Hacker News: alexwennerberg

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

alexwennerberg — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:24:59 +0000

My point is that people, lacking common sense, got themselves addicted to nicotine after reading this blog post. I'm not trying to refute the science here, which would be both far longer of an endeavor and not what my blog post is about.

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

alexwennerberg — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 06:38:02 +0000

I’m not trying to argue against his post. If I was, I would devote more than two sentences to it. I’m trying to argue that it’s too long

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

alexwennerberg — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:43:01 +0000

Citing individual papers is not how you do science. Science requires the full context of an entire domain, which may include high quality papers which contradict each other.

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

alexwennerberg — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:39:27 +0000

In your original comment, you quoted my text. In the follow-up, you changed the subject, talking about a bunch of other comments (most of which are heavily downvoted). My reply was a commentary on my text, not what anyone else said. My point was that you took one mildly acerbic offhand comment and made it out to be something that it was not (i.e. unfairly cruel and hostile). This is because you interpreted offhand dismissal as "sneering." Frankly, your reply was far ruder and more sarcastic than anything I said.

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

alexwennerberg — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:04:16 +0000

I cannot speak on behalf of Hacker News commenters that are not myself, I can only defend my words, which were far milder than that.

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

alexwennerberg — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:06:21 +0000

> "Tee hee lols, cutting insight from superior mind, zing, burn, am I so great, or am I so great? I hope you feel wiser for reading my wisdom. Imagine how much worse this would be if I committed that sin of 'adding detail and nuance'. Also I'm not going to do the one thing I said they should do - interrogate the assumptions I made at the start."

It's actually quite interesting to me that even relatively mild jabs get dismissed by rationalists as "sneering." "Sneering" is what they are most averse to: as if the worst crime is simply to choose not to engage with something or be dismissive of it on its face. Something that is extremely normal to do.

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

alexwennerberg — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:52:04 +0000

> By the content and construction of these sentences, the author makes it abundantly clear that he finds the second overwhelmingly more convincing than the first, and that the second essentially refutes the first.

> Given that the only evidentiary standard this author appears to be able to apply is “how much does this agree what what I already believe”

Mainstream medical science along with common sense point to nicotine being addictive and bad for you. I don't really feel the need to interrogate that view, especially when "interrogating" in this context would mean spending dozens of hours of my life going line-by-line through each reference and trying to understand the context of a field which, frankly speaking, neither me nor the author of the article have any business trying to evaluate. The only winning move is not to play.

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Who Cares About the Shrimp?"

alexwennerberg — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:44:13 +0000

I do

New comment by alexwennerberg in "AWS Acquires DuckLabs"

alexwennerberg — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:49:14 +0000

I'm glad I stuck with SQLite. Governance is an important part of any open source project. SQLite has kept things narrow and focused, while DuckDB's philosophy is to do more and more, making it a general-purpose data science tool. I am old-fashioned in that I believe in the philosophy that software should "do one thing and do it well"

Who Cares about the Shrimp?

alexwennerberg — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:53:31 +0000

Article URL: https://joinreboot.org/p/who-cares-about-the-shrimp

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287871

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Naive design is better than AI design"

alexwennerberg — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:33:42 +0000

> Normal people overwhelmingly prefer AI design (and flattering, grandiose AI slop writing as well)

Everyone I have talked to universally hates AI design.

New comment by alexwennerberg in "SQLite should have (Rust-style) editions"

alexwennerberg — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:36:43 +0000

I don't have a problem with setting a few relevant flags for any new SQLite database. It's a good encouragement to familiarize yourself with the settings.

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)"

alexwennerberg — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 04:32:37 +0000

> Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income.

There are probably a few thousand of these in the entire United States. The market system heavily under-values writing as is, independent of piracy

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)"

alexwennerberg — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 04:29:51 +0000

> This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

If the books were released under an open source license, there would be no problem here?

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Building durable workflows on Postgres"

alexwennerberg — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:27:37 +0000

> But when you hit that wall, it is hard to stop and convince people to use different patterns and systems. I've seen so many tables go from "it will only be a few thousand rows" to suddenly several TB and then people are looking confused when performance and db admin tasks get really difficult.

It's much, much worse in my experience to have to develop for the opposite -- working on a system that was designed for an imagined "infinite" scale that in reality like 100GB and a few transactions a minute.

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Permacomputing Principles"

alexwennerberg — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:10:28 +0000

For any Bay Area folks, we have a permacomputing meetup. Planning on scheduling the next one, you can join the mailing list or RSS for updates

https://alexwennerberg.com/permacomputing.html

Please don't vibe code your personal website

alexwennerberg — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 01:03:55 +0000

Article URL: https://alexwennerberg.com/blog/2026-01-31-ai.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47759977

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

AI can sort of code, can't write

alexwennerberg — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:02:26 +0000

Article URL: https://alexwennerberg.com/blog/2026-03-31-craft2.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47630699

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by alexwennerberg in "Permacomputing"

alexwennerberg — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:39:46 +0000

See you all there!

New comment by alexwennerberg in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

alexwennerberg — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 07:46:16 +0000

Large firms are extremely bureaucratic organizations largely isolated from the market by their monopolistic positions. Internal pressures rule over external ones, and thus, inefficiency abounds. AI undeniably is a productive tool, but large companies aren't really primarily concerned with productivity.