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ipnon

8,464 karma · joined September 23, 2016

#lang racket

(define email (foldl string-append "" '("me" "." "pm" "@" "ipnon")))

(define zero "If you can imagine a society in which the computer-robot is the only menial, you can imagine anything.")

(define one "War is the best game and the worst life.")

(define two "For I know of nothing as profoundly exciting as to glimpse for the first time some new and basic truth.")

(define three "When I got to Cambridge, I was faced with the problem of looking at a question to which no one knew the answer—but I wasn’t willing to face it. When I left Cambridge, I didn’t know how to face it very well, but I understood that this was my job; this was the change that occurred that year.")

(define four "So here is an even more striking statistic: 0% of that first batch had a terrible experience. They had ups and downs, like every startup, but I don't think any would have traded it for a job in a cubicle. And that statistic is probably not an anomaly. Whatever our long-term success rate ends up being, I think the rate of people who wish they'd gotten a regular job will stay close to 0%.")

(define five "They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard.")

(define six "Always with you what cannot be done.")

(define seven "But whoever is acquainted with such a change in men, and can render a man humid and dry, hot and cold by regimen, could also cure this disease, if he recognizes the proper season for administering his remedies, without minding purifications, spells, and all other illiberal practices of a like kind.")

(define eight "松茸やかぶれた程は松の形")

(define nine "This black sprite is called humanity, but little is known about its true nature. If the soul is the source of all life, then what distinguishes the humanity we hold within ourselves?")

(define ten "If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.")

(define eleven "Clear and plain and coming through fine. I'm coming through fine too, eh? Good, then. Well then as you say we're both coming through fine. Good. Well it's good that you're fine and I'm fine. I agree with you. It's great to be fine.")

(define twelve "And he came and found them asleep again: for their eyes were heavy.")

(define thirteen "I believe that men are here to grow themselves into the full, into the best good that they can be, at least this is what I want to do. This is my belief: We are supposed to, I'm supposed to grow into the best good that I can get to. As I'm going there, becoming this, and when I become and forever become, this will just come out of the horn. Whatever that's going to be, that's what it will be. I'm not so much interested in trying to say what it's going to be, I don't know, but I just hope; I realize good can only bring good.")

(define fourteen "You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.")

(define fifteen "Live in the future, then build what’s missing.")

(define sixteen "Don’t you find that there’s a certain mad beauty in unorthodoxy?")

(define seventeen "From the first day we met, it was surprising to find that there were so many similarities in our thinking ... the day I met Isamu Noguchi I realized that he was a man who was nearly as strange and opinionated as I was.")

(define eighteen "Nothing can exist in isolation. Architecture and garden, garden and sculpture, sculpture and people, people and community ... must each be closely and mutually related. In these connections may lie a new ethics for artists.")

(define nineteen "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.")

(define twenty "Heaven forbid! That would be the greatest misfortune of all! To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! Do not wish me such an evil.")

(define twenty-one "Our philosophy stops with the sigh 'If only ...' and with the insight 'Once upon a time ...'")

(define twenty-two "In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject area) who didn't read all the time--none.")

(define twenty-three "Please put me out of my Missouri.")

(define twenty-four "企業のネットが星を被い、電子や光が駆け巡っても国家や民族が消えてなくなるほど、情報化されていない近未来—")

(define twenty-five "Religion brought forth Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother.")

(define twenty-six "ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ")

(define twenty-seven "I only know two tunes—-one of them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn’t.")

(define twenty-seven "On ne conduit le peuple qu'en lui montrant un avenir : un chef est un marchand d'espérance.")

(define twenty-eight "Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, 'Do it again'; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening, 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.")

(define twenty-nine "Come to me, artificially accelerated cortical-development idea, he said in prayer.")

(define thirty "What I cannot create, I do not understand.")

(define thirty-one "La parole a été donné à l'homme pour déguiser sa pensée.")

(define thirty-two "Ὅπου ἔργον ἐπιτελεῖσθαι δύναται κατὰ τὸν κοινὸν θεοῖς καὶ ἀνθρώποις λόγον, ἐκεῖ οὐδὲν δεινόν˙ ὅπου γὰρ ὠφελείας τυχεῖν ἔξεστι διὰ τῆς εὐοδούσης καὶ κατὰ τὴν κατασκευὴν προιούσης ἐνεργείας, ἐκεῖ οὐδεμίαν βλάβην ὑφορατέον.")

(define thirty-three "Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I’d like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a computer you can’t lift.")

(define thirty-four "You don't need to take my proposal seriously because it is so ridiculous that I am obviously completely out of touch with the real world. But that kite won't fly, for I know the real world only too well: the problems of the real world are primarily those you are left with when you refuse to apply their effective solutions. So, let us try again.")

(define thirty-five "The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly: I'd rather use them to mimic something better.")

(define thirty-six "It's like if you want to be a good pianist, you have to do a lot of scales and a lot of practice, and a lot of that is kind of boring, it's work. But you need to do that before you can really be very expressive and really play beautiful music. You have to go through that phase of practice and drill.")

