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bawis commented on First, make me care   gwern.net/blog/2026/make-... · Posted by u/andsoitis
ziofill · 20 days ago
This reminds me of what my PhD supervisor told me as he was trashing my first draft of my first paper: “up until this point in your life you’ve been trained to convince someone who knows more than you that you know something by writing impressive equations and complex concepts. Now you are the expert and if you do that nobody will read your papers. And if someone stops after a few sentences you’ll lose citations too.”
bawis · 20 days ago
What was your PhD thesis about ?
bawis commented on Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?    · Posted by u/amadeuswoo
atrettel · a month ago
Before I started the project, I was already vaguely familiar with the notion of an inverted index [1]. That small bit of knowledge meant that I knew where to start looking for more information and saved me a ton of time. Inverted indices form the bulk of many search engines, with the big unknown being how you implement it. I just had to find an adequate data structure for my application.

To figure that out, I remember searching for articles on how to implement inverted indices. Once I had a list of candidate strategies and data structures, I used Wikipedia supplemented by some textbooks like Skiena's [2] and occasionally some (somewhat outdated) information from NIST [3]. I found Wikipedia quite detailed for all of the data structures for this problem, so it was pretty easy to compare the tradeoffs between different design choices here. I originally wanted to implement the inverted index as a hash table but decided to use a trie because it makes wildcard search easier to implement.

After I developed most of the backend, I looked for books on "information retrieval" in general. I found a history book (Bourne and Hahn 2003) on the development of these kind of search systems [4]. I read some portions of this book, and that helped confirm many of the design choices that I made. I actually was just doing what people traditionally did when they first built these systems in the 1960s and 1970s, albeit with more modern tools and much more information on hand.

The harder part of this project for me was writing the interpreter. I actually found YouTube videos on how to write recursive descent parsers to be the most helpful there, particular this one [5]. Textbooks were too theoretical and not concrete enough, though Crafting Interpreters was sometimes helpful [6].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_index

[2] https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54256-6

[3] https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/

[4] https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3543.001.0001

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SToUyjAsaFk

[6] https://craftinginterpreters.com/

bawis · a month ago
Thanks for detailing, how much time you invested in it?
bawis commented on Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?    · Posted by u/amadeuswoo
atrettel · a month ago
I recently wrote a command-line full-text search engine [1]. I needed to implement an inverted index. I choose what seems like the "dumb" solution at first glance: a trie (prefix tree).

There are "smarter" solutions like radix tries, hash tables, or even skip lists, but for any design choice, you also have to examine the tradeoffs. A goal of my project is to make the code simpler to understand and less of a black box, so a simpler data structure made sense, especially since other design choices would not have been all that much faster or use that much less memory for this application.

I guess the moral of the story is to just examine all your options during the design stage. Machine learning solutions are just that, another tool in the toolbox. If another simpler and often cheaper solution gets the job done without all of that fuss, you should consider using it, especially if it ends up being more reliable.

[1] https://github.com/atrettel/wosp

bawis · a month ago
What body of knowledge (books, tutorials etc) did you use while developing it?
bawis commented on Ask HN: How did you learn to code?    · Posted by u/chistev
another_twist · a month ago
Started by reading lots of articles on Topcoder (they have a dynamic programming tutorial which imo is the best material on DP). Then did exercises from CLRS before writing a single line of code. I considered it leg work and not of very high value (remains true though, the best paying jobs in tech are research and in finance its quant trading). Then I dived head first into C++ and Java, slogged through the pain and I got absolutely hooked. I learnt almost all of the computer science I know through books, good old fashioned working through exercises, doing lectures on MIT Ocw. Never paid a single cent for any professional courses or bootcamps or any of that jazz. I did write some Python in high school but most of the work I did while at uni studying something else entirely. My initial objective was not to build anything at all but to just get better at competitive coding. But then I built something reasonably complicated and I have been an engineer ever since. I have worked in ML, distributed systems, low level systems programming in the past 10years. To answer the question I learnt coding by self study.
bawis · a month ago
bawis commented on Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?    · Posted by u/meridion
jijath · 2 months ago
Off the top of my head:

- Language learning: I have a couple of languages that I want to focus on this 2026. Both for the enjoyment of learning and using said languages, and also because it will help me improve work-wise.

