Ask HN: What was your favorite comment in 2020? Comments on Hacker News can be very well thought, I'm often impressed with the quality of discussion, although I don't participate much. I'm curious, what do you think was the most insightful comment of 2020? |
> I sometimes find myself thinking, "why would you do that!?" and that's when I realize that what that really means is I'm the one who's not understanding something. I should be asking myself, "why would they do that?"
This is my favorite because it’s simple, but so powerful. I’ve tried to stick to this advice since I saw that comment. And I think it has made me kinder and much more willing to empathize with others and give chances.
Every time I find myself judging or criticizing others, I keep reminding myself of this comment and almost always end up with a different perspective.
If people frequently misinterpret you, it's logically sound to look at the common denominator
Commenting online can be an exception of course. Let's not rid ourselves of every sin...
In these cases someone might be doing hundred things right in their life and the one mistake is what catches all the attention and provokes criticism. I feel like if only humans could view themselves with the same ruthless no-excuses mentality as they do view others they would immediately realize how much there is in their own life to fix and fixing all that would probably keep them too busy to unnecessarily point fingers at others.
(I'm not saying that criticism is always unnecessary, but that there's probably all kinds of low-hanging fruit in people's own lives that they're not just able to perceive. This blind spot of course applies to me too which I find frustrating at times).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25300272
The ethics are obviously debatable, but its an elaborate application of the hacker ethos to the problem of feeling like you're wasting away 9 to 5, Monday to Friday on a job that in the grand scheme of things no one really cares about or makes any real difference.
Ethics aside, I respect their self awareness the most.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25306954
This comment on EUV fab processes sent me down a rabbit hole. I had no idea how much the state of the art has improved!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25131424
Another rabbit hole comment, this time on compact nuclear fusion and REBCO tape:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24632653
This comment that reined in the hyperbole around GPT-3, while still leaving space for fun and exploration, struck a nice balance:
> - Submit the changes to a test farm consisting of about 100 to 200 servers that would compile the code, build a new Oracle DB, and run the millions of tests in a distributed fashion.
> - Go home. Come the next day and work on something else. The tests can take 20 hours to 30 hours to complete.
> - Go home. Come the next day and check your farm test results. On a good day, there would be about 100 failing tests. On a bad day, there would be about 1000 failing tests. Pick some of these tests randomly and try to understand what went wrong with your assumptions. Maybe there are some 10 more flags to consider to truly understand the nature of the bug.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324718
And a related, more recent comment from 2020 that identified a key failure mode:
> We need to actually coin a word to describe "company solved their use-case wonderfully and can't resist fiddling around with it for reasons that don't align with their user-base”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043088
But i found this one comment which really resonated with me:
Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine.
<snip>
I've already written a rant about it before and I don't have the energy to repeat myself, but do not fool yourself into thinking switching from excel to Alteryx is doing yourself any favors. You're just trading one monster for another.
Save yourself a huge amount of money, not to mention your sanity and just take the time to learn some Python, Julia, literally anything else to get the same results faster, more reliably, and not be locked into that noveau Oracle-esque nightmare.
“... As I became more senior and had junior employees working alongside me, I could see how quickly they would get frustrated when they couldn’t perform at my level. ...”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23861738
“... I spent years at a time not working or even thinking about how to make money. ... I can tell you that for me personally I don't think it was ideal. ...”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23947858
“... I knew years before finishing [my Ph.D.] that I was just not cut out for a life in academia, and positioned myself in the best way I knew how for a life in industry, but I did not anticipate just how truly painful the experience would be. ...”
> I'd rate the news as "vibing" on a scale of clickbait to party for the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25035508
> By the way, I decided to also quick summarize the usual HN threads that have the trigger word iPhone in it...
> Yeah, TIL Mathematica knows what a goat is, and can recognize one on sight.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24489614
I had fun writing that. :)
dmoreira 12 hours ago [-] doing it consistently over a long period of time. It took me years to realize that all nighters and overwork were a big mistake. What truly works is to show up everyday consistently for years. Like Bill said, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
It's still an open question why we can't port a biological neural brain on regular CPU (a neumomorphic system) One could say it's because emulating a brain (e.g Blue brain) require too much compute and/or that we lack observability (we can't easily records all the state data that constitute a brain) but that doesn't preclude emulating a simple brain such as the one of c ellegans (302 neurons whole nervous system!!) and I've never met a satisfying explanation as to why this is so hard and where can I track progress on this task.