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shpongled

1,097 karma · joined July 12, 2017

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shpongled··on Rosalind: A genomics toolkit in Rust running whole-genome pipelines on a laptop
There is a relatively widely adopted tool (100+ citations, >500k invocations collected via telemetry) for mass spectrometry-based proteomics written in Rust, and quite a few others in the works.

[1] https://github.com/lazear/sage

shpongled··on Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
The title is >Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.

Isn't being an anti-masker the opposite of this viewpoint? Literally saying, I only care about the returns for myself, even if creates negative value for others.

shpongled··on I Wrote a Scheme in 2025
As someone who is "into" programming languages (and making toy implementations of them), I think some of the most important macros are along the lines of Rust/Haskells `derive/deriving` for quickly enabling serialization, printing etc. Using a language without such capability quickly becomes frustrating once you move to any kind of "real" task.
shpongled··on Zig Libc
As someone who has been primarily writing Rust for the past 8+ years, I am actually unaware of any political drama surrounding Rust. It's just a programming language.
shpongled··on How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code
Looking at their profile I'm inclined to agree. But I think in isolation, this one post isn't setting off enough red flags for me. At the very least, they aren't just using default prompts.
shpongled··on How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code
No, it doesn't. The "I'm an expert at AI detection" crowd likes to cite things like "It's not X, it's Y" and other expression patterns without stopping to think that perhaps LLMs regurgitate those patterns because they are frequently used in written speech.

I assign a <5% probability that GP comment was AI written. It's easy to tell, because AI writing has no soul.

shpongled··on How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code
Unclear why you think this is ChatGPT, doesn't read like it at all to me. Many people - myself included - use punctuation to emphasize and clarify.
shpongled··on Responses from LLMs are not facts
If you consider correctly citing a source that is explicitly provided in the context via tool use, then sure.

They absolutely cannot correctly cite sources otherwise.

shpongled··on From VS Code to Helix
The value proposition is multi-cursor editing, which is very nice
shpongled··on SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think
It's not totally novel, but it's very cool to see the continued simplification of protein folding models - AF2 -> AF3 was a reduction in model architecture complexity, and this is a another step in the direction of the bitter lesson.
shpongled··on SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think
Probably because ByteDance and Facebook (spun out into EvolutionaryScale) are doing it
shpongled··on Cosmic simulations that once needed supercomputers now run on a laptop
Protein folding is in no way "solved". AlphaFold dramatically improved the state-of-the-art, and works very well for monomeric protein chains with structurally resolved nearest neighbors. It abjectly fails on the most interesting proteins - just go check out any of the industry's hottest undrugged targets (e.g. transcription factors)
shpongled··on Quicksort explained IKEA-style
There's no problem with randomness in FP?

You could use a monad/external state for an OS-level RNG, or define a purely functional PRNG

shpongled··on Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware
2016 remains one the greatest single player FPS games I've played (Titan Fall 2 is the other)
shpongled··on OCaml as my primary language
When I mean "use" them, I mean make heavy use of them, e.g. structs or functions annotated with multiple lifetimes, data flows designed to borrow data, e.g. You can often get by just with `clone` and lifetime elision, and if you don't need to eke out that last bit of performance, it's fine.
shpongled··on OCaml as my primary language
As someone who loves SML/OCaml and has written primarily Rust over the past ~10 years, I totally agree - I use it as a modern and ergonomic ML with best-in-class tooling, libraries, and performance. Lifetimes are cool, and I use them when needed, but they aren't the reason I use Rust at all. I would use Rust with a GC instead of lifetimes too.
shpongled··on Open models by OpenAI
Thanks! I'm not super up to date on all the ML stuff :)
shpongled··on Open models by OpenAI
Do you know when this was introduced (or which paper)? AFAIK it's not that way in the original transformer paper, or BERT/GPT-2
shpongled··on Open models by OpenAI
I looked through their torch implementation and noticed that they are applying RoPE to both query and key matrices in every layer of the transformer - is this standard? I thought positional encodings were usually just added once at the first layer
shpongled··on I drank every cocktail
I think you cropped out the important part of the quote:

> It’s rare that I have more than a drink or two in one night.

I don't drink that often any more, but 2-3 drinks in a night, done occasionally is not a problem. I've had weeks where I drink a beer (or two!) every night, and also don't struggle with any alcohol problems.

2 drinks every single night? Leaning that way - and not great for you just from a health/caloric perspective.

shpongled··on LLM Inevitabilism
I would pay $5000 to never have to read another LLM-authored piece of text ever again.
shpongled··on Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized
One possibility is trying a different form of cardio. I personally don't enjoy running at all... but I love cycling. Running for 30 minutes is super boring, but I can go do a 4-hour ride no problem. If you can't go outside at all, then this won't really help you though.
shpongled··on Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized
"It doesn't get any easier, you just get faster"

- Greg LeMond

shpongled··on Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface
True, I should have qualified "actual" duration, not perceived duration!
shpongled··on Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface
N,N-DMT is very intense and not to be taken lightly - but you could say the same with LSD, psilocybin, etc. Personally, I am much more wary of large doses of LSD/psilocybin than DMT, in part to the substantially longer duration of the former. Ego death and the complete dissolution of reality makes it harder to have a bad trip
shpongled··on Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++
Yep, I would love anonymous record types, ala StandardML/OCaml
shpongled··on Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders
I just googled "car fatalities [alcohol/distracted]" etc, and found either NHTSA or California statistics. All of them could be prevented using modern tech, but considering that we can't even get speed cameras socially/legally accepted I don't see it happening. We just don't have a culture of caring about this stuff in the US, despite >40,000 people dying each year due to traffic fatalities.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving [2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding [3] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving

shpongled··on Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders
Most car "accidents" are intentional - drivers are choosing to speed (35%), drive intoxicated (30%), or scroll tiktok (15%) rather than pay attention to the road.
shpongled··on Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders
Firearms are a constitutionally enshrined right - driving is not. For the vast majority of Americans, cars represent a significantly higher threat than assault by gun [1]. We also let drivers flagrantly and repeatedly break the law and negligently kill people with essentially near-impunity. The same cannot be said for firearms.

[1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...

shpongled··on The little book about OS development
Writing my own "OS" (read: mostly copying from the OG Bran's Kernel Development Tutorial [1]) was also a formative experience for me as a teenager. Really great way to learn systems programming and what goes on under the hood!

[1] http://www.osdever.net/bkerndev/Docs/gettingstarted.htm

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