flâneur

Andrew Kachnic

5 followers · 9 following · 1142 views

on the atlas — 40

highlights — 23

  • Most smart people do not change the world much. Why? They get trapped in excellence. Instead of making a path for themselves, they climb the ladders that already exist.
    What's stopping you?
  • You cannot allow other people to decide what you want from life. This is the most likely single thing to ruin your life
    What's stopping you?
  • There's nothing magic about academic papers. I have my name on a few publications, including one that won best paper award at the top conference in its field. My median blog post is more rigorous than my median paper or, for that matter, the median paper that I read. When I write a paper, I have to deal with co-authors who push for putting in false or misleading material that makes the paper look good and my ability to push back against this has been fairly limited. On my blog, I don't have to deal with that and I can write up results that are accurate (to the best of my ability) even if it ma…
    How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT
  • An important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness. They know that you get an A not for effort but for results, and that it's almost always easier to start from a good partial solution than from nothing at all.
    The Mail Must Get Through
  • In capital markets, we don't need all that many informed participants to think that some form of the efficient market hypothesis holds ensuring "prices reflect all available information".
    Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?
  • For example, I noticed how I'd get distracted for N minutes if I read something on the internet when I needed to wait for two minutes, so I made sure to keep a queue of useful work to fill dead time (and if I was working on something very latency sensitive where I didn't want to task switch, I'd do nothing until I was done waiting).
    95%-ile isn't that good
  • Many tools that are really helpful, can be burdensome when applied incorrectly. A good example is typing in Python. We all love type systems, particularly the engineers at Sentry who are used to Rust and TypeScript will probably quite quickly fall into the “trap” of expecting the same experience in Python. Python is not a strongly typed language, and sometimes the desire to achieve a similar outcome has disastrous results in productivity at the cost of perceived correctness. But typing that does not provide value can have the opposite effect.
    Development Philosophy | Sentry Developer Documentation
  • not to mention that they loved using -O3, which mostly exists to slow down build times with little benefit
    Designing a SIMD Algorithm from Scratch · mcyoung
  • not to mention that they loved using -O3, which mostly exists to slow down build times with little benefit
    Designing a SIMD Algorithm from Scratch · mcyoung
  • When a user requests an add by writing a + b, how should I decide which instruction to use for it? This seems like a trick question… just an add right? On x86, even this isn’t so easy, since you have a choice between the actual add instruction, or a lea instruction (which, among other things, preserves the rflags register). This question becomes more complicated for more sophisticated operations.
    Designing a SIMD Algorithm from Scratch · mcyoung
  • Shuffles are worth trying to wrap your mind around. SIMD programming is all about reinterpreting larger-than-an-integer-sized blocks of data as smaller blocks of varying sizes, and shuffling is important for getting data into the right “place”.
    Designing a SIMD Algorithm from Scratch · mcyoung
  • Maintaining a friendship is taxing: you have to be there for each other through everything; you have to be willing to keep talking even when you’re annoyed with them, even when they’ve hurt you. You have to have unwavering conviction about who the most important people in your life are.
    The problem of long-term close friendships - by Kasra
  • Serious vulnerability is not just talking about how you were struggling at some point, or that you were overwhelmed with emotion previously but are fine now—it’s sharing these things as they are happening, expressing your anger and anxiety and sadness while you still haven’t resolved them
    Give your friends a chance to abandon you - by Kasra
  • Dark corners are basically fractal—no matter how much you illuminate, there’s always a smaller but darker one. — Brian Kernighan
    The GNU Awk User’s Guide
  • Recipe for a Programming Language 1 part egrep 1 part snobol 2 parts ed 3 parts C Blend all parts well using lex and yacc. Document minimally and release. After eight years, add another part egrep and two more parts C. Document very well and release. After 35 more years, add Unicode and CSV support, sprinkle lightly with a few choice features from gawk, document very well again, and release.
    The GNU Awk User’s Guide
  • Animation values should be proportional to the trigger size: Don't animate dialog scale in from 0 → 1, fade opacity and scale from ~0.8 Don't scale buttons on press from 1 → 0.8, but ~0.96, ~0.9, or so
    Web Interface Guidelines
  • College students aren’t very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that’s true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with.
    Free speech is in trouble - by Nate Silver
  • Programmers are bright people who are (often justly) proud of their ability to handle complexity and juggle abstractions. Often they compete with their peers to see who can build the most intricate and beautiful complexities. Just as often, their ability to design outstrips their ability to implement and debug, and the result is expensive failure.
    Basics of the Unix Philosophy
  • Buying a small increase in performance with a large increase in the complexity and obscurity of your technique is a bad trade — not merely because complex code is more likely to harbor bugs, but also because complex code will be harder to read for future maintainers.
    Basics of the Unix Philosophy
  • Assemblers, compilers, flowcharting, procedural programming, structured programming, “artificial intelligence”, fourth-generation languages, object orientation, and software-development methodologies without number have been touted and sold as a cure for this problem. All have failed as cures, if only because they ‘succeeded’ by escalating the normal level of program complexity to the point where (once again) human brains could barely cope. As Fred Brooks famously observed [Brooks], there is no silver bullet.
    Basics of the Unix Philosophy
  • Everyone wants to quit something, build something, be something, do something. Most people won’t.
    BRYCE DOT VC
  • There are better ways to design than putting a lot of effort into making something look special. Special is generally less useful than normal, and less rewarding in the long term. Special things demand attention for the wrong reasons, interrupting potentially good atmosphere with their awkward presence.
    Untitled Collection Design Information · Klim Type Foundry
  • Postrationalisation is an open secret in the design industry. Only once a project is finished does it receive a writeup, portraying the messy process as a logical sequence leading up to a spotless, perfect unveiling. I suspect, however, that for most designers it’s an irrational process. There just comes a point where all the inputs have been processed, all the terrible drawings and tenuous concepts have been thrown away, and you just work towards the finish — too fatigued to even know if it’s worth anything or not anymore. If you’re lucky, someone or something will come along to help validate…
    Untitled Collection Design Information · Klim Type Foundry