Hacker News Reader

morelandjson 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

I’d have to guess that new startup founders are building leaner teams leading to slower burn rates and longer run ways. That has value. I think share skepticism is warranted is whether or not old behemoths can retrofit AI efficiency gains into their existing organizational structures.

morelandjson GPT-5

Anyone know what the deal is with connectors? I don’t see them in the app and they made it sound like Google Calendar would be made broadly available as a connector.

morelandjson Burrito Now, Pay Later

Being fully leveraged is great for capitalism and horrible for your mental health and general well being. Ever live under crushing debt? It’s awful. Step back for a minute and look at the big picture. People are taking on debt to eat lunch. That’s insane. The author acts like it’s zero sum and if BNPL isn’t the one offering the short term loan someone else will at worse terms. That’s just not true and hand waves over the fact that people who are uneducated are unwittingly being coaxed into making bad decisions with glittery UX and one click checkout.

morelandjson Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M

Would honestly prefer this to an overly burdensome interview process.

morelandjson Achieving Great Privacy with Safari

How to avoid fingerprinting? In general, and is there anything for Safari?

morelandjson Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

https://github.com/Duke-QCD/trento/blob/master/src/fast_exp....

Check it out for yourself! I’m not claiming this was some kind of prodigious programming move, just something memorable that stuck with me.

morelandjson Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

The smartest people I’ve ever worked with to date were from physics grad school. Still remember the time my coworker was doing code profiling, decided he was unhappy that the exponential function from the standard library was too slow, and decided to write a Taylor series approximation that gave him the precision he needed and cut the run time in half. He also learned C++ in a weekend and was vastly better at it by the end of that weekend than most people I’ve met in industry. And these were just every day occurrences that made it a thrill to go to work. Working with talented people is a drug.

Some tips for younger people considering it: get involved in undergraduate research, apply to fellowships, shop for an advisor with a good reputation, start anticipating and preparing for an industry transition early, travel, date, and enjoy life!

morelandjson Kids Can't Read Books

Next gen will probably leverage AI summarization extensively and effectively. They’ll have better tools to efficiently consume information than lawyers in the past.

morelandjson Kids Can't Read Books

I’d like to defend the opposite perspective. Kids today are connected to a firehose of information-dense content distributed over the web and through cell phones. They’re consuming more information than any generation in the past, both garbage and high-value content.

There is an undeniable “holier than thou” attitude pushed by avid book readers. Frankly, there are a lot of books and long-form content which could be summarized without losing value into a single internet blog post. People have changed the way they consume information and books are on the decline but I reject the idea this is a crisis.

morelandjson Imaging shapes of atomic nuclei in high-energy nuclear collisions

Am one of the authors cited in the paper. I think the real opportunity for this type of inverse problem estimation work is resolving the shape and fluctuations of the nucleon.

morelandjson Trump wins presidency for second time

It’s good to periodically reexamine your own positions against that of the majority and be open to realignment and different ideas, but remember that the collective opinion of society over the long term may look back unfavorably on the collective opinion of society over a period of time in the past. It’s OK to hold minority opinions, and it’s OK to disagree with the majority of Americans who voted for Trump.

morelandjson Are there individual protons and neutrons in a nucleus?

Physicists model heavy-ion collisions at the LHC using fluid dynamic simulations, and to get accurate predictions of final particle correlations, you need to account for the position fluctuations of discrete protons and neutrons within the nucleus.

morelandjson Causal inference as a blind spot of data scientists

Not sure what point you are trying to make here. Double ML is a valid approach for debiasing confounding effects.

morelandjson Kalman filter from the ground up

There are quite a few similarities between the Elo rating system and Kalman filters. I’ve always thought this would be a good way to teach them, because you can start with a simplified univariate case, then modify and generalize from there.

morelandjson Texas paid Bitcoin miner Riot $31.7M to shut down in August

I have a different definition of healthy capitalism, a system that enables people to fulfill their needs/wants while maximizing collective happiness. Wantonly consuming electricity for the purpose of price discovery amidst the back drop of global warming may not be (completely) insane, but it does appear to be a textbook externality, and it’s hardly a slam dunk for capitalism.

morelandjson Ask HN: Tips for Efficiently Managing Full-Time Job, PhD, Side Hustles, Gym?

Sleep, food, exercise. Those three form a pillar for happiness and success. Some tricks which I’ve found helpful:

Instead of focusing on doing the thing, focus on doing the things that makes doing the thing easy.