(define thirty-seven "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")

(define thirty-eight "Every mathematician believes that he is ahead of the others. The reason none state this belief in public is because they are intelligent people.")

(define thirty-nine "Ambition is a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the present.")

(define forty "If you decide you don’t have to get A's, you can learn an enormous amount in college.")

(define forty-one "At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T. D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.")

(define forty-one "Genuine mathematicians do not gang up, but the weak need gangs in order to survive.")

(define forty-two "The Arnold Principle: If a notion bears a personal name, then this name is not the name of the discoverer. The Berry Principle: The Arnold Principle is applicable to itself.")

(define forty-three "But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.")

(define forty-four "The least efficient learning strategy is to ask 'why am I so dumb' over and over. A more efficient strategy is to ask 'what (prerequisite knowledge) am I missing' and go back and fill it in.")

(define forty-seven "What is this Earth without art? Just a rock.")

(define forty-eight "There is no reason to stop at any given place, even though it is probably unwise to order the full menu.")

(define forty-nine "I insulted you because I'm honest, and I apologized because I'm brave".)

(define fifty "Em mim foi sempre menor a intensidade das sensações que a intensidade da consciência delas. Sofri sempre mais com a consciência de estar sofrendo que com o sofrimento de que tinha consciência.")

(define fifty-one "Het is me ten enenmale onmogelijk alles op te bouwen op de basis van dood, ellende en verwarring, ik zie hoe de wereld langzaam steeds meer in een woestijn herschapen wordt, ik hoor de aanrollende donder steeds harder die ook ons zal doden, ik voel het leed van miljoenen mensen mee en toch als ik naar de hemel kijk, denk ik dat dit alles zich weer ten goede zal wenden, dat ook deze hardheid op zal houden, dat er weer rust en vrede in de wereldorde zal komen.")

(define fifty-two "Ce qui est n'est pas clos, du point de vue le plus essentiel. Ce qui est ouvert, est à être.")

(define fifty-three "EARTH PEOPLE, THIS IS GOD. YOU HAVE THIRTY DAYS TO LEAVE. I HAVE A BUYER FOR THE PROPERTY.")

(define fifty-four "You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.")

submissionscomments
ipnon··on Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses
It’s like saying you don’t want to exercise because it induces tachycardia and hypertension. The point is that you are training your body to adapt to overstimulation in a context and dose dependent manner.
ipnon··on AGI Is Here
The singularity doesn't mean that we get an AGI Day with a big announcement from The People In Charge that intelligence has been solved once and for all. It simply means that the frequency of "this changes everything" and "rumored model X at lab Y passes benchmark Z at 110% in less-than-zero-shot" style posts increases monotonically for ever.
ipnon··on Shooting down ideas is not a skill
Common failure mode in environments that promote being the best over getting things done: If you went from school to college to industry always identifying with being better than everyone else, because that's what it takes to get in the door, sometimes you miss the transition to when you're already in the door. A lot of people don't realize they were supposed to put their guards down until it's too late. It's too bad but this is what the cutthroat labor pipeline rewards.
ipnon··on Shooting down ideas is not a skill
I like this quote from pg:

>In a way this is virtuous, because I think startups are a good thing. But really what motivates us is the completely amoral desire that would motivate any hacker who looked at some complex device and realized that with a tiny tweak he could make it run more efficiently. In this case, the device is the world's economy, which fortunately happens to be open source.

After a while you learn to ignore criticism. I'm not really interested in what people have to say who would never become users anyway. They're simply not the demographic. It's all noise, and when I was younger and more impressionable it caused serious self-doubt. But when I demo something and I see the eyes light up, and then they say "well, what about this?", that's pure gold.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/whyyc.html

