Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 6,299 posts.

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4156

Bayes is guaranteed to overfit

The myth A few years ago I saw a StackOverflow question (but I cannot find it now): allegedly Andrew Gelman blogged that Bayesian models would not overfit and would only underfit (I also cannot find Andrew’s blog post now but I think what he meant by “Bayesian models only underfits” is that you can never fully model…

4157

Why write?

As a reaction to the previous article on how to write a scientific paper, I got some reactions from friends and colleagues, the underlying message being that they would rather like to understand why writing can be important. There is indeed a tendency to see academic writing as a tedious task that one should try to…

4164

There is no hard takeoff

Back in 2014, Elon Musk referred to AI as summoning the demon. And it wasn’t hard to see that view. Soon, Go agents would beat top humans learning from self play. By the end of 2017, the same algorithm mastered Chess and Shogi. By 2020, it didn’t even need tons of calls to the simulator, and could play Atari too.

4169

You can serve static data over HTTP

This will be short. I need to let some steam off and flush this thing out of my mind because it's already hanging around for too long. The story goes like this: we're prototyping small tool for whatever and we're at the point where there is a visible need to store some (most likely) static data. Oh, the thing is in…