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Comment by ezyang | Hacker News Reader

Hi Hacker News! One of the things about this blog that has gotten a bit unwieldy as I've added more entries is that it's a sort of undifferentiated pile of posts. I want some sort of organization system but I haven't found one that's good. Very open to suggestions!

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What about adding a bit more structure and investing in a pattern language approach like what you might find in a book by Fowler or a site like https://refactoring.guru/. You're much of the way there with the naming and content, but could refactor the content a bit better into headings (Problem, Symptoms, Examples, Mitigation, Related, etc.)

You could even pretty easily use an LLM to do most of the work for you in fixing it up.

Add a short 1-2 sentence summary[1] to each item and render that on the index page.

[1]: https://gohugo.io/content-management/summaries/

Maybe organize them more clearly split between observed pitfalls/blindspots and prescriptions. Some of the articles (Use automatic formatting) are Practice forward, while others are pitfall forward. I like how many of the articles have examples!

How about listing all if these on 1 single page? Will be easy to navigate/find.

They are listed on one page right now! Haha

They're indexed on one page, but you can't scan/scroll through these short posts without clicking because the content itself isn't all on a single page, at least not that I can find.

(I also like the other idea of separating out pitfalls vs. prescriptions.)

Wordpress’s approach to this is giving each post a short description in addition to the main content. The excerpt gets displayed on the main list, which helps both to grok the post and keep the list from becoming unwieldy.

As in, all content on one page where the link just takes you to appropriate heading on the same page. These days you can do a lot on a single html.

My suggestion: Change the color of visited links! Adding a "visited" color for links will make it easier for visitors to see which posts they have already read.

Some sort of navigation would be nice a prev/next or some way to avoid having to go back to the links page all the time.

All of the pages that I visited were small enough that you could probably wrap them them <details> tags[1] and avoid navigation altogether

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...

There was a blog posted here which had a slider for scoring different features (popularity, personal choice, etc). The rankings updated live with slider moves.

Also, take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40774277

To be honest, current format worked perfectly for me: I ended up reading all entries without feeling something was off in how they were organized. I really really liked that each section had a concrete example, please don't remove that for future entries.

Thank you for sharing your insights! Very generous.

In "Keep Files Small", there seems a lacuna: "for example, on Cursor 0.45.17, applying 55 edits on a 64KB file takes)."

When I saw the title, I knew what this was going to be. It made me want to immediately write a corresponding "Human Blindspots" blog post to counteract it, because I knew it was going to be the usual drivel about how the LLMs understand <X> but sometimes they don't quite manage to get the reasoning right, but not to worry because you can nudge them and their logical brains will then figure it out and do the right thing. They'll stop hallucinating and start functioning properly, and if they don't, just wait for the next generation and everything will be fine.

I was wrong. This is great! I really appreciate how you not only describe the problems, but also describe why they happen using terminology that shows you understand how these things work (rather than the usual crap that is based on how people imagine them to work or want them to work). Also, the examples are excellent.

It would be a bunch of work, but the organization I would like to see (alongside the current, not replacing it, because the one-page list works for me already) would require sketching out some kind of taxonomy of topics. Categories of ways that Sonnet gets things wrong, and perhaps categories of things that humans would like them to do (eg types of tasks, or skill/sophistication levels of users, or starting vs fixing vs summarizing/reviewing vs teaching, or whatever). But I haven't read through all of the posts yet, so I don't have a good sense for how applicable these categorizations might be.

I personally don't have nearly enough experience using LLMs to be able to write it up myself. So far, I haven't found LLMs very useful for the type of code I write (except when I'm playing with learning Rust; they're pretty good for that). I know I need to try them out more to really get a feel for their capabilities, but your writeups are the first I've found that I feel I can learn from without having to experience it all for myself first.

(Sorry if this sounds like spam. Too gushing with the praise? Are you bracing yourself for some sketchy URL to a gambling site?)

Maybe you should ask Claude.

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