ipnon··on Post Mortem: axios NPM supply chain compromise
NPM is designed to let you run untrusted code on your machine. It will never work. There is no game to step up. It's like asking an ostrich to start flying.
ipnon··on Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide
I think it is accurate. Where are the autonomous AI who beat the creator to the punch? When we write "Hello, World!" in C and compile it with `gcc`, do we give credit to every contributor to GNU? AI is a tool that thus far only humans are capable of using with the unique inspiration. Will this change in the future? Certainly. But is it the case now? I think my questions imply some reasonable objections.
ipnon··on Ask HN: Founders of estonian e-businesses – is it worth it?
In Brusselsese that means we should be able to start business sometime around the turn of the century, right?
ipnon··on Ask HN: Founders of estonian e-businesses – is it worth it?
Hopefully the program continues its success and becomes basis for 25th EU regime
ipnon··on Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
But you only $200/month for the productivity of what used to cost monthly salary for 10 software engineers. Doesn't this democratize software construction?
ipnon··on 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
I think the combinatorial space is just too much. When I did web dev it was mostly transforming HTML/JSON from well-defined type A to well-defined type B. Everything is in text. There's nothing to reason about besides what is in the prompt itself. But constructing and maintaining a mental model of a chip and all of its instructions and all of the empirical data from profiling is just too much for SOTA to handle reliably.
ipnon··on Mathematics in the Age of AI [video]
Greatest time to work in math since Pythagoras drew a triangle
ipnon··on Ask HN: Would you use a job board where every listing is verified?
Yeah something like that. A breakup fee between the job board company and the hiring company: “if you don’t hire someone within 90 days we keep half of the salary.” But there’s not much incentive for the hiring side to do this!
ipnon··on Ask HN: Would you use a job board where every listing is verified?
Put some money on the line. I'm not an economist but you could structure a market where you cannot just take up mental space in the job market for practically nil. That's the current malincentive, that companies put up job listings they have no intention of filling, even when candidates who are qualified by their own criteria apply. The current job market maladies are a perverse incentive of the price of posting a job and applying for a job are effectively nil, the spread is too big for anyone to make the trade.
ipnon··on Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
I think you are smarter than me because I continue to work in computer programming even when there is no money to be made!
ipnon··on Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
In my experience anyone who went to Ivy+ or worked at Big N never has any problem getting a job.
ipnon··on Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
Yes, but how many people have tried to enter the field since then? Is the economy that supports current number of tech workers really better than one that supports 10x?
ipnon··on Where things stand with the Department of War
I think this is one of the weaknesses of rationalism and effective altruism, is that it tries to make a clean break from the common law legal reasoning that the government, and thus corporations, operate on. While I find rationalism to be a useful lens, the fact is that the common law legal framework is totally dominant, and so these deontological arguments made rationally collapse very quickly when translated to the dominant framework.
ipnon··on What Python’s asyncio primitives get wrong about shared state
And in that case you begin to wonder why use Python at all? The language struggles to give developers the granularity needed to finely manage threads like C++, and it doesn't have the actor model first class like Erlang. I love Python, but I love Fortran and Lisp too. They've all served their purpose and it's time to move on, even though there is already incredible momentum behind it.
ipnon··on A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification
California is becoming more like a nanny state. I don’t think a law like this would pass in North Dakota or Texas in a thousand years.
ipnon··on Netflix Backs Out of Warner Bros. Bidding, Paramount Set to Win
They loaded up 2 competitors with debt and got billions in return as a breakup fee. Not a bad strategy.
ipnon··on The State of Machine Learning Competitions – 2025 Edition
This is the best way to break into AI.
ipnon··on What's the best way to learn a new language?
It’s true that 70% of a language is about ~100-300 words. In linguistics this is called the “core sight set”. If you’re in a pinch traveling I recommend asking an AI for the 300 most frequent word core sight set and cramming these with Anki. You can get gist with about 10 hours of study and be much more useful than 100 hours of Duolingo. With the core sight set and a generous amount of loan words and gesticulation you can communicate practically any necessity to anyone. It will by no means be elegant or poetic but it gets the job done reliably. It’s the 10,000 word long tail of vocabulary where a language shines but it’s the first 300 where it lives and breathes.
ipnon··on What years of production-grade concurrency teaches us about building AI agents
Interesting take. I’m an Elixir fanboy because I find LiveView to be very slim. You’re just sending state diffs over WebSocket and updating the DOM with MorphDOM. The simplicity is incomparable to state of the art with JavaScript frameworks in my humble opinion.
ipnon··on How long do job postings stay open?
I would not recommend the standard resume -> job portal -> application pipeline to anyone seriously looking for gainful employment. The signal:noise ratio is not in your favor. The current meta for tech jobs is an OSS portfolio, sponsored competitions, self-produced apps, and technical blogposts, roughly in that order. You will get much farther by solving real problems with public visibility.
ipnon··on Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you
Customers agree to this when they accept the terms of the app. This is also how a debit or savings account at any bank works. Both businesses have sophisticated models to determine how and when customers are likely to make withdrawals, and based on these models they lend out the money based on acceptable risk criteria.
ipnon··on Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you
This is called a float business in finance. Starbucks has more than a billion dollars in unredeemed balances, and they make ~$200 million per year in interest with this cash. They're basically a bank with a coffee shop side hustle.
ipnon··on Rari – Rust-powered React framework
Very nice, I think a Rust server using a WebSocket to send MorphDOM diffs to the browser would be very well received.
ipnon··on Gemini 3 Deep Think
They're using the ride share app playbook. Subsidize the product to reach market saturation. Once you've found a market segment that depends on your product you raise the price to break even. One major difference though is that ride share's haven't really changed in capabilities since they launched: it's a map that shows a little car with your driver coming and a pin where you're going. But it's reasonable to believe that AI will have new fundamental capabilities in the 2030s, 2040s, and so on.
ipnon··on Show HN: Agent framework that generates its own topology and evolves at runtime
In HNese this means "very impressive, keep up the good work."
ipnon··on Ask HN: What CI do you use instead of GitHub Actions?
Why do you need a CI at all? You can use a queue like Oban on your own server to kick off jobs. And with AI you can add new jobs, so long as they are well defined, in a few minutes and schedule them however you like. I only recommend this because I use a similar system. If you are planning on GitHub's recent instability to be improved in the future, I would not get your hopes up, they have a long history of instability.
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