Also see A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry's series of fortifications [0] regarding castles and their strategic importance, especially on how they were essential to local control of the area as opposed to "just" FOBs for military campaigns. (Incidentally the term "tyranny of the wagon equation" linked in the article also eventually leads to a different ACOUP series.)
> Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
> History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
> My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
> There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
> And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
> So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
Nice. I just rewatched Terry Gilliam's movie the other day. A good portion of your quote is voiced over by Depp. There's so much going on visually that the literary bits are easy to miss the first few times. Looking West from a steep hill is pretty magic.
That passage has always felt a little heartbreaking for me. The early internet era felt like much the same kind of experience, though it's been much more than five years now, and it's hard to see many traces left of that wave.
Can't wait for someone to buy boolean.exposed and teach me about some esoteric representation of booleans in memory that I'd never considered (either that or it's a very simple page).
Feels like something similar to the NFPA 704 safety square [0] — maybe they could copy that to mimic a relatively accepted "danger measurement" format.
Also of interest: hypercanes [1], my hurricane-adjacent Interesting Wikipedia Deep Dive, which (according to Wikipedia):
- require ocean temperatures of 120 °F (50 °C)
- have sustained winds of 500 mph (800 km/h)
- have barometric pressures in their centers sufficiently low enough to cause altitude sickness
- may persist for several weeks due to above low pressure
- may be as large as North America or as small as 15 mi (25 km) — Wikipedia has an unhelpful caption about the size of the "average hypercane" (!)
- extend into the upper stratosphere, unlike today's hurricanes (lower stratosphere)
- due to above height, may sufficiently degrade the ozone layer with water vapor to the point of causing (an additional) hazard to planetary life
This article and its associated HN comment section continue in the long tradition of Big O Notation explainers [0] and getting into a comment kerfuffle over the finer, technical points of such notation versus its practical usage [1]. The wheel turns...
From what I read in the comments of the first post, the Pyon guy seems very toxic and pedantic, but the rebuttal by Ned isn't great. For example, nowhere in the rebuttal is the pedantic technical detail ever actually described. In fact the prose reads very awkwardly in order to circumlocute around describing it, just repeatedly naming it "particular detail". In my view, the author overreaches: he dismisses Pyon not only for the delivery of his criticism (which was toxic) but also the content of his criticism (why?).
Ultimately Ned is in the right about empathy and communication online. But as an educator it would have been nice to hear, even briefly, why he thought Pyon's point was unnecessarily technical and pedantic? Instead he just says "I've worked for decades and didn't know it". No one is too experienced to learn.
EDIT: I just skimmed the original comment section between Pyon and Ned and it seems that Ned is rather diplomatic and intellectually engages with Pyon's critique. Why is this level of analysis completely missing from the follow-up blogpost? I admit to not grasping the technical details or importance, personally, it would be nice to hear a summarized analysis...
Such is the curse of blogging: when writing a series of posts, authors naturally assume that the readers are as engaged and as familiar with the previous discussion as they are.
In reality, even regular subscribers probably aren't, and if you're a random visitor years later, the whole thing may be impossible to parse.
> Why is this level of analysis completely missing from the follow-up blogpost
Because that's not what the article is about. It's not about whether Pyon was correct or wrong, it's that they were a dick about it. Their opening words were "you should be ashamed". They doubled and tripled down on their dickery later on.
And no matter how good your point is or how right you are: if you're a dick about it people will dislike you.
I think the lesson of those articles is not that people should stop trying to correct a misleading or incorrect explanation, but rather, that some people on the internet (like the "expert" described there) are more interested in picking and winning "fights" rather than gently helping the author correct his article. If you see Pyon's comments, he was very aggressive and very internet-troll-like.
The wrong take from this would be "... and therefore, technical details don't matter and it's ok to be inaccurate."
One caveat here is that the author of the article posted it here in HN for comments -- it's not that someone else did, and this is unfair because HN was never supposed to take a look, etc. They expected a review, otherwise they wouldn't have posted it here.
HN is not an audience of laypeople (mostly) and will critique the article with a different mindset than a novice that might be impressed by the visuals (which are impressive).
So I think the reaction is both to be expected and reasonable: HN will critique how correct the explanation is, and point out the mistakes. And there were a couple of fundamental mistakes due to the author not being a subject matter expert.
Good intro! I first learned Big O from Cracking the Coding Interview since many universities in Europe notoriously skip complexity notations even in basic programming classes. This definitely explains it in a much simpler way.
