On the Edge

What Hacker News says

1. lovestoryNov 2024
   I only have time to listen to audiobooks so I hope this list is not too basic.

   On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver

   The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto by Jonathan Taplin

   The Value of Others by Orion Taraban

   Rinsed: From Cartels to Crypto: How the Tech Industry Washes Money for the World's Deadliest Crooks by Geoff White

   Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan

   Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter by Zoe Schiffer

   Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban

   AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

   Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC by Roger Ver

   Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America by Charles Gasparino

   The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets by Thomas R Cech

   and my book of the year

   Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health by Casey Means M D

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2. sienNov 2024
   A few of the books that stand out that I've read this year.

   Troubled - Rob Henderson. About how Henderson was in state care and wound up at prestigious universities and his thoughts on the world.

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/176444107-troubled

   Not the End of the World - Hannah Ritchie from 'Our World in Data' about the state of the planet.

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145624737-not-the-end-of...

   Dictatorland - Paul Kenyon - About the dictators who have impoverished Africa.

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36260719-dictatorland

   Magic Pill - Johann Hari - About Semaglutide and how people got fat.

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201319612-magic-pill

   On the Edge - Nate Silver - About how seeing the world in terms of risk and expected value can work.

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/204236707-on-the-edge

   Orbital - Samantha Harvey - Booker Prize winner about people on the ISS and the world.

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123136728-orbital

   Build, Baby, Build - Bryan Caplan on why YIMBYism is a good idea. This is a graphic novel. It's really fun.

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/181564537-build-baby-bui...

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3. domodomoJul 2009
   On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore (http://bit.ly/11KMaT Amazon).

   Commodore has been kind of ignored in computing history, but they were the first company to sell 1 million units. This book has a lot of big characters in it, including the ruthless, cigar chomping, Jack Tramiel.

   I'm biased though, as I cut my teeth on a C64.

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4. alexpotatoApr 2026
   I was reading Nate Silver's book "On The Edge" and there is an interesting part where he takes predictions on the usage of nuclear weapons taken from just after World War 2 and compares them to what the Bayesian prediction would be given what actually happened.

   Post World War 2, some people had the odds per year at 10%. Some of that is probably a mix of recency bias + not understanding how to use new weapons etc etc but as Silver points out, the odds were much lower.

   I mention this only b/c the "could something trained on LLMs of the time predict the future" always makes me think of it.

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5. maxbondApr 2026
   > Repeatedly, in a reproducible way, for events in the arrow of time? We can test this by going back to 1945 and running forward again?

   This is a frequentist mental model - all well and good, but frequentism and Bayesianism are different schools of statistics. Where frequentism asks the question, "if I keep drawing samples from this distribution, what does the histogram converge to?" Bayesianism asks the question, "given my prior understanding and a new piece of evidence (a new sample), how should I adjust my hypothesis about what distribution it is I am sampling from?". (That is really boiled down, and the frequentist part is maybe even butchered.)

   Among other applications this enables us to estimate a distribution for which we have a tiny number of samples. A problem I'm interested in is called the Doomsday Argument, which estimates how long humanity will survive using your birth order (the number of humans born before you) and the anthropic principle (we assume you were not born unusually early or unusually late but closer to the mode); interestingly, everything you observe in the universe is already factored into this measurement, so you can't ever get a second sample. Obviously the opportunity for error with 1 measurement is huge, but you can come up with a number and it isn't arbitrary, it is a real estimate.

   Similarly, we only have about 80 samples of years in which it was possible to have a nuclear exchange, so a fairly small sample size, but we can still get a noisey estimate. But I haven't read On The Edge yet, so I don't know exactly what Silver does here.

   >> This is kind of the point being made.

   > Was it?

   I think they meant that all of the solutions people invented to prevent nuclear war and which commentators failed to anticipate is reflected within the true probability distribution and within our dataset. So it is captured in our estimate, to the best of our abilities and given the limited data we have.

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