1,344 karma · joined December 28, 2013
(2022 - 2025) Evergrow, Head of Engineering (2017 - 2022) Pinterest, user+pin modeling (2016 - 2016) Startup (2013 - 2016) Google, query understanding (2008 - 2013) Stanford, BS + MS
Indeed. Learning to take action in the face of uncertainty and failure is a major challenge for this personality type, though it's possible to unlearn that tendency with enough practice.
I wrote about a similar dynamic here [1] if it's interesting.
That said, it's not right for everyone [1]. In particular, the high vocabulary load means that most readers can't simply read straight through it, and the focus on one grammatical concept at a time can feel artificial ("oh, this is the pluperfect chapter"). I also found that there were a few words that I couldn't grasp from context alone and had to search for online, which is fine but dims the magic a bit.
https://magisterp.com/2016/10/06/lingua-latina-love-the-text...
> Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, claims that "The Nicaraguan case is absolutely unique in history ... We've been able to see how it is that children—not adults—generate language, and we have been able to record it happening in great scientific detail. And it's the only time that we've actually seen a language being created out of thin air."
- "I wanted to live all my internalized misogyny"
- "Replenishing the white race is a full time job in itself"
- "A feminist cut me off in traffic once"
- "I believe in choosing a marital structure from an arbitrary point in human history and pretending it represents some kind of inviolable rule.”
But if you find value in juxtaposing these two, more power to you.
> Despite various publications of results where hand-washing reduced mortality to below 2%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. [...] His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, giving Semmelweis' observations a theoretical explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur's research, practised and operated using hygienic methods, with great success.
> A reasonable person would have asked why everyone was wasting so much time preparing manioc. When told “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”, they would have been unsatisfied with that answer. They would have done some experiments, and found that a simpler process of boiling it worked just as well. They would have saved lots of time, maybe converted all their friends to the new and easier method. Twenty years later, they would have gotten sick and died, in a way so causally distant from their decision to change manioc processing methods that nobody would ever have been able to link the two together.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
For those who aren't familiar, Ruff is a very fast Python linter that supersedes a variety of tools like isort, flake8, and perhaps eventually Black [1]. My understanding is that since Ruff is an all-in-one tool, it can parse the underlying Python files just once -- and since this is the most expensive phase of these kinds of tools, adding any extra functionality on top (such as linting, formatting, ...) is very cheap. And that's to say nothing of the fact that Ruff is built on Rust, with the usual performance wins that Rust projects tend to have.
I'm a little apprehensive of how development will look given a VC raise with the expectation of VC returns. But for now, I'm delighted and can't wait to see what the team comes up with.
It's not surprising that a spiritual community highly invested in a fixed text can find new interpretations for it, see all of Christiany for illustration or [1] for a specific Christian example. The "kshetre kshetre dharma kuru" example, though, is especially naive -- sure, I guess you can make a new meaning if you totally ignore Sanskrit grammar. The author is clearly quite early on in their study.
> rigvedic sanskrit differs from modern sanskrit in the sense that vedic sanskrit is similar to all other languages
Sure, I agree that Vedic and Classical Sanskrit differ, largely in the same way that Homeric and Attic Greek differ. But this isn't the claim you made -- you said that the Rigveda contains "words and idioms made up when the situation called for it," which I reject.
> Panini codified Sanskrit because he felt the language was evolving too rapidly
Panini's intent is an open question, though your view is a reasonable one. The Ashtadhyayi is more descriptive than people give it credit for: it generally focuses on the भाषा, i.e. the contemporaneous usage of experts (शिष्ट), with a lesser emphasis on Vedic usage, and it further takes extensive notice of regional variation and different preferences among other grammarians of the time. Another possible interpretation is that just as the other parts of the ritual had been fully worked over and polished, it was thought that the language itself should be perfected (संस्कृत).
> for Sanskrit it is the vast majority of the available literature, not a few oddballs here and there.
This is an interesting observation that has other explanations -- see below.
> It is unique to classical (and not vedic) Sanskrit literature though
Again, I see no support for this.
> And the number of these is astonishingly low
Sure, I agree with this. But this isn't the claim you made -- you said that the nature of Sanskrit makes it useless for tasks like describing how to build a bridge, which I reject.
~~~
I'd like to conclude with two thoughts.
First, you are raising interesting questions. Why is it the case that so much of Sanskrit literature is commentary? Why does the number of Shilpa Shastras seem relatively low? Why does Sanskrit literature tend to have a culture of reinterpretation?
