Hacker News: jsomers

Can you use autoregressive diffusion to generate market data?

jsomers — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:56:13 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-use-autoregressive-diffusion-to-generate-market-data/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021410

Points: 177

# Comments: 55

What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 edition

jsomers — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 01:23:28 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.janestreet.com/wrought-2026/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000920

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jsomers in "The paper computer"

jsomers — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 03:59:24 +0000

Yeah, and it's really worth checking out https://dynamicland.org/, because Bret Victor is actually doing this -- slash pointing the way to what such a world could look like. It just seems like now might be a good time for specific smaller parts of that vision to be carved off and developed further. I say that largely because of the advances in multimodal AI, which maybe haven't been fully applied yet in this area.

The paper computer

jsomers — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 04:57:48 +0000

Article URL: https://jsomers.net/blog/the-paper-computer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747770

Points: 291

# Comments: 89

Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

jsomers — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 02:20:13 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-our-neural-network/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47146487

Points: 317

# Comments: 204

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft (2023)

jsomers — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 01:22:07 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46983725

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I design with Claude more than Figma now

jsomers — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:47:24 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.janestreet.com/i-design-with-claude-code-more-than-figma-now-index/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905837

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A coder considers the waning days of the craft (2023)

jsomers — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:11:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46575040

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jsomers in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

jsomers — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 20:01:28 +0000

This was posted when it came out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45802029. It generated a lot of comments -- more heat than light, possibly -- and I wonder if instead of just taking the title as a jumping-off point, folks could engage with the meat of the article itself.

(I wrote the article. I'm a longtime HN user. I find that threads here lately have gotten very jumpy-offy -- commenters use a specific article about e.g. icebergs melting to have a conversation about climate change and climate change denial, instead of to talk about the merits of the particular article -- and I was hoping to nudge folks to read the full piece, then comment on specific parts of it. I'm not sure that'll work but figured it's worth a try!)

The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

jsomers — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 19:55:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/is-ai-amazing-or-are-we-simple

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46176137

Points: 5

# Comments: 5

The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

jsomers — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 13:17:40 +0000

Article URL: https://jsomers.net/blog/the-mcphee-method

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45013535

Points: 199

# Comments: 53

Show HN: A word of the day that doesn't suck

jsomers — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 11:31:24 +0000

I’ve long thought that the Word of the Day was a wasted genre. The goal should be to give you words you can use; to enrich your understanding of words you already know; or at least to use words to tell you something neat about the world.

Instead, what you usually get is words that will never be used in conversation, held up as curios. Some examples from Dictionary.com’s daily email: thewless, balladmonger, vagility, contextomy. These words are... not useful.

I’ve always thought I could do better. My friend Ben recently created a daily puzzle game, called Bracket City, launched here on HN [1], which I like because it takes about the same amount of time as Wordle but has some of the variety and artistry of a good crossword.

Ben agreed to let me write a word of the day for the game’s audience. We’ve collected them all here: https://bracket.city/words. It’s such a joy to write -- every day, I pay homage to a word I love or use or have newly discovered. I find myself paying more attention to words I encounter, thinking if they deserve a place.

It’s also fun for another reason. Many years ago I wrote a blog post, "You’re probably using the wrong dictionary" [2], that made the rounds and actually still finds new readers today. It was about how the modern-day dictionaries we find by default on our iPhones and web browsers are actually kind of bureaucratic and lifeless. Through a writer I love, John McPhee, I rediscovered Webster’s 1913 dictionary, which feels like it was written by a thinking person who loved words. I still consult it all the time. Writing a word of the day has reminded me just how delightful and useful Webster’s old dictionary is -- and reacquainted me with the OED, which I now look to every day, and which I discovered you can access with your library card.

Some of my favorite entries so far: sophisticated, twee, gravitas, blockbuster, meteorologist, send, bid. There are more than 175 now -- and more coming once a day, every day, for as long as Bracket City stands.

To sign up to see each word of the day as it’s published, go to https://bracket.city/words.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622719

[2] https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44645597

Points: 82

# Comments: 34

An experiment that turned back biological time

jsomers — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 04:13:24 +0000

Article URL: https://nehalslearnings.substack.com/p/the-experiment-that-turned-back-biological

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43713053

Points: 31

# Comments: 2

Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]

jsomers — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 21:46:10 +0000

I thought the HN crowd would appreciate this story I wrote about the keeper of a university's lab animals. In reporting articles about science, and being a biology-watcher generally, I’ve had an uneasy time squaring my enthusiasm for cutting-edge biomedical research with the fact that this research so regularly involves breeding animals just to give them diseases and kill them. This is done as humanely as possible, of course.

The contrast hit me most vividly during the pandemic when I was writing an article about the immune system. [1] One of the scientists I spoke to told me about putting hamsters on warming plates, picking them up gently — in general, caring for and about them — and then feeling grief at their deaths. But of course understanding the immune response during infection with covid was a worthy cause. I felt no judgement towards this scientist; they are in a difficult position.

There was another more direct bit of inspiration, when I read this article [2], in 2023, about the toll that caring for laboratory animals could take on people’s mental health:

> Besides the symptoms Sessions experienced, those who handle lab animals may face insomnia, chronic physical ailments, zombielike lack of empathy, and, in extreme cases, severe depression, substance abuse, and thoughts of suicide. As many as nine in 10 people in the profession will suffer from compassion fatigue at some point during their careers, according to recent research, more than twice the rate of those who work in hospital intensive care units. It’s one of the leading reasons animal care workers quit.

That left an impression on me, and also armed me with a character: the forgotten-about, somewhat miserable vivarium worker.

The story obviously takes many liberties with fact — it is fiction — but I also tried to ground it in reality, and stuff that you might think I made up (the guillotine, the crazy VR sphere in the first paragraph), I did not.

I hope you enjoy! If nothing else I expect you’ll appreciate the illustrations, done by my friend Ben Smith [3].

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-corona...

[2]: https://www.science.org/content/article/suffering-silence-ca...

[3]: https://www.stephenbonesproductions.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710761

Points: 71

# Comments: 17