https://danluu.com/corrections/

I'm trying some experimental tiers on Patreon to see if I can get to 
substack-like levels of financial support for this blog without
moving to substack!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Major errors on this blog (and their corrections)

Here's a list of errors on this blog that I think were fairly
serious. While what I think of as serious is, of course, subjective,
I don't think there's any reasonable way to avoid that because, e.g.,
I make a huge number of typos, so many that the majority of
acknowledgements on many posts are for people who e-mailed or DM'ed
me typo fixes.

A list that included everything, including typos would both be
uninteresting for other people to read as well as high overhead for
me, which is why I've drawn the line somewhere. An example of an
error I don't think of as serious is, in this post on how I learned
to program, I originally had the dates wrong on when the competition
programmers from my high school made money (it was a couple years
after I thought it was). In that case, and many others, I don't think
that the date being wrong changes anything significant about the
post.

Although I'm publishing the original version of this in 2021, I
expect this list to grow over time. I hope that I've become more
careful and that the list will grow more slowly in the future than it
has in the past, but that remains to be seen. I view it as a good
sign that a large fraction of the list is from my first three months
of blogging, in 2013, but that's no reason to get complacent!

I've added a classification below that's how I think of the errors,
but that classification is also arbitrary and the categories aren't
even mutually exclusive. If I ever collect enough of these that it's
difficult to hold them all in my head at once, I might create a tag
system and use that to classify them instead, but I hope to not
accumulate so many major errors that I feel like I need a tag system
for readers to easily peruse them.

  * Insufficient thought
      + 2013: Using random algorithms to decrease the probability
        that good stories get "unlucky" on HN: this idea was tried
        and didn't work well as well as putting humans in the loop
        who decide which stories should be rescued from oblivion.
          o Since this was a proposal and not a claim, this
            technically wasn't an error since I didn't claim that
            this would definitely work, but my feeling is that I
            should've also considered solutions that put humans in
            the loop. I didn't because Digg famously got a lot of
            backlash for having humans influence their front page
            but, in retrospect, we can see that it's possible to do
            so in a way that doesn't generate backlash that effective
            kills the site and I think this could've been predicted
            with enough thought
  * Naivete
      + 2013: The institution knowledge and culture that create
        excellence can take a long time to build up: At this time, I
        hadn't worked in software and that thought that this wasn't
        as difficult for software because so many software companies
        are successful with new/young teams. But, in retrospect, the
        difference isn't that those companies don't produce bad
        (unreliable, buggy, slow, etc.) software, it's that product/
        market fit and network effects are important enough that it
        frequently doesn't matter that software is bad
  * Insufficient verification of information
      + 2016: Building a search engine isn't trivial: although I
        think the overall point is true, one of the pieces of
        evidence I relied on came out of using numbers that someone
        who worked on a search engine told me about. But when I
        measured actual numbers, I found that the numbers I was told
        were off by multiple orders of magnitude
  * Blunder
      + 2015: Checking out Butler Lampson's review of what worked in
        CS, 16 years later: it was wrong to say that capabilities
        were a "no" in 2015 given their effectiveness on mobile and
        that seems so obviously wrong at the time that I would call
        this a blunder rather than something where I gave it a decent
        amount of thought but should've thought through it more
        deeply
  * Pointlessly difficult to understand explanation
      + 2013: How data alignment impacts memory latency: the main
        plots in this post use a ratio of latencies, which adds a
        level of indirection that many people found confusing
      + 2017: It is easy to achieve 95%-ile performance: the most
        common objection people had to this post was something like
        "False. You need to be very talented and/or it is hard to
        [play in the NBA / become a chess GM / achieve a 2200 chess
        rating]". James Clear made an even weaker claim on Twitter
        and also got similar responses. There isn't really space to
        do this on Twitter, but in my blog post, I should've included
        more concrete examples of what various levels of performance
        look like for people who have a difficult time estimating
        what performance looks like at various percentiles. To pick
        one of the less outlandish claims, here's a claim that a 2200
        rating is 95%-ile for someone who's ever played chess online,
        which appears to be off by perhaps four orders of magnitude,
        plus or minus one.
  * Errors in retrospect
      + 2015: Blog monetization: I grossly underestimated how much I
        could make on Patreon by looking at how much Casey Muratori,
        Eric Raymond, and eevee were making on Patreon at the time. I
        thought that all three of them would out-earn me based for a
        variety of reasons and that was incorrect. A major reason
        that was incorrect was that boring, long-form, writing
        monetizes much better than I exepected, which means that I
        monetarily undervalued that compared to what other tech folks
        are doing.
          o A couple weeks ago, I added a link to Patreon at the top
            of posts (instead of just having one hidding at the
            bottom) and mentioned having a Patreon on Twitter. Since
            then, my earnings have increased by about as much as Eric
            Raymond makes in total and the amount seems to be
            increasing at a decent rate, which is a result I wouldn't
            have expected before the rise of substack. But anyone who
            realized how well individual writers can monetize their
            writing could've created substack and no one did until
            Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi created
            substack, so I'd say that this one was somewhat
            non-obvious

Thanks to Anja Boskovic and Ville Sundberg for comments/corrections/
discussion.

Individuals matter -
Archive Support this site (patreon) Twitter