There are a lot of companies and academic institutions working on genomics. Most don’t do self promotion at the scale that Google does. And most aren’t on the HN radar.
It’s a very common experience that people in the physics-adjacent sciences have. It’s so common that there’s an xkcd about it: https://xkcd.com/793/
My job hasn’t completely changed. It’s changed, but fundamentally I solve problems. Sometimes LLMs help me do that now. The job market sucks, but there are so many confounding factors: pandemic over hiring, the loss of