- OSS development: Programming was set aside these couple of years and I want to be active and help the community. Either by contributing to a project or an OS (9front is always on my mind).

- Be a good father and partner: this is one of my primary goals this 2026.

- More time for outdoor sports: As much as I like being indoors, playing with computers, I need to go outside and spend time in nature doing something that I enjoy (ie. running or surfing)

- Mindfulness and spirituality: Grown so much in the past couple of years and now is time for me to meditate on these topics.

- Last but not least, participate in the old-school internet: Be more active and talk to real people, read their blogs, donate to their endevours for a better internet, enjoy their art, etc.

bawis · 2 months ago
> Language learning: I have a couple of languages that I want to focus on this 2026. Both for the enjoyment of learning and using said languages, and also because it will help me improve work-wise.

May I ask which languages are you talking about here? and what methods you will follow?

bawis commented on Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?    · Posted by u/meridion
amha · 2 months ago
* Get less scared about applying to do stuff! I'm leaving my longtime job---I've taught advanced math to super-smart high schoolers; I'm quitting to be a visiting professor at Deep Springs College for a semester and then ???---and in the past, fear of applying to things (jobs, grad schools, writing residencies) has been a major blocker.

* Learn complex analysis!

* Get a better workflow for writing my notes to myself (e.g., Obsidian) and for publishing my blog/website (have a marginally-functional Hugo instance right now). Small thing, but the kind of important-but-not-urgent thing that it's easy to put off!

bawis · 2 months ago
For complex analysis, I recommend using Stein's book (the whole series is good).
bawis commented on Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian   twitter.com/haravayin_hog... · Posted by u/flaxxen
b42 · 2 months ago
Careful, by learning russian you also become an oppressed russian minority that needs to be "liberated". It's not just your brain that will get bombarded.
bawis · 2 months ago
Same with English. let's ~~bomb other countries~~ spread "democracy".
bawis commented on Google's year in review: areas with research breakthroughs in 2025   blog.google/technology/ai... · Posted by u/Anon84
andsoitis · 2 months ago
> Meanwhile the economy is tanking.

NYT: US GDP Grew 4.3%, surging in 3rd Quarter 2025 - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/business/us-economy-consu...

WSJ: Consumers Power Strongest US Economic Growth in 2 years - https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-gdp-q3-2025-2026-6cbd079e

The Guardian: US economy grew strongly in third quarter - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/23/us-economy-...

bawis · 2 months ago
The old problem with metrics like GDP, is that they consider the whole but not the parts, it is kinda saying that I and Musk have billions in wealth, but I am in debt.
bawis commented on Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2026?    · Posted by u/mfrw
johnwheeler · 2 months ago
- Tech layoffs grow 100% YoY

- Multiple interest rate cuts instead of 1

- News about prosecutions for insider trading on Polymarket.

- Bitcoin will touch a multi-year low. MSTR becomes insolvent.

- Google Gemini will overtake ChatGPT in DAU.

- Software will be more commoditized and the authors’ “taste” will become its primary differentiator.

- Fiserv will increase 50% or more in market cap (I said the same thing last year about PayPal, and I was wrong)

- Warren Buffett will pass away. (I hope I’m wrong) :-(

- Google will drop the price of Gemini Ultra to $125 a month or less, Anthropic and OpenAI will follow suit.

- Logitech will start making a dedicated vibe-coding microphone-whatever that means.

bawis · 2 months ago
I will take the Warren Buffett prediction seriously.

u/bawis

KarmaCake day20June 12, 2023View Original