Readit Newslucasfcosta commented on A brief history of random numbers (2018) crates.io/crates/oorandom... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
This is what I come to HN for.
Thanks for writing this, Jessica.
This is a great paragraph:
> If you want to, you can just decide to shift gears at this point, and no one's going to tell you you can't. You can just decide to be more curious, or more responsible, or more energetic, and no one's going to go look up your college grades and say, "Hey, wait a minute, this person's supposed to be a slacker."
I've often seen people get too attached to an unproductive "identity" instead of looking at things as they are. It's way too common for people to fail once and think they're a failure, rather than thinking that they just failed at that particular time.
By the way, I remember meeting you during the S23 batch and how genuinely excited you were to meet us, young founders who were just getting started. It does seem like you found your people!
I know this is repeated ad nauseam by now, but as an ardent user of em dashes for many years pre-LLM, I think this a bad heuristic.
Co-author and founder of Briefer here.
I used to use em dashes before they were cool. I actually learned about them when I emailed a guy who's a software engineer at Genius and also writes for The New Yorker and The Atlantic.
I asked him for tips on how to write well and he recommended that I read Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style", which uses em dashes exhaustively, and explains when and why one should use them.
It also pains me that I can't use them anymore or else people will think an AI did the writing.