to the right/wrong axis, especially in the ethical sense implied by the Moretti quote. And as the sibling comment correctly observes, the existence of language barriers rather disprove that hypothesis.

Regarding the nobel prize quote above, while it provides some food for thought, I’m not sure what point exactly it is intended to make.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-05-24 16:11:06+00:00
The kind of person with the background to need these operations, and who is working on the kinds of problems where this stuff comes up, is more than capable of learning numpys syntax. Its not that bad.

Avoiding the special purpose tools designed by and used by the people who work on these problems every day is the instinct of someone who has just started needing them and wants to solve new kinds of problems with the tools they already know. But the people with experience don't do it that way (for a reason), you need to learn what the current best solution is before you can transcend it.

Guys, every few months some well meaning person posts their great new library here that "fixes" something to remove all that pesky complexity. Invariably its made by some beginner with whatever it is who doesn't understand why the complexity exists, and we never hear of them or the library again. This is absolutely one of those times.
by jryle70 | 2025-05-24 16:11:17+00:00
Having rich parent certainly helps. The problem with this line of thinking is that there are many many rich parents, but only one Tailor Swift. What happen to all other rich kids who also dream of being a singer? Can you say, "with straight face", that they can just became Taylor Swift if their dad was a Merrill Lynch banker?

There is also one and only Adele, whose father left when she was two and who had a very modest upbringing.
by fetzu | 2025-05-24 16:12:59+00:00
I wouldn’t say that there is no competition in the army, in fact some selection processes (special forces, who gets up the ladder and earns a seat on the general staff or a star) are probably more competitive than in civilian life. It’s probably more about the general mindset: those extreme situation (and I am not necessarily talking about the competitive ones) create that positive feedback loop though shared hardships and closeness, and probably outweigh that competitiveness.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-24 16:13:00+00:00
> Don't you think you are falling for classic whataboutism here?

I do not. This sort of codec complexity can't be avoided. And ASN.1 is NOT "exceptionally bad" -- I rather like ASN.1. The point was not "wait till you see ASN.1", but "wait till you see Kerberos" because Kerberos requires a very large amount of client-side smarts -- too much really because it's got more than 30 years of cruft.
by antirez | 2025-05-24 16:13:00+00:00
Sure, it's not a 1:1 map, but often who does an excellent job, does it along all the line: form, content, and the best papers are even shorter normally... They don't have to justify with many pages the lack of real content.

About the nobel price quote: it shows that the most powerful language is unexpected, breaks the obviousness of things, something that ancient greeks knew very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
by pvg | 2025-05-24 16:13:07+00:00
Get a median human to write some elevator or hold music and see how that goes. There's an entire business of making and licensing such music which would not be the case if any rando could just crank it out.

Emails, etc, are just 'communication but over text' - it's 'writing' in the very basic sense but it's not the sort of writing people concerned with style and quality care about, either as consumers or producers. Me talking to the cashier at the store is not 'public speaking', neither I nor the cashier care it's not the Gettysburgh Address.
by user_7832 | 2025-05-24 16:13:13+00:00
I really wish people explored such concepts more. There's gotta be a balance between "every unit/thing/room is a modular entity" and "the building is static, take it or leave it". If I had to guess, there seems to be significant inertia and friction in the whole process. You can't build something unless you have some money, and if it involves buying and/or demolishing existing structures, you need even deeper pockets, making it "sticky" (as it's a discontinuous function).

The economist in me in partially hopeful that there is a way to address such an inefficiency.
by dafelst | 2025-05-24 16:13:37+00:00
I agree with everything that you say here, but I think it is important to differentiate "good leaders" (which you have described) with "successful leaders" whose motives are often far more self-serving.

There are "good, successful leaders" but in my experience they are few and far between, and often the "successful" aspect is forced to plateau by the "good" part.
by keiferski | 2025-05-24 16:14:12+00:00
Japanese culture has different ideas than the West when it comes to preservation vs. rebuilding structures, which is ultimately rooted in the fact that it’s an island with typhoons and earthquakes, and thus architecture tended not to last long, historically at least.

This is also why you see so many articles online about buying cheap houses in rural Japan: because typically new owners will demolish old buildings like this rather than refurbish them in the way a building is in Paris or London.

