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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 Beyond agentic coding
Programming languages are most interesting area in CS for the next 10 years. AI need criteria for correctness that can't be faked so the boundary between proof verification and programs will become fuzzier and fuzzier. The runtimes also need support for massively parallel development in a way that is totally unnecessary for humans.
ipnon··on Early Christian Writings
Yes, these are the central mysteries of Christianity. We have to reckon with imperfect people writing about a perfect person. And there is never any absolute proof or disproof. We make the justification by faith alone.
ipnon··on Early Christian Writings
“Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.”
ipnon··on The Codex app illustrates the shift left of IDEs and coding GUIs
You have to move up or down to survive. In 10 years we'll either be managers (either of humans or agents), or we'll be electrical engineers. Programming is done! I for one am glad.
ipnon··on The Apple Marketing Philosophy (1977)
Note it is an instance of itself.
ipnon··on [dead]
One thing that slop often lacks is framing. I want to know why a particular person designed it this way. What were the constraints of the original team? What were their goals at the time? How did these change over time? Just knowing "TikTok aims for 99.99% uptime and low latency" without any story, well I don't find it very useful. I'd rather get an interview of one of the first architects!
ipnon··on Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?
2 things have not changed since the advent of AI, and never will change. The first is the calculus of computation. The second is the engineering of computation. All coding is just some interesting combination of these two forms of logic.

You can learn both of these quickly to a deep level with only 2 books. For the calculus of computation, read "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP) by Abelman and Sussman. It is available for free.[0] If you understand all of this book, you understand all of the fundamentals of computer science. Every program you write from now on will be understandable to you, with enough persistence. But most importantly you will be able to think in computer programs by second nature, and communicate in this language. And when you talk to AIs in this language, they become exceedingly precise and powerful, because you lost the ambiguity in how you are conceptualizing the program.

For the engineering of computation, read "The Elements of Computing Systems" by Nisan and Schocken.[1] An abridged version of this book is available for free in the form of the Nand2Tetris course. In this course you will start with an imminently simple digital construct, and use it to build step by step a full working computer that can run Tetris. You could even write a Lisp from SICP on this computer, and pretty easily too as you'll see in SICP itself! Once you have completed both books you'll have met in the middle between abstract computer science and concrete computer science: coding.

Just like in your math class, you can see that one side of a right triangle is always longer than the others, but you cannot understand how or why or explain it or work with it until you can comprehend some simple theorems and functions, you cannot truly compose computer programs until you can speak the language of computer science. It used to be that you could make a career by copying code you saw online, patching bits and piece together to create basically working code. But that era is over. AI reads and writes and searches millions of times faster than you. But still only humans are capable of new compositions. But in order to create these new compositions you have to be able to speak a mutual language that you and the AI can understand. That language is computer science, and it hasn't changed since time began and it won't change in 10, 100 or 1,000 years from now when AI is capable of doing anything and everything better than we can. So if you want to stop struggling and start creating new and exciting things with computers, read these 2 books!

[0] https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

[1] https://www.nand2tetris.org

ipnon··on Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?
I agree, use the AI to replace all of your typing, but none of your thinking.
ipnon··on Jack Kerouac's 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctioned
I highly recommend John Ventimiglia's audiobook reading of the Original Scroll. It's my favorite reading of any audiobook. He perfectly captures all of the tone and characters and rhythm.
ipnon··on Jack Kerouac's 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctioned
On the Road is the American Odyssey. A lost man separated from his wife and returning from war takes a long and twisted path over many years to find his way home, despite countless setbacks and moral failings, at the mercy of the divine all along the way.
ipnon··on Capital One to acquire Brex for $5.15B
Personally I'm okay with being outcompeted if their's a billion dollar payout at the end.
ipnon··on Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
Makes me realize how much I love New York, thank you.
ipnon··on Skip is now free and open source
Paying for things that aren't worth it is noble, but not good economics in the long run. If people want to buy a tool not for what it produces but for the story it tells, this is fine. But just like startups need product-market fit, tools also need product-market fit, and if no one is buying, it could simply be that the alternatives are suitable replacements.
ipnon··on Electricity use of AI coding agents
I think this number is derived from the water used to create all the goods they consume. Let's say every American eats 1lb of beef per day, and nothing else, to create a simple model. Then every American has a water footprint of about 1,850 gallons.

