101–110 of 261 posts
This all is good advice. Don't be intimidated, try new things, have fun. On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.
I have unfortunately failed at that :(. The fun sure does go away slowly, then all at once
I feel like I can't have fun anymore because the AI can just do the thing instantly and you've got people on this website advocating to let the AI do everything while you merely read the code.
For now, do what interests you in a way that interests you.
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I hate it when people do this. I refuse to write Bell Hooks or E. E. Cummings without capitals. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely, I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension. Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase wil…
eNGLISH is a lingua franca, so it's prone to morph much more than without the status. do you really think a blogger or 5 will change how upper case exist? maybe we'll signal something with exacerbation by some unicode somewhere at the phrase. maybe we'll type with the help of AI (fuck ai). maybe English will have augmentative and diminutive word forms like Portuguese. maybe grammar will be simpler, so more people can…
The cutesy writing style is a bit irritating, plus the article is one big ego stroke. Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this? No? It's because you're not a narcissist.
Maybe in more optimistic times. "Just have fun" is a top luxury nowadays in 2025.
I'm asking this question purely out of curiosity, and not as a snark, is there any particular reason why you don't capitalise the beginnings of your sentences? It seems strange to go to the effort of capitalising STEM and putting a hyphen in college-level without capitalising the letters. Is it something like the push towards sans-serif fonts because some groups of people find it easier to read?
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You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm. How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal). Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive". Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for…
You would likely enjoy Isaac Asimov's "Profession": https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php
I highly recommend it. I'm also just a huge Asimov fan
Me too. Sometimes when I tell people I spent the day on the computer, I get responses like "oh that's sad" or "you're going to burn yourself out".
Would they say the same thing if I told them I spent the day painting in my studio? Or playing the guitar? Or writing a piece of music? The computer is my paintbrush.
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You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm. How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal). Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive". Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for…
I don't understand how this is a power law and not normal. The "long tail" is usually mentioned in a normal distribution being the right-most end of it.
There's kinda a big difference in the characteristics of a normal distribution and power and I think explaining that will really help.
In a normal you have pressure from both ends so that's why you find it in things like height. There's evolutionary pressure to not be too small but also pressure to not be too large. Being tall is advantageous but costly. Technically the distribution never ends (and that's in either direction!). Though you're not going to see micro people nor 100' tall people because the physics gets in the way. Also mind you that normal can't be less than zero.
It is weird to talk about "long tail" with normal distributions and flags should go up when hearing this.
In a power distribution you don't have bounding pressure. So they are scale free. A classic example of this is wealth. It's easier to understand if you ignore the negative case at first, so let's do that (it still works with negative wealth). There's no upper bound to wealth, right? So while most people will be in the main "mode" there is a long tail. We might also say something like "heavy tail" when the variance is even moderate. So this tail is both long and the median value isn't really representative of the distribution. Funny enough, power laws are incredibly common in nature. I'm really not sure why they aren't discussed more.
I think Veritasium did a video on power distributions recently? Might be worth a check.
Heavy tail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy-tailed_distribution
Long tail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
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Gen Z linguistic phenomenon. It's to signify a more authentic or calmer, more personable style rather than an overly literary one. It's kind of nice actually, like talking to a friend about their thoughts. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...
It's how we all used to talk on IRC, well before Gen Z came online :)
I grew up on some where you got flamed very quickly if you didn’t clean that up (e.g Espernet).
I'm asking this question purely out of curiosity, and not as a snark, is there any particular reason why you don't capitalise the beginnings of your sentences? It seems strange to go to the effort of capitalising STEM and putting a hyphen in college-level without capitalising the letters. Is it something like the push towards sans-serif fonts because some groups of people find it easier to read?
Gen Z linguistic phenomenon. It's to signify a more authentic or calmer, more personable style rather than an overly literary one. It's kind of nice actually, like talking to a friend about their thoughts. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/18/death-of-cap...