Hacker News: Reimersholme

New comment by Reimersholme in "What Most People Miss About Getting Promoted"

Reimersholme — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 11:07:13 +0000

> Probably. Most managers would also argue that because you're so great with machines, you'll surely be even greater at managing others who are supposed to be great with machines. Does that make sense? No. Do managers and executives think like this anyways? Yes.

I'd say the opposite is true. In modern management theory, the value of domain knowledge for managers is severely undervalued.

New comment by Reimersholme in "OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now"

Reimersholme — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 11:34:00 +0000

In The Art of Learning, Joshua Waitzkin talks about how this was a strategy for him in tournaments as a child as well. While most other players were focusing on opening theory, he focused on end game and understanding how to use the different pieces. Then, by going with unorthodox openings, he could easily bring most players outside of their comfort zone where they started making mistakes.

New comment by Reimersholme in "Mira Murati leaves OpenAI"

Reimersholme — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 20:12:34 +0000

...and Sam Altman once again posts a response including uppercase, similar to when Ilya left. It's like he wants to let everyone know that he didn't actually care enough to write it himself but just asked chatGPT to write something for him.

New comment by Reimersholme in "Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers"

Reimersholme — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 16:18:04 +0000

Microsoft having a lot of partnerships with the military industry, and now also getting their hands on all of OpenAIs technology. In parallel, OpenAI stops sharing information about their models, making it harder for other countries to copy. Add to that the chip ban. Hm...?

New comment by Reimersholme in "Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (2021)"

Reimersholme — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 22:08:19 +0000

Impressive how this post references back to a post six years before as the starting point. Shows the value of tenacity and sticking with it, as learning compounds over time.

New comment by Reimersholme in "Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%"

Reimersholme — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 15:40:33 +0000

What's weirder to me is how I can't remember even seeing them advertised within Spotify. I know there are some really need content Spotify is producing, but the ones I'm aware off I've generally found by accident somewhere on the Internet, never through their own UI.

New comment by Reimersholme in "Goodbye, data science"

Reimersholme — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 14:44:31 +0000

Rather than wanting to confirm priors, I believe this usually is a problem with neither the PM nor the data scientist ensuring that the problem formulation is good enough before diving in. I.e., what data would be needed to actually test the hypothesis? Do we have that data or not? Is the hypothesis even formulated in a way to be falsified in theory?

I've seen so many analysis tasks where data scientists without questioning went away for a few weeks to crunch data and come back with some random graphs and statistics that are completely useless as decision support.

New comment by Reimersholme in "Finland and Sweden set to join NATO as soon as summer"

Reimersholme — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 17:17:23 +0000

The Swedish island Gotland is of central strategic importance in the baltic sea, so in case of a conflict either NATO or Russia would seize control of the island with or without Sweden’s consent.

Not to mention to secure against a Russian invasion of the mainland, of course…

New comment by Reimersholme in "Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)"

Reimersholme — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 16:36:20 +0000

Well, human thinking relies on prior models/filters for understanding the world as well so that would invalidate us as having general intelligence too?

New comment by Reimersholme in "In big tech’s dystopia, cat videos earn millions while real artists beg for tips"

Reimersholme — Mon, 31 May 2021 11:30:31 +0000

Actually, I remember reading an article from someone at Spotify who argued that the economics in that situation would end up hurting small artists and favour Taylor Swift much more than the current model.

As an example; big music aficionados might listen to 75 different bands in a month, which will mean 1% of their subscription money will go to each of them.

The large majority of music listeners though listen to 5-10 big-name artists only.

Distributing money fairly after what each premium subscriber listens too thus would end up favouring the big name artists much more than the current model they have.

I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but thought it was an interesting perspective...

New comment by Reimersholme in "A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes"

Reimersholme — Sun, 09 May 2021 17:40:41 +0000

I guess “emotional stability” is an inverted rebranding of neuroticism as it’s usually known?

New comment by Reimersholme in "Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]"

Reimersholme — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 12:43:17 +0000

I don't know about start-ups, but I think Portugal in general is still growing in attraction for remote workers. Great climate, still cheap and beneficial tax laws.

New comment by Reimersholme in "Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”"

Reimersholme — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 21:15:34 +0000

There is a very scary thing about digital art where platforms at any time can remove things or silently release a new version. It makes me uncomfortable in the same way as when newspapers online make updates to their articles with no transparent revision history of what was changed and when.

The technology just makes it easier though. The Foundations have been trying to erase the original Colin Young version of Build me up Buttercup that I love in favor of Clem Curtis rerecordings since long before Internet was a thing, as an example.

New comment by Reimersholme in "Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”"

Reimersholme — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 19:14:36 +0000

Kanye West was the first big artist I know to really utilize The new release model to break out of the old formula of releasing an album and then it’s done.

It was fascinating when Life of Pablo was released on Spotify and over the next few months was given continuous updates and patches, like it had been software.

Really proves the old proverb that great art never is finished, it’s abandoned...

New comment by Reimersholme in "Americans Aren’t Making Babies, and That’s Bad for the Economy"

Reimersholme — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 15:46:45 +0000

Speaking from a European perspective, raising children to be productive members of society used to be peoples retirement security. Socialised pensions where other peoples kids will be working to pay for your stay in the retirement home changes that equation completely.

New comment by Reimersholme in "List of Peter Thiel's Online Writings"

Reimersholme — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 16:35:15 +0000

Thanks for the great resource! I first encountered Peter Thiels thoughts in his interview with Erik Weinstein in The Portal and was blown away by their discussion.

Looking forward to reading these!

New comment by Reimersholme in "Ludic Fallacy"

Reimersholme — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 12:29:03 +0000

...and then a financial crisis hits and suddenly they expect the government to bail them out because they didn't account for that risk in their models.

New comment by Reimersholme in "Ludic Fallacy"

Reimersholme — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 12:26:54 +0000

Yes. One of the key points Taleb likes to make is that many real life situations are fat tailed, i.e. extreme events are much more likely than what someone assuming a normal distribution would account for, which might help explain why the financial system turns out to be so extremely fragile over and over again every time a major event/crisis occurs.

New comment by Reimersholme in "Reddit bans 2000 communities including The_Donald"

Reimersholme — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 10:50:09 +0000

"Communities and people that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.

[...]

While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate."

So as long as you hate or incite violence towards whatever groups Reddit define as "in the majority", you are welcome? Mind blowing...

New comment by Reimersholme in "Chaos in Hong Kong as hundreds of masked men assault protesters, journalists"

Reimersholme — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 12:01:14 +0000

I assume he's referring to emperor Xi. I don't think it's correct to consider him a single point of failure though.