[0] https://watercalculator.org/news/articles/beef-king-big-wate...

ipnon··on Gas Town Decoded
It's like Conway's Law. Both humans and agents arrive at roughly identical hierarchies for organizing labor. There is something inherent in the game of telephone required by limited working memory that requires this structure. Gas Town's only failure is not being familiar with prior art and coming up with very strange names for established patterns that already exist in large hierarchical organizations like governments, corporations and militaries.
ipnon··on Algebra will return to S.F. middle schools after more than a decade
When I read that there were three separate pilot programs to test how to introduce algebra back to 10 year olds all I see is dollar signs and bureaucratic paralysis. I will avoid political arguments and instead make a simple economic one, which is that in California there is a lot of money to be made by endlessly experimenting and trialing and suing for any given public proposal. And this incentivizes things like not teaching 10 year olds algebra, or taking 10 years to reintroduce algebra, when such a pedagogy is already well established for many decades, because you can make a career out of toying with outcomes. But we're not talking about software simulations here: A whole generation of kids have been denied an educational opportunity that will have effects on the rest of their lives. This reintroduction is a decision that should have been made in a single day long ago if the well-being of the pupils was the goal of these schools.
ipnon··on Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
You can get the same output as $500k/year of software engineers for $2.4k/year now. Never been better if you ask me!
ipnon··on Show HN: AI in SolidWorks
I feel like I am still doing it the hard way, I just have to type 10x less into my keyboard to get the same amount of code out. But as soon as my understanding of the system diverges from its reality, I still do the old fashioned work of figuring out the difference and how to resolve it. It feels like a printing press replacing scribes to me.
ipnon··on ChatGPT Health
I used to work in healthtech. Information that can be used to identify a person is regulated in America under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). These regulations are much stricter than the free-for-all that constitutes usage of information in companies that are dependent on ad networks. These regulations are strict and enforceable, so a healthcare company would be fined for failing to protect HIPAA data. OpenAI isn't a healthcare provider yet, but I'm guessing this is the framework they're basing their data retention and protection around for this new app.
ipnon··on AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention
Modal is great for infrequent batches.
ipnon··on China accuses Netherlands of making 'mistakes' over chipmaker Nexperia
Chinese diplomacy doesn't work very well because they don't have power projection, so they can't attack Netherlands. They don't control global finance, so they can't sanction anyone because there is hardly any Dutch money in China. And they don't have any moral high ground because they're constantly performing industrial espionage and corporate nationalization on friends and foes alike. So all of this just makes me laugh.
ipnon··on Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
I don't feel like I ever learned how to code. The first program I wrote was in Flash, it moved a little triangle spaceship around a small frame and shot lasers. I had no idea what was going on. Later in college I wrote a lot of Python, like Django and simple algorithms. Still had no idea what was going on. After college I wrote lots of JavaScript targeting Web APIs and DOMs and strange frameworks. Still confused. We were serving on the order of 100,000,000 people a day, kind of just made it up as I went along. Now I write Elixir, and still only have a fuzzy idea of what I'm doing, but eventually it starts to work with the features and reliability I want.

I suppose all of this is to say I still feel like I'm learning! If I ever feel like I have finished the learning process it will probably be on my death bed!

ipnon··on ManusAI Joins Meta
$1bn seems low but $100bn seems high.
ipnon··on PhDs Can't Find Work as Boston's Biotech Engine Sputters
The university pipeline seems to me totally broken as a way to gain employment. It's still effective for prestige. You should stay in school as long as you're still climbing the world university rankings, but once you start falling down this ladder leave and join industry. You will get paid more and do more interesting and valuable work.
ipnon··on Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
Good luck with this!
ipnon··on Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
De Bello Gallico is much more intimidating than it is difficult. Caesar wrote using pretty simple language. Once you learn the main geographic and military terms it's a fun read!
ipnon··on CUDA Tile Open Sourced
It's kind of like if the Django README explained how SQL works, the structure of HTTP requests, best practices for HTML, and so on. If you don't know what MLIR is, you might not be the target audience for this library. Nvidia in general doesn't prioritize developer experience as much as companies like Meta do for open source projects like React.
ipnon··on CUDA Tile Open Sourced
GPU programming definitely is not beginner friendly. There's a much higher learning curve than most open source projects. To learn basic Python you need to know about definitions and loops and variables, but to learn CUDA kernels you need to know maybe an order of magnitude more concepts to write anything useful. It's just not worth the time to cater to people who don't RTFM, the README would be twice as long and be redundant to the target audience of the library.
ipnon··on Coding Intelligence Asymptotics
This is a great example of how basic napkin math eliminates many classes of errors.

And most certainly we will see alien code. Already in speedrunning we see a pattern of “ahuman” behavior, where a learner optimized for a well-defined system begins to lose the implicit beauty of the system that draws humans to it. Before RL models became feasible for speedrunning, top runs were these apexes of performance, the tightest possible lines and utmost precision. But the RL speedruns use impossible strategies like nonstop tricks impossible to do with hands, and they lose a great deal of beauty in this manner, at least to some people.

Perhaps the greatest lesson we can derive from this example is that the improvements are still marginal compared to top players. A casual player might beat a track in 1:10, the world record might be 1:00, and the RL record might be 0:50. So we still see significant yet undeniably marginal improvements in performance.

I suppose soon enough we will have experimental evidence for all these ideas!

ipnon··on FDA Approves Pill Version of Wegovy
This is a critical moment in healthcare for America. We might see the end of the era of metabolic syndrome.
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