Toxic expert here! I hate when blog posts try to teach complex subjects. It's almost always a non-expert doing the teaching, and they fail to do it accurately. This then causes 1) the entire internet repeating the inaccuracies, and 2) the readers make no attempt to do further learning than the blog post, reinforcing their ignorance.
I'll double down on my toxicity by saying I didn't like the page layout. As someone with ADHD (and a declining memory), I need to be led through formatting/sub-headings/bullets/colored sections/etc into each detail or it all blends together into a wall of text. The longer it takes to make a point (visually and conceptually), the more lost I am. I couldn't easily follow it. The Simple Wikipedia page was more straight to the point (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation), but reading the "full" Wikipedia page thrusts you headlong into a lot of math, which to me signifies that this shit is more complex than it seems and simplifying it is probably a bad idea.
> Toxic expert here! I hate when blog posts try to teach complex subjects. It's almost always a non-expert doing the teaching, and they fail to do it accurately. This then causes 1) the entire internet repeating the inaccuracies, and 2) the readers make no attempt to do further learning than the blog post, reinforcing their ignorance.
Ask yourself why. The usual answer is that top experts either can't be bothered to create better content, or they actively gatekeep, believing that their field must remain hard to learn and the riff-raff must be kept out.
I think the first step is to accept that laypeople can have legitimate interest in certain topics and deserve accessible content. The remedy to oversimplified explanations is to write something better - or begrudgingly accept the status quo and not put people down for attempts that don't meet your bar.
It's also good to ponder if the details we get worked up about actually matter. Outside the academia, approximately no one needs a precise, CS-theoretical definition of big-O notation. Practitioners use it in a looser sense.
> Ask yourself why. The usual answer is that top experts either can't be bothered to create better content, or they actively gatekeep, believing that their field must remain hard to learn and the riff-raff must be kept out.
This oversimplifies things.
It's sometimes a third option: the topic is complex enough it cannot be digested into a ready to consume blogpost without previous work (reading and practicing), which in turn requires previous work, and so on, until you've turned it into an introductory course.
And that's not gatekeeping or "cannot be bothered to simplify" -- it's a falsehood, a kind of internet new age mantra, that everything can be made simple enough to explain in a blog post. Some things can't. There's nothing elitist about it, since everyone has the mind power to take that introductory course.
> It's also good to ponder if the details we get worked up about actually matter. Outside the academia, approximately no one needs a precise, CS-theoretical definition of big-O notation. Practitioners use it in a looser sense.
The article made some genuinely serious mistakes and the author here (graciously, it has to be said) admitted to being wrong about some things like Big O being "the worst case".
In this cases, maybe the damage could be limited by saying "I know this isn't Big O, this is what some engineers call it but it's actually something different. Because practitioners find useful nonetheless, I will explain it (explanation follows)".
I found the visual presentation top-notch by the way, it's clear some effort was put into this and it shows!
There is a lot of value in explaining the gist of something, even if it's not entirely accurate. In my experience, the cases where even that is impossible are very rare, at least when it comes to practical computer programming.
> Ask yourself why. The usual answer is that top experts either can't be bothered to create better content, or they actively gatekeep, believing that their field must remain hard to learn and the riff-raff must be kept out.
Before asking why, ask if. There are good articles about complex topics, they just get drowned out by bad articles.
I remember being taught how to change the brakes on my car. Was explained very simply, it was easy (or so I thought). So I decided to do it to my car next time I needed brake work. And I did, and a year or two later, my brakes failed.
The thing I was taught wasn't wrong, but it left out important details. There are very specific steps involved in cleaning parts, applying the right lubricant, not applying lubricant, aligning parts, not forcing things, doing the same change on both sides, torque specs, bedding steps. If you don't do them, the brakes just fail again. The person who taught me didn't go over those important yet intricate details - probably because they were taught by a non-expert too.
If the choice is "quit my job to start writing lots of expert content", or "accept the status quo", I choose neither. I have my own life to live. But if during the course of living my life, a wave of inaccuracy begins to lap at my door, I will attempt to stem the tide, in my own way. The toxic aspect, I think, is really just the way in which these corrections are given, and definitely I and others could do better with our tone. But to just give up and not give the corrections at all, I think would be disastrous.
(fwiw, I think HN's overzealous "guidelines" force people to either be toxicly positive or insidiously critical. that's not to say I'm not an asshole, but it's hard to just be normal on this forum without this bizarre culture coming down on you)
As a semi-toxic semi-expert, I think one of the main reasons there is precious little blog-sized content that goes deep is that it’s hard to do. Most subjects, in or out of tech, can go incredibly deep on many, many points.
