Top all-time · #2662
Brian Lee
Personal blog · moderndescartes.com · on HN as brileephilosophywriting
Brian Lee's personal blog at moderndescartes.com covers philosophy and writing. Since 2014, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 115 times, most often “The Factobattery”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- The Factobattery5 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2023-01-07
- Readability: Google's temple to engineering excellence (2023)4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-07-05
- From GnuGo to AlphaGo Zero – A Roadmap for Solving Difficult Problems4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-04-16
- What's in a Codebase?3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-03-26
- Who Pays You? and Why?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-07
- My Path to Machine Learning3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-03-14
- Taste2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-09-12
- The Chemistry of Refrigerants2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-07-13
- Data-Oriented Programming in Python2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-09-14
- How (Not?) to Use Python’s List Comprehensions2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-04
What Hacker News says?
I'm working on a startup in this space and wrote up my thoughts here: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/study_mode/
Comment linking /essays/study_mode/
on “Study mode”Submitted Deep learning on electronic medical records is doomed to fail as a story · 227 points
HN discussionThis report, which is often quoted, https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... gives a crazy low cost for a solar + battery plant that assumes storage for an hour and a half which is certainly too little. When I split out their generation and storage numbers and put in the assumption that 12 hours of storage gets you through the night the price is getting in the same range as gas turbine power p…
Comment linking /essays/factobattery/
on “A battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant”Submitted Learn perfect pitch in 15 years as a story · 171 points
HN discussionI did some lengthy analysis behind the chemistry / economics and wrote it up here. https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/carbon_neutral_concre... TL;DR: ignoring all sources of overhead/inefficiency and purely on consideration of thermodynamic costs, $70 of electricity can generate $100 of lime, $300 of chlorine gas, and $75 of hydrogen gas. Much more details on the chemistry and economics in the blog post...
Comment linking /essays/carbon_neutral_concrete/
on “Launch HN: Heimdal (YC S21) – Carbon neutral cement”Submitted A Deep Dive into Monte Carlo Tree Search as a story · 150 points
HN discussionNo. I wrote up the computations explaining why. See http://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/co2_closed_rooms/
Comment linking /essays/co2_closed_rooms/
on “Is Conference Room Air Making Us Dumber?”Submitted How (Not?) to Use Python’s List Comprehensions as a story · 134 points
HN discussionFor non-Googlers like me, here's some background about "readability": https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/readability/
Comment linking /essays/readability/
on “Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?”Submitted Data-Oriented Programming in Python as a story · 99 points
HN discussionCould be a good candidate for factobattery. Overbuild the system, run them at full speed at peak solar generation, then underclock them at night. https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/
Comment linking /essays/factobattery/
on “New LLM optimization technique slashes memory costs”Submitted The Tyranny of the Flake Equation as a story · 78 points
HN discussionI transcribed the score, available here: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/chopin_waltz_posthumo...
Comment linking /essays/chopin_waltz_posthumous/
on “A Chopin waltz unearthed after nearly 200 years”Submitted Bitpacking and Compression of Sparse Datasets as a story · 60 points
HN discussionI realized the same thing when trying to compute F1-optimized thresholds; scanning through all possible threshold scores is O(n^2) but computing f1 score inline while scanning through the sorted array is O(n). https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/auc_intuition/ is my writeup on why the sorting approach is the most economical way to approach this sort of problem
Comment linking /essays/auc_intuition/
on “14,000x Speedup (2015)”Submitted Unexpected Shunts in the Supply Chain as a story · 29 points
HN discussionYou may wish to search for "readability at Google". Here is one article: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/readability/ (I have not read this article closely, but it is about the right concept, so I provide it as a starting point since "readability" writ large can be an ambiguous term.)
Comment linking /essays/readability/
on “Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust”Submitted LLM Shibboleths determine AI effectiveness as a story · 23 points
HN discussionFor those of you suggesting we use the extra energy for $pet_topic I suggest reading https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/ Tldr: most applications of free energy have capital costs that far outweigh the free energy harvest potential.
Comment linking /essays/factobattery/
on “Maximizing Battery Storage Profits via High-Frequency Intraday Trading”Submitted Codebase is 250% AI generated as a story · 16 points
HN discussionTaste is the field behind the goalposts, and we as humans are constantly expanding that field by "having taste" and developing taste as a community. https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/taste/
Comment linking /essays/taste/
on “You Had No Taste Before AI”Submitted Learn Perfect Pitch in 15 years as a story · 5 points
HN discussionBeing one of those lucky few at Google Brain who switched into ML early enough to catch the wave... I fielded my fair share of questions from academic friends about how they could get one of those sweet gigs paying $$$ where they could do whatever they wanted. I wrote these two essays basically to answer this class of questions. Why did Brain Exist? https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/why_brain/ Who pays you? And…
Comment linking /essays/who_pays_you/
on “I sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS 24”Submitted Readability: Google's temple to engineering excellence (2023) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI did some thinking about this idea on my blog - https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/homeostasis_volatilit... the short: think of it like the Kelly Criterion. There's an optimal level of risk to take here, which you can update based on real world experiences.
Comment linking /essays/homeostasis_volatility/
on “Giant Ship Is Moved To and Fro to Break Suction: Suez Update”Submitted The Chemistry of Refrigerants as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI wrote a similar game called Fibs, where the game mechanism is that adjacent Fibonacci numbers are combined to make the next Fibonacci number. It's also command-line based. https://github.com/brilee/games/blob/master/fibs.py A short writeup is here: http://moderndescartes.com/essays/fibs
Comment linking /essays/fibs
on “2048 in the terminal”Submitted Joining Jane Street as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI wrote a blog post trying to explain some of the subtleties of Western musical notation - http://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/musical_notation/ I think better systems exist, but it's hard to design one without understanding the span of functionality that the current system is capable of handling. And once you've spent the 15 years it takes to fluently read Western musical notation, it's hard to think any other wa…
Comment linking /essays/musical_notation/
on “Tibetan musical notation”Submitted From GnuGo to AlphaGo Zero – A Roadmap for Solving Difficult Problems as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