For example, don’t focus on going to bed early, focus on avoiding caffeine after noon and winding down your routine an hour before your target bed time. Don’t focus on going to the gym but focus on living somewhere that is close to a gym. Same with eating well, develop a system that makes it convenient to eat well. For example, I do a mix of grocery delivery and meal kits because I know I hate grocery shopping.

By focusing upstream on making downstream execution easy, things fall into place and it all feels more actionable.

morelandjson We need scientific dissidents

My experience in physics was that dissidents were plentiful. It’s easier to poke holes in existing theories than it is to explain why a new theory explains all previous observations. I’m more worried about the reproducibility crisis than I am about scientific group think. Most scientists I knew, including those I disagreed with, were open minded people.

morelandjson Ask HN: Is the Market Recovering?

May I ask where you are working now?

morelandjson New research puts age of universe at 26.7 – not 13.7 – billion years

It’s pretty misleading label for the estimate. It’s the age you get when you reverse extrapolate current physics to the point where current bodies converge in space and time.

It’s possible space and time continue beyond that extrapolation point. No one knows.

morelandjson Ask HN: What will AI look like in 2025?

Similar to what you see today, but wide spread acceptance and adoption. Companies that that are worried about privacy issues today will get over their reservation by 2025. Many software jobs will provide some kind of access to one of big tech models.

I think terms will emerge around querying LLMs similar to how Googling became a term. Peoples’ behaviors will change and they’ll query models more regularly for more use cases. AI generated contributions will become more culturally acceptable.

morelandjson Science and Religion Have Never Been Enemies

Unsurprisingly, the author takes a religious approach to proving his point and leans heavily on assertions and anecdotes.

If anyone has any doubts, the scientific method is the foundation of all science. It is completely incompatible with the overwhelming assertions of religious texts. If religions were evaluated within scientific framework, they would be deemed junk and crack pot theories.

morelandjson Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

My mind is blown how useful ChatGPT is. There are certain types of questions it nails where Google search is useless. You’re just an early adopter. Broader adoption is coming, it will just take time.

morelandjson Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics

Is your concern that you pay money to educate other people’s children? What is outrageous about that?

morelandjson Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI

“ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by Sam Altman’s OpenAI and released in November 2022, is a stupendously scaled-up autocomplete. Really, that’s all that it is.”

Stopped reading after this part. To be so intentionally misleading and dismissive of truly miraculous work by the LLM community and the OpenAI team is not for me.

morelandjson Sam Altman says era of remote work is over

I’m approaching the point where I feel similarly about WFH deniers as I do about vaccine deniers. We performed an immediate GLOBAL switch to fully remote work and corporate life went on largely unaffected. We have the experimental data strongly supporting that it does not hurt the ability of most workers to function (exceptions apply).

What’s more annoying, is that the execs confuse their own 0.0001% career experience with that of their typical employee. Yes, if you’re running a company and in board meetings and such, then it makes sense to be face-to-face. For your SDEs, DEs, and scientists in the trenches? Not so much.

My interactions with my manager are great and keep me focused. We have zero problems communicating over video. Most other interactions are generally neutral or net-negative, a distraction from the work I would be doing for my manager.

I like these little side interactions, and I enjoy talking with my coworkers, but I don’t think it’s ultimately as beneficial to the bottom line as people think. I can move quite fast when I’m left alone to my own devices.

morelandjson Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and warns of danger ahead

What exactly are people proposing? We bury our head in the sand and ban the development of neural networks?

Sure, we can all agree to be worried about it, but I don’t see what drumming up anxiety accomplishes.

The world changing is nothing new.

morelandjson HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it (2015)

What compute environments are used for LLMs like ChatGPT? Do you see this recent frenzy driving demand for HPC engineers?

morelandjson Bitcoin’s best quarter in 2 years beats all major indexes in Q1

Finance writing is the first to go with ChatGPT. Zero substance.

morelandjson Xi Jinping Says He Is Preparing China for War: Take Him Seriously

Your hypothetical actions are insane and you’ve just lost the support of Europe. Moreover, China is calling your bluff because it’s so over the top it looks like bluster.

morelandjson Dropping the SAT requirement is a luxury belief

This is an interesting idea. You could stratify the admissions process by family income level, and set bars for admission at each level that ensure an equal distribution of admissions relative to the population distribution of income.