HN user

nilirl

1,018 karma

My new book 'Copywriting after AI' is available at https://www.nair.sh/books/copywriting-after-ai

Posts14
Comments210
View on HN

My point was your needs and problems are not everyone's needs and problems.

I don't want to think of memory management in most projects, I want to focus on business logic, so I use Node.js instead of Rust, even if the latter gives me more control.

Similarly, I don't want to think of DOM management in most projects, I want to focus on data dependencies, so I use React instead of Web Components, even if the latter gives me more control.

The idea of reactivity came from or was popularized by Angular.js

No, spreadsheets popularized reactivity. And the general point is incredibly weak.

Don't use frameworks and make your own? Sure, have your fun. But then try teaching your framework to your company of 1000 and see how quickly you realize your view of the "problems" are only a slice of the pie.

98% Isn't Much 15 days ago

Truly robust engineering isn’t about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases.

How do you justify this when you factor in cost and time?

Not prevent, just not provide very responsive feedback, right?

I don't know, I understand the principle, but I don't see how you can determine the value of a principle outside of a specific context.

Even for accessibility, we can't target every context in the name of being accessible. We still have to pick which contexts of inaccessibility we'll need to support with more attention.

I understand the design principle but I would argue it's a bad implementation principle.

Engineering attention is finite. Why would you spend time thinking about 8 clicks when most people will only need ~3?

Not all user-action possibilities are equally important, and if they are, then you better have infinite resources to spend on engineering.

I don't want to hate without cause, so I read the prize winning entry 'The June'.

So, now, I can hate with cause: it reads like someone who cares about what their MFA friends think.

Meaning, it puts most of its emphasis on description, and so little on situational engagement. Which makes sense, I suppose, for an LLM.

Half-Baked Product 19 days ago

Honest question: Does the founder end up making money this way? Can you really get rich building a failed business?

The strongest signal you can give people now is offering personal interaction. It's expensive to go meet someone or ask someone if you can call them.

I wrote about this from the perspective of someone with no connections [0] but I think even if you're well connected, reaching out to people from other networks is a useful way to gain access to great thinking, information, and opportunity.

[0] https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/marketing-under-pres...

1. Incredible! Can I make an unsolicited ask? If you had industry specific templates for standardized PDFs it would be easier for me to send Parsewise to the insurance companies I'd worked for. Something similar to https://www.useanvil.com/forms/?type=pdf-templates but with your clean, semantic data model.

2. Can I ask how? When I was building something like this, I realized there's an element of burning tokens for correctness. Meaning, splitting things into small units and small processes, each using a separate LLM output to be later combined. For a 1k page document, what kind of token usage do you see?

I enjoyed your comment.

Over the long term, democracies have mostly avoided self-implosion, so this political see-saw does seem to work.

The question is: is there anything we can do to make it feel better to live in?

Your argument hinges on deciding what "works" means.

You're saying it "works" for some people but maybe not in a way or scale that was originally intended for it to "work".

But isn't that how all learning in a complex system takes place? Doesn't mean you need to rush to cancel something?

What's wrong in saying it doesn't do what we thought it would but it does do something useful? Maybe adjust further investment based on results obtained. Ignore sunk cost.

That's fine if they're benefiting from the status quo, that decision making should be left to those in-context.

The political experiments should be chosen and driven by small units in order to be safely contained.

Planning shouldn't be a top-down activity, strategy should be. Meaning , the bounds for decisions and the rules of play must be centrally determined, but not the experiments themselves.

I don't completely follow the last bit of your comment. It sounds like you agree that a centralized planner doesn't have enough context to make system wide decisions. Am I right?

Yes, but they're not safe experiments. And they're not experiments in the sense that we don't focus on shaping the reusable knowledge they produce.

It's not enough to try things, we also need a social system in place to allow trying to be safe and useful, even on failure.

I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?

We're missing guardrails to allow safe experimentation and we're missing institutions to provide affordances.

I think the difficult bit is figuring out how to seperate the goodness of centralized decision shaping and the badness of centralized power accumulation.

Does this also extract semantic relationships and data dependencies between fields?

In the past I'd built an internal tool that transforms insurance PDFs to structured data. I wanted to extract explicit data dependencies between fields to perform validation.

Insurance forms can sometimes have 30-40 pages and they can have fields on page 40 that depend on fields on page 4 with a few nested if conditions. Would Parsewise be able to extract those relationships?

If yes, how do you do it for large documents?

Ok, I love it.

Can you simplify how form dynamism works? I skimmed the docs and saw 'states', but it didn't immediately click how it works.

Do we build a tree of rules outside of the components? Are states attached to each component, bottoms-up, and then the form tree is managed by the library?

For more advanced students, those with preconceived ideas, teachers use a refutational style of teaching. It's not the same as argumentation because the goal is to find an appropriate bridge from one model (the preconceived, naive model) to another model (the one being taught). It works by pointing out a fascinating explanatory limitation in the naive model and then showing the students how the better model deals with said limitations.

The author's argument is hilariously wrong because we've been doing something for thousands of years: teaching.

And it works, to some degree.

And how do teachers teach? They don't start by trying to argue or by trying to prove students wrong. They teach by showing what's fascinating.

Taking the time to show people what's fascinating, what's perplexing, where the tension lies, and how it's resolved, is teaching.

Argument construction in social contexts is ironically ego-driven. Demonstrating something interesting, on the other hand, means asking yourself what what they would find interesting about what you want to tell them.

Scientists and consultants both build models.

The scientists do,

Step 1: Build Model

Step 2: Think of implications

Step 3: Check if observations make sense based on implications

Step 4: If wrong, refine model or go back to Step 1. If right, submit to other people and ask them to verify.

The consultants do,

Step 1: Build model.

Step 2: Tell people this is the right model.

denied her access to the legal system in all her dealings with Meta

How ... how is that legal? Why would that ever be made legal?

Apparently businesses can use contracts to opt out of regular public courts and agree on using a neutral decision-maker; an arbitrator.

But then the post says:

Meta got its arbitrator – a lawyer who is paid by Meta to adjudicate contractual disputes instead of an actual judge

Huh? How's that legal?

Turns out, the law requires arbitrators to be neutral, but not the people choosing the arbitrators.

Arbitration services are businesses. So even though Meta doesn't directly pay the arbitrator, they pay the business picking the arbitrator.

Meaning, Meta has a long-term relationship with the arbitration service provider. They can choose to take their business elsewhere, if unhappy.

Imagine being Wynn-Williams, having a company of this size put a target on your head. I wonder how many live in silence because the paycheck is too good or the punishment too bad.

But an even larger point: most of HN is probably employed by a company that aspires to be Meta; HN is run by a VC fund that wants to make many Metas; and worse, unfortunately, I sometimes dream of being a Zuckerberg.

I am thoroughly seduced by a power I've never felt, even if I see it as poison.

Where's your argument, Braveheart? Why play coy? If people don't like this choice, where's your defense for it?

The demo is not egregious by itself, it's the choice of the demo for this circumstance. Why boy-hits-boy-with-rock-for-girl for an animation DSL?

I think you're discounting people's reaction of not liking it. That is communicative. Not everything has a well established model to communicate efficiently using words.

And being a trope is not enough of a defense; tropes can drift away from culture over time.

The demo is not egregious by itself, it's the choice of the demo for this circumstance. Why boy-hits-boy-with-rock-for-girl for an animation DSL?

If the choice is meaningless, why defend it?

And if the choice is meaningful, why this?