Assuming these observations are true, I believe that the answer is some combination of: India's oral memory culture and a concomitant deference to authority and preference for the spoken over the written; consequently, a preference for text forms that can be easily memorized (sutra and verse), which can be harder to parse and change; material constraints on manuscript preservation in the hot and humid Indian climate; strong deference to realized spiritual teachers, and by extension to all teachers; and extensive competition with local languages for intellectual territory.
But that's an armchair answer that needs further investigation. Note that none of these points have anything to do with Sanskrit as a language.
Second, Sanskrit and the tradition are far more exacting and precise than you give them credit for, and I encourage you to look into the matter more deeply before making extremely strong statements about it that have little basis in fact.
I have been reading and teaching Sanskrit for a long time, and in that time I have learned that while Sanskrit is special in many ways, it is still a language that can be used and learned like any other. Even so, I have seen extraordinary claims, both positive and negative, from people confidently asserting what Sanskrit is like without looking deeply into the matter. And while they are well-intentioned, they are -- to use your phrase -- "modern keyboard warriors who have not studied Sanskrit literature."
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Reinterpreting-New-Testament-Dont-Mea...
Sanskrit's high polysemy is restricted to a rather bounded set of words (see the नानार्थवर्गः in the अमरकोशः).
Stepping back, this claim and the others you have made in this thread are strange and at odds with my experience reading and speaking and teaching the language, specfically the claims that:
- "Sanskrit semantics is intentionally loosely defined"
- the Rigveda contains "words and idioms made up when the situation called for it" in some way that is different from the ordinary suffixation that is a standard part of Sanskrit grammar;
- the ISKCON interpretation of the Gita is "technically as valid as the literal interpretation" in some manner that is unique to Sanskrit.
I consider these claims extraordinary and request evidence that any of these problems are (a) real and (b) unique to Sanskrit.
> That is amazing if you want to have intellectual debates, but useless if you are trying to follow directions to build ..say.. a bridge.
We have the various Shilpa Shastras [1] as a clear example of this kind of instruction, so I eagerly await a concrete example of what you mean.
Do you have examples of stories to support this point? I ask because the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, at least, are deeply concerned with cities, city life, and the politics of cities, and nomadic life within them is a salient point only insofar as its main characters are in exile from the cities they wish to return to.
I have studied Sanskrit literature extensively and do not know what this means.
> people have interpreted these mnemonics in different ways
Your implication is that people interpreted these mnemonics differently due to misunderstanding these rules. The mainstream scholarly response is rather some version of प्रयोगशरणा वैयाकरणाः ("grammarians take refuge in usage"), i.e. that different grammarians working in different eras and time periods were forced to reconcile the Ashtadhyayi as a fixed document with the slight divergence in contemporary usage -- that is, that they followed usage and intentionally reinterpreted rules to fit usage.
For an example of how this accounts for Patanjali's readings in particular, see [1].
My experience here is quite limited, so I'm inclined to defer to yours. With that caveat, I find that ORMs play more nicely with my IDE (e.g. I can rename a column name and automatically update all call sites) and often raise early warnings if their declarative classes are out of sync with the underlying table schema.
[1]: https://qz.com/116196/google-engineers-insist-20-time-is-not...
> Cerebrospinal fluid, known to doctors as CSF, as clear as liquid crystal, circulating through the strands of the arachnoid, flashes and glistens like silver in the microscope’s light. Through this I can see the smooth yellow surface of the brain itself, etched with minute red blood vessels–arterioles–which form beautiful branches like a river’s tributaries seen from space.
Previous HN discussion on that chapter here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9733730
I wish him well.
This is a video about `law.resource.org` and why they do the work they do. The most salient part of the video, for me, is the opening, where we hear from various citizens -- water inspectors, fire department chiefs, building inspectors -- who had to pay thousands or (at times) tens of thousands of dollars in order to get access to law codes that are directly relevant to their jobs.
From the article:
> “Dude, it’s cool. I took SFC’s advice and moved my code off GitHub.” So did I. Guess what? It doesn’t matter. By claiming that AI training is fair use, Microsoft is constructing a justification for training on public code anywhere on the internet, not just GitHub.
And:
> when it comes for their own field, they are suddenly very worried
From the article:
> First, the objection here is not to AI-assisted coding tools generally, but to Microsoft’s specific choices with Copilot. We can easily imagine a version of Copilot that’s friendlier to open-source developers—for instance, where participation is voluntary, or where coders are paid to contribute to the training corpus. Despite its professed love for open source, Microsoft chose none of these options. Second, if you find Copilot valuable, it’s largely because of the quality of the underlying open-source training data. As Copilot sucks the life from open-source projects, the proximate effect will be to make Copilot ever worse—a spiraling ouroboros of garbage code.
> The point is not to never use frameworks, but to isolate them. To call them from a single place. One that we own. That we are responsible for and that we limit very much in what it can touch.