The more detail that’s included, the harder it becomes to write less. If you ask me to write 500 words on indexing strategies for an RDBMS, I’ll probably manage, but very little will be explained. If you ask me to write 5000 words, there’s no way I’ll hit that target, because I’ll want to explain every tangent, every fundamental, and so on.
The single best blog [series] that manages to pull this off, IMO, is Jeremy Cole’s series on InnoDB [0]. It’s not short taken as a whole, but each article is short enough that it (probably) meets people’s attention spans. I think the thing that makes it so great to me is that it’s written assuming that the reader already understands certain concepts. For example, he doesn’t spend multiple paragraphs explaining what a B+tree is; he links to the Wikipedia page, and then describes how InnoDB uses them.
In contrast, when I write something, I usually find myself assuming that the reader doesn’t have some fundamental knowledge. I usually try to either put it in a section that’s easily skipped, or in a pop-out toggle, but either way, it’s there.
To me, these fundamentals are incredibly important, because a. they’re how I understand things b. I don’t feel that you can operate something to its fullest capability (let alone fix it) if you don’t know how the thing works.
Re: gatekeeping, to me the perfect example is the Linux kernel. Torvalds is notoriously unfriendly, and while you can judge that however you’d like, the man has a massive weight on his shoulders, and letting code in that doesn’t meet his standards threatens that weight. I get it. Then, I also came of age during the RTFM era, so I’m used to it.
It's a bit like the choice between two doctors. One is very polite, spends an hour by your bedside every day, smiles and holds your hand and encourages you not to give up but has no idea about how to interpret your symptoms, has a horribly confused idea of what's going on but can explain that mess in his head to you in a reassuring tone that feels authoritative.
The other doc is morose, doesn't smile, the meetings are brief like an interrogation but he knows exactly what's up, spends the time on reading the literature, case studies, phones up other doctors who treated similar illnesses, cuts you and sews you back at the right spot and hands you the exact pills that will get you on your feet in a few months, but at the same time was distant and cold throughout the whole thing and talked to you as if you were a car in the repairshop.
Ideally, it would be both. Of the two I'd still choose the second guy.
Writing is one of the best ways to learn something. Maybe non-experts learn something by writing about it?
Don't think the entire internet is repeating inaccuracies. :) I also believe there are readers that attempt to learn further than a blog. A blog post can inspire you to learn more about a topic, speaking from personal experience.
If there were no blog posts, maybe there would be no HN I believe.
There should be a place for non-experts. One could remain skeptical when they read blog posts without hating blog posts about complex topics written by non-expert.
This varies wildly with the subject, and the degree of inaccuracy.
If you say, “hash maps are generally O(1), and are a great default choice,” you’re not that wrong (subjectivity aside).
If you say, “storing integers as strings guarantees precision, so you should prefer them over decimal or float types,” you’re technically correct about the first part, but are enormously wrong for a variety of reasons about the conclusion.
My experience is the opposite. I hate the colorful books with many little boxes, pictures with captions in floaters, several different font sizes on the page, cute mascots etc, where even the order or reading is unclear.
Instead I found it much easier to learn from old books made before the 70s-80s, sometimes back into the 40s. It's single column, black on white, but the text is written by a real character and is far from dry. I had such a book on probability and it had a chapter on the philosophical interpretations of probability, which took the reader seriously, and not by heaping dry definitions but with an opinionated throughline through the history of it. I like that much better than the mealy mouthed, committee-written monstrosity that masks any passion for the subject. I'd rather take a half page definition or precise statement of a theorem where I have to check every word but I can then trust every word, over vague handwavy explanations. Often these modern books entirely withhold the formal definitions so you're left in a vague uneasy feeling where you kind of get it, have questions but can't find out "is it now this way, or that way, precisely?". And I'm not so sure that these irrelevant-cute-pics-everywhere books are really better for ADHD at the end of the day, as opposed to distraction free black on white paragraphs written by a single author with something to say.
But yes, I was never really a 1.6 player but I felt the same way about Garry's Mod maps. Joining a random server and seeing the maps and assets download and never really knowing what you were going to spawn into... it was wonderfully weird in a way that reminds me of the individuality of the Old Internet™. It might be nostalgia talking but there's some crispness and snappiness to the Source engine that games these days don't quite have.
> The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.
> Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.
Nope it's the book about the concept of a true turing-machine like alien being which has no "consciousness", it's mechanistic but insanely complex, like the Borg but not even assimilating; it's like a very very sophisticated "grey goo" nanobot scenario
[0] https://acoup.blog/2021/12/10/collections-fortification-part...