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mjdowney

121 karma · joined October 25, 2019

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mjdowney··on Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language
Concise better, silly
mjdowney··on Show HN: HN Follow – Follow Your Friends on HN
Out of curiosity, any plans on adding push notification primitives?
mjdowney··on New York City is sinking due to weight of its skyscrapers, new research finds
For context it's sinking at 0.1 cm / year, versus 50 cm / year in Mexico City and 20 cm / year in Jakarta.
mjdowney··on Lately I've been using timers daily
nods approvingly while reading hn instead of just sitting on a bench
mjdowney··on My thoughts on OCaml
Related: https://twitter.com/zetalyrae/status/1639474931086901248

My OCaml:

    let foo (x: bar): baz =
      (\* Is this quuxable? *)
      match is_quuxable x with
      | Yes ->
         (* Then, we have to ... \*)

All the OCaml I see in the wild:

    qlet%bind f = 's 't  'a 'b (fun ꙮ -> ꙮ ((<_<')) ꙮ)
    [@@ppx_gov_backdoor (~b~e~p~i~s)]
mjdowney··on Deep Neural Networks from Scratch in Zig
You can go 100x faster using SIMD on the CPU, instead of doing the linear algebra by hand, then another order of magnitude or two on the GPU.
mjdowney··on Tell HN: Instagram's API has broken, support tickets ignored, status page green
There is nothing more frustrating than a status page that lies about the state of an API. Feels like insult + injury. I'd rather they not even have a status page!
mjdowney··on Show HN: Using GPT-3 and Whisper to save doctors’ time
That's super cool!
mjdowney··on NordVPN library and client code open-sourced
Since there is so much criticism here of NordVPN (in general, not for open-sourcing), what are the VPNs that people like?
mjdowney··on Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?
There is a mindset where each bookmark is an implicit obligation, and they of course pile up faster than you can go back and peruse them to your satisfaction, so this understandably leads to an unpleasant feeling of unfulfillable obligation.

After getting into all the second brain stuff and trying out quite a few ways of organizing this kind of information, I've started to think very carefully about what sort of implicit commitment I'm making when I write something down. I use a system of tags for things I need to look at later in some way, and I almost never tag links, but I often search back through them to find something particular that comes to mind, and I'm glad I store them.

Maybe you would have success reorienting your perspective to feel like "just" bookmarking is enough, such that there's not an implicit responsibility to come back and do something particular with the bookmarks? Or if you want that responsibility, that you can have one kind of bookmark that you're "just" saving, and another kind that you are okay committing to review?

Then it might become clearer just by the size of the folders if you're "assigning" yourself an impossible amount of work.

mjdowney··on Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?
I think if we divorce the idea of direct data manipulation from exclusively non-textual representation, we are slowly making progress in this direction through traditional notebooks (e.g. Jupyter) and notebook successors like Clerk (see Moldable Live Programming With Clerk[1]).

These are not the sweeping, fundamental changes that Bret Victor envisioned, but we are collectively moving toward more interactive programming. Imagine modern web development without hot reloading.

Clojure is the language where I see this happening most, and which is seeing the most expansion toward "visualization and interactivity as part of a the backend dev experience".

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bs3QX92kYA

mjdowney··on ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving
I tend to agree in spirit, but I worry there's a real risk of a lemon market[1] situation.

If, for whatever reason, consumers of content are not immediately attuned to the difference between vacuous GPT-nonsense and something that would bring them value if they just thought hard enough, it might lead to an overall reduction of returns to thoughtful, high-quality content, even if that content is only momentarily over the head of the reader, but wouldn't be in the long run.

This obviously to the detriment of both the consumers and producers of content.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

mjdowney··on Babashka Babooka: Write Command-Line Clojure
I've really enjoyed Babashka lately. Most recently, I ported a script from Bash which gets around WiFi captive portals and was able to add some features and even unit tests. Super fun and would have been hard for me to do in Bash!

https://gist.github.com/matthewdowney/dab4d12d001152dec473e3...

mjdowney··on Why people make dumb financial decisions on purpose
Hear, hear! Tired of seeing these tirelessly dumb takes about expected value theory's supposed flaws or its psychological dimension.

Poker players make bets based on bank roll size and very good understanding of expected value. They either use Kelly criterion[1] or develop competing heuristics for value at risk[2].

Plenty of areas where psychology adds an interesting human dimension to decision making, but this and other risk-neutrality scenarios are not part of this category!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion#Criticism [2] http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs286r/courses/fall12/papers/Tho...