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Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

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Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

#391
For every new job opportunity your blog or "personal brand" online garners you, there will be 0-? opportunities lost due to a hiring manager or recruiter being put off not even by the content of your online presence, but by the fact you have one at all.

Most middle managers will not hire someone with a fledging YouTube channel or a popular blog or a weaponisable Twitter following unless the role is a public facing PR role (devrel etc).

The thing is, there is no way to know about or count the lost opportunities. Grey man strategy (i.e. not early 2000s "build a personal brand" strategy) is safest for most people.

Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

#392
I didn't make my website for those reasons. I was inspired by Bill Beaty of amasci.com's philosophy of putting everything online[0]. But after a while I got sick of how things looked online changing every time I looked, so (sadly) started making lovely LaTeX PDF books instead, and lately putting everything into Obsidian. I must move some of all that online one day.

The highlights have been John Baez commenting on one page how beautiful the images were, and Jugu Abraham (Indian movie critic) thanking me for linking to pages on his site. Am still considering getting rid of comments though—even though it's handled automatically, they're about 99.99% spam.

One thing I learned is that my pages on the most obscure subjects get the most hits! Two in particular are super-obscure and get hits almost every day. I guess there's no other pages on the web about those topics. That maybe seems obvious, but was surprising. It's hard not to assume a piece of writing has to be on a popular topic for someone to want to read it.

[0] http://amasci.com/faq.html#hits the whole page is a great read, as is the whole site. So much great stuff.

Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

#393

It got me laid. In 1996 I was a teenager and my dad taught me html and ftp. I wrote a website with some cheesy poems and drawings, and uploaded it to geocities/athens/acropolis. Also, I put links to my page on several web directories. A girl from another city read that website and sent an email to me. It would be untoward to tell the rest of the story.

I was a teenager in the 90s and also had a personal site. Somehow got onto a link repository site called nerd world and a girl from a few states away (USA) found the page and emailed me. It started a long, remote friendship through the rest of high school and college via letters, AIM, and email. We still keep in contact every now and then.

Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

#394
post #115

I have a few ML-related demos on my blog that I created in school to help me to understand some fundamental concepts. I have pointed to them during interviews and I think they helped to demonstrate a depth of knowledge that words alone could not.

Hey, I enjoyed reading your article on Alphabet Chess ( https://lukesalamone.github.io/posts/alphabet-chess/ ). The idea seems quite unique, but I can understand how it could lead to positions where the engine may consider the position to be almost equal, but it could be objectively worse for one of the players. It would be interesting to compare this variant with Fischer Random Chess. According to Wikipedia ( https:…

Hey, thanks for reading my post, I'm glad you liked it! I would say the purpose of alphabet chess is to be unequal, but in a semi-predictable way. That's why streamers will use the "egg opening": it puts them at a disadvantage and brings everyone out of "book".

> positions where the engine may consider the position to be almost equal, but it could be objectively worse for one of the players

That is a good point, centipawns aren't the best metric for the subjective experience of playing. Engines are really good at defending, finding the "only move" defense where a human will struggle. And the mental work of finding "only moves" is pretty taxing. If you put someone under that kind of pressure for long enough, they will break.

The analysis is also flawed because it doesn't take into account the fact that the opponent is also playing a word. If I know that my opponent must play a "G" move on his next turn, I should play a move to take advantage of that fact. Stockfish's game tree is not eliminating impossible moves and will tend to overrate the opponent's position.

(As a concrete example, suppose I can make a move M1 where the opponent's only move to not lose immediately is an F move, but if the opponent plays it they are at an advantage. In this situation the opponent must play a G move, a fact which a human might be able to guess. Stockfish will not play M1, but instead play a different move M2 that at least maintains equality. So the stockfish evaluation is pretty flawed.)

Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

#397
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you document any part of it on your blog? Or was it just a personal memory for you alone? Either way, fucking dope.

i did. It is really old so the writing is very cringe... search cherokee cave tour and my username to find it.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how I'd never heard the word "spelunk" before today, and now in the span of the last few hours, I've heard it multiple times in three different contexts.

Have you heard of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

No, but now I'm seeing it everywhere!

Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

#399
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The font is awesome. Can you please tell which font it is.

It's just this: p, .conversation-chat, blockquote, em, strong { font-size: 1rem; font-style: normal; font-family: Menlo, monospace; } That's really the heart of it. I've wanted to try using a sans-serif font like Inter, but I'm stuck in a pit where people expect me to use a monospace font and any attempt to move away from that means I basically change a huge part of the site's visual identity. I'm still trying to fig…

Maybe a quasi proportional font like Iosevka Etoile? You can easily hack it to your likings (see https://github.com/vincentbernat/vincent.bernat.ch/blob/feat...)
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