My guess is that the Nagakin became a little too retro and run down, and the lack of this preservation culture meant that no one really wanted to live there. It would probably still exist and be in good condition had it been built in say, London - like The Barbican, for example.

An interesting article on the ephemeral idea: https://www.archdaily.com/1002972/the-eternal-ephemeral-arch...
by amluto | 2025-05-24 16:15:39+00:00
> But the bigger problem is that stainless steel has significantly worse mechanical characteristics

This is a common claim, but I’m not sure I really believe it. Even for applications that require especially good mechanical characteristics, e.g. tool steels, good stainless alloys can be very good.

I would believe that the stainless alloys that are widely available in large quantities at somewhat reasonable prices for structural use (e.g. 304 and 316 stainless steel) have mediocre mechanical properties.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-24 16:16:31+00:00
Exceptionally well written. As the parent of a young disabled child myself I especially appreciated this bit of honesty:

> accounts I have read from people with disabilities and their parents: would you undo it? In one sense, it’s an idiotic query … If I could press a button that made Max’s life easier by granting him everything he has been denied, I would do it in a second.

For some reason there is this social pressure to express “I wouldn’t trade it for the world because he is perfect just as he is”. Yes he is perfect in his own way, but the idea that you wouldn’t trade it for perfect health is BS.

The other thing that struck me is how many idiotic things people say to parents in these situations. (We haven’t experienced that though, I guess we’ve been lucky).
by throwaway31131 | 2025-05-24 16:16:56+00:00
My problem is I mostly agree with the piece, it's very possible to live cheaply when everything goes smoothly and most things are routine. The problem is things very often don't go smoothly, especially once you have a family.

For example, my daughter took a small fall on a jungle gym, so small that I didn't even think she really got hurt but she landed really unlucky and broke her arm. We went to urgent care but she needed surgery to put pins in. Modern medicine is amazing. Totally healed, not even scares from the pin, but it is not cheap. Expect to pay at least $17K [1] for this w/o insurance, our was significantly more. And with insurance, you're not living on $400/month anymore...

Cars break down, pipes back up, etc. etc. etc.

[1] https://www.talktomira.com/post/how-much-does-a-broken-bone-...
by ryandrake | 2025-05-24 16:17:57+00:00
For a while we were looking to move out to a more rural State and work remotely. More than one realtor let us know that the seller’s price was ~10-20% more for us than the advertised list price because we are from California. I guess we have a reputation or something. Or it’s just plain old price discrimination. Ok. I won’t make an offer and buy your house that you are trying to sell, then. Is that what you want, smart guy?
by user_7832 | 2025-05-24 16:18:30+00:00
I think it's less of the size, and more of other things like amenities, and imo, those tiny windows.

I have lived in (modern) rooms not much bigger. For someone living by themselves, it's not bad at all. And lots of people do live in such sized spaces - eg hotels, or cities like NYC.

I have no idea how expensive the rent there was, but if it was low enough, in a large city with enough people on a tight budget, lots would be interested. Heck, with the current housing shortage in many places (like NL) where even getting a place to stay is a challenge, there would definitely be takers for such a place.
by armcat | 2025-05-24 16:18:35+00:00
There is a "small language model", and then there is a "small LARGE language model". In late 2018, BERT (110 million params) would've been considered a "large" language model. A "small" LM would be some markov chain or a topic model (e.g. latent dirichlet allocation) - technically they would be considered generative language models since they learn joint distributions of params and data (words), and can then sample from that distribution. But today, we usually map "small" LMs to "small" LLMs, so in that sense a small LLM would be anything from BERT to around 3-4B params.
by vzaliva | 2025-05-24 16:19:09+00:00
The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything. Musk is a glaring recent example - and now Paul. I do appreciate his essays on tech and related subjects, but not for their literary merit. If I’m seeking advice on writing, I’d turn to actual writers - people who’ve earned recognition and acclaim specifically for their work in that field.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-24 16:19:10+00:00
I would really hope "not breaking the law" doesn't require an "above average" HR team. As long as it isn't bottom of the barrel you should be fine.

...if I was really cynical, I might say that one of the reasons you might want a "world class" HR team is in order to break the law, or come really close to the line, without getting caught, in a way that increases profits.