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Yeah, it's a bit obscure and "meta"...

Y Combinator is named after a computer science concept - the "combinator," and more specifically, the "Y combinator" function. Paul Graham and Robert Morris (co-founders of the Y combinator company), both computer scientists themselves, likely chose the name as a nod to their background and the company's focus on technology startups. The Y combinator function is a higher-order function used in functional programming languages that allows for the creation of anonymous functions, which can be useful for creating new functions from existing ones. This aligns with the company's mission of helping startups to iterate quickly and efficiently.

Also see: https://www.ycombinator.com/faq under `Why did you choose the name “Y Combinator?`

wolfium3on Elon Musk to Develop 'TruthGPT'

Catchy name. He should also make another social media company called Truth Social. Oh wait..

wolfium3on Why is GPT-3 15.77x more expensive for certain languages?

You can use their online tool to see how it tokenizes words: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

wolfium3on Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)

Depends on person to person. For me it's on the order of ~20-30 minutes.

wolfium3on Sam Altman wants to convince billions to scan eyes to prove they aren’t bots

Terrible idea. Any form of biometrics are effectively passwords that can not be changed/rotated. If the data is compromised/leaked even once, it's useless.

Edit: That said, one of the other commented this: "Eyeballs are usernames not passwords". I think that's ok-ish...

wolfium3on Linux vs. Mac

I switched in the other direction (Mac to Linux).

I grew up with Windows PC's + laptops and Mac's keyboard and general way of doing things was just always really unintuitive (maybe infuriating?) for me.

I also didn't like Mac's prescriptive attitude toward me as a user. It's MY machine. I bought it, it belongs to ME. I should be able to do whatever I want to the deepest parts of the configs if I feel inclined to do so. (Like "right to repair" I would like something similar to "right to full control of my own hardware")

wolfium3on Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

I think I once got it to get out of "buy" mode by lying to it and telling it I'm in a sanctioned country. Maybe it's a trick that could work for you :)

wolfium3on Spike mRNA vaccine sequences circulate in blood up to 28 days after vaccination

Isn't that a good thing though? I.e. promote the production of more training material for the immune system for longer?

(Please correct me in the thread if my understanding is incorrect)

wolfium3on ChatGPT makes up fake academic papers

In my view, underestimating the platform's capabilities may lead one to assume its imminent shutdown. For instance, I find the platform particularly useful for generating succinct bullet-point summaries of articles, enabling me to consume content in 1 minute instead of, say, 15 minutes.

wolfium3on Why is there so much useless and unreliable software?

Because of "Agile" planning practices. Get things barely working (MVP) then move onto the next project to make sure your manager's manager stays happy.

wolfium3on Why is remote work seen as a gift?

It strongly depends on your personality type. I'm much, much, much more productive WFH due to my ADHD.

Also, noise cancelling earphones did NOT help while I was still in the office.

wolfium3on Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

Wow... after some searching I eventually found out what PG is... Paul Graham (PG) wrote an essay titled "The Submarine". http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

wolfium3on Nord Stream leaks confirmed as sabotage, Sweden says

I sincerely hope they don't repair it and instead focus more on building up infrastructure around renewable energy sources.

wolfium3on Ask HN: Why are today's consumers not discerning what is ad and what is not?

I think it depends on your tolerance for ads. I hate ads so much I end up closing browser tabs or switching off whatever appliance they're on. My hate for ads is much greater than the love for the content they are attached to.

wolfium3on Ask HN: What are the reasons behind your success as a self-taught programmer?

- My dad taught me the "dir" and "cd" commands very early and encouraged me to try out all the "exe" files I could find on the computer.

- I eventually discovered QBASIC.EXE and it had really good copy-paste examples which got me into programming.

wolfium3on Substitute certain overhyped programming terms with more accurate replacements

If you expand a NN to decision trees, the resulting decision tree(s) can take up orders of magnitude more space and take orders of magnitude more time to run than the original NN.

The paper is discussed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_okxGdHM5b8

wolfium3on Ask HN: Apps that are built with Git as the back end?

Dataform comes to mind (if you set it up to use git like that)

wolfium3on Five hours' sleep is tipping point for bad health

Scary! How does the treatment for such a condition/situation even work?

wolfium3on Machine learning’s crumbling foundations

I'm not 100% familiar with the details - there's a ML component that calculates some stuff to narrow the ES search down (like categories), then at the end there's another ML system that re-ranks things. (ES alone doesn't give the best results)

wolfium3on Machine learning’s crumbling foundations

I work in a company where ML has made a considerable difference to our bottom line (search component of an e-commerce site). When I joined the company, search was so bad, it was easier to just use google and include 'inurl:' to actually find products on the site. Now, years later, the builtin search actually gives you what you're looking for better than google does. (This is important because if you can't find something quickly you're more likely to shop elsewhere).

If you've seen "ML done right", you wouldn't use the word "crumbling".

That said - I won't deny ML is over-hyped. It works for very specific problems and in many cases the best solution is a non-ML one. Knowing when NOT to use ML is just as important as knowing when to use it.

wolfium3on Ask HN: What tiny purchases have disproportionately improved your life?

Blue light blocking glasses. I work on computers a lot and usually ended up feeling fatigue by the middle of the day. When wearing blue light blocking glasses, I don't feel tired anymore :).

I've had them for about a year and a half now.

wolfium3on PHP: A fractal of bad design (2012)

https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture

^^ Someone recently shared this article with me. Really made me think about my interaction with programmers using other languages.

wolfium3on An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

Wolf: Why are we still here? Just to suffer?

wolfium3on Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications

There was a recent talk at PyCon US 2021 on this :)

TALK / SangBin Cho / Data Processing on Ray [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNLqvdov_J4]

wolfium3on No Space Left to Run: China's Transnational Repression of Uyghurs

I think as a "the ends justify the means" argument it's not a strong enough argument if you think that constitutions / human rights are important.

wolfium3on No Space Left to Run: China's Transnational Repression of Uyghurs

For countries that have the concept of a "constitution", I think extraditions should be made illegal and declared "unconstitutional" since you cannot guarantee that the target country has the same quality/level of constitution as the country an individual is extradited from.

wolfium3on EU Competition Chief all but confirmed Apple to be forced to allow 2nd App Store

Not having the ability to side load apps and having only one store is why I buy DON'T buy an iPhone in the first place.

wolfium3on Why Don't Americans Use Bidets?

I would personally never get rid of toilet paper. Feeling _completely dry_ afterwards is very important to me.

wolfium3on Circuit Synthesis for Analog Computing

Came across a video by the author of this article

"ASPLOS'20 - Session 2B - Noise-Aware Dynamical System Compilation for Analog Devices with Legno"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PU-6cWQQkE

wolfium3on Self-Reproducing Cellular Automata

(not directly related to the article) The cellular automata in the article is a discrete one. For those interested, there are also "continuous" automata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I.