Top all-time · #8
Gwern Branwen
Personal blog · gwern.net · on HN as gwernscienceprogrammingphilosophy
Gwern Branwen writes Gwern.net Newsletter, a personal blog at gwern.net about science, programming and philosophy. Since 2010, 1,549 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3,480 times, most often “Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement (2022)”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link gwern.net for its long essays on commoditizing complements, plus pieces on GPT-3, spaced repetition and archiving URLs, cited as references in discussions.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called a good article, a good list, a fun post and the best work on its topic; silk-road page's anchors and print CSS praised.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal website of Gwern Branwen (writer, self-experimenter, and programmer): topics: psychology, statistics, technology, deep learning, anime. This index page is a categorized list of Gwern.net pages.
Most-linked posts?
- Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement (2022)65 people · 70 mentions · first linked 2023-02-24
- Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement (2018)56 people · 75 mentions · first linked 2018-03-25
- Nicotine: On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)37 people · 53 mentions · first linked 2016-05-06
- /28 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2017-01-06
- It Looks Like You're Trying to Take over the World (2022)24 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2023-02-15
- Surprisingly Turing-Complete22 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2016-11-14
- Spaced Repetition20 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2017-12-19
- Nicotine19 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2023-04-27
- Spaced Repitition17 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2011-07-26
- The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend17 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2017-10-16
What Hacker News says?
Of course people would scramble, but it has nothing to do with how much value you can screw users out of using advertising, because even if ads were worth $0 revenue, search is so valuable you could just plain charge users. This is why there is essentially no relationship between the value of search and the ad revenue. The value of the ad revenue could be $0, and the value to the user would still be $100+/month. And…
Comment linking /Ads
on “Google Search Is Dying”Submitted On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality as a story · 576 points
HN discussionGoogle's problem is they've virtually nothing (given their resources) to "commoditizing their complement". https://www.gwern.net/Complement Google's compliment is web sites. What have they done to make a web site easier to make? They even killed their RSS feed. They have released a bit of web tech, but their offerings are generally a bit sad or only solve Google problems (e.g. Go). If you want to distribute an .exe…
Comment linking /Complement
on “Google Search Is Dying”Submitted Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017) as a story · 525 points
HN discussionTry and read Borges’ essay on blindness. Some excerpts: There were the books, but I had to ask my friends the titles of them. I remembered a sentence from Rudolf Steiner, in his books on anthroposo phy, which was the name he gave to his theosophy. He said that when some thing ends, we must think that something begins. His advice is salutary, but the execution is difficult, for we only know what we have lost, not w…
Comment linking /docs/borges/1977-borges-blindness.pdf
on “Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?”Submitted Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf] as a story · 425 points
HN discussionThe business justification is called commoditizing your complement. https://gwern.net/complement is a good article about it.
Comment linking /complement
on “Steam Machine”Submitted Life Improvements Since the 1990s as a story · 424 points
HN discussionIt is no surprise but sound business reason that private repos will be available for free. For some background, check this HN classic: "Commoditize your complements" ( https://www.gwern.net/Complement#2 )
Comment linking /Complement
on “Announcing unlimited free private repos”Submitted Nootropics as a story · 413 points
HN discussion"Come to think of it, the negative impact on such competitors was likely a key motivation for releasing the new models." "Commoditize Your Complement" is often cited here: https://gwern.net/complement
Comment linking /complement
on “Open source AI is the path forward”Submitted What Is The Morning Writing Effect? as a story · 405 points
HN discussion> if Facebook were selling their AI advances instead of selling the output it produces, they wouldn't be advocating for everyone else to open source their stack You're acting as if commoditizing one's complements is either new or reprehensible [1]. [1] https://gwern.net/complement
Comment linking /complement
on “Open source AI is the path forward”Submitted Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement as a story · 403 points
HN discussionThis is in line with "Programming As Theory Building"[0] (Peter Naur, 1985) that puts forward the idea that when one is building a system one builds a "theory" (in a sense a mapping of what, where and why) of that system that is essential for continued work on it. Once I internalized this idea it helped me make sense of why rewrites are not "never a good idea" and simultaneously why they are so fraught with peril, a…
Comment linking /doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf
on “My AI skeptic friends are all nuts”Submitted Melatonin as a story · 385 points
HN discussionCommoditize Your Complements: https://gwern.net/complement
Comment linking /complement
on “Meta Llama 3”Submitted My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s as a story · 382 points
HN discussionThey're commoditizing their complement [0][1], inasmuch as LLMs are a complement of social media and advertising (which I think they are). They've made it harder for competitors like Google or TikTok to compete with Meta on the basis of "we have a super secret proprietary AI that no one else has that's leagues better than anything else". If everyone has access to a high quality AI (perhaps not the world's best, but…
Comment linking /complement
on “Meta Llama 3”Submitted Using Silk Road as a story · 368 points
HN discussion> LLM just complete your prompt in a way that match their training data. They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own. They just write text. LLMs have a million plans and a million thoughts: they need to simulate all the characters in their text to complete these texts, and those characters (often enough) behave as if they have plans and thoughts. Compare https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
Comment linking /fiction/clippy
on “Claude 4”Submitted 1.5 TB of Dark Net Market scrapes as a story · 364 points
HN discussionFirst of all, leniency is usually expected (and this was the exact opposite of leniency) if it is someone's first offense or if they seemed like a good citizen prior. Second of all, people missed my point I guess: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42792552 Third of all, the Silk Road saved lives. https://cybercrimejournal.com/pdf/Lacson%26Jonesvol10issue1I... https://gwern.net/doc/darknet-market/silk-road/1/2013-…
on “Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon”Submitted Internet Search Tips as a story · 344 points
HN discussionThe problem is that if the law is arguably unethical or arbitrary, you're going to catch more "good" people in it. My comment was not so much a defense of Ross as it was an accusation against unjust drug law. Imagine a hypothetical law which arrests anyone who trades in red shirts. Someone comes along and doesn't see what the big deal is and decides to trade in these shirts on the black market. Lives are saved becau…
on “Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon”Submitted How Many Computers Are in Your Computer? as a story · 335 points
HN discussionAs I keep telling people: "hands are hard". This is why I went so far as to make a hand-specific dataset ("PALM" https://www.gwern.net/Crops#palm which of course now everyone is going to confuse with 'PaLM'...). Hands are just way too variable to learn easily. My dataset is a start, but it may benefit from focused training, the way Facebook's new Make-A-Scene https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13131#facebook (not DALL-E 2 q…
Comment linking /Crops
on “Dall-E 2”Submitted It looks like you’re trying to take over the world as a story · 334 points
HN discussionFWIW, open source is not an absolute good. It is undercutting the ability of your peers to make a living. It is making software a commodity, such that capital rich hardware owners can make a killing. See AWS. Commoditize your complement. https://www.gwern.net/Complement
Comment linking /Complement
on “Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube”Submitted Perfume reviews as a story · 325 points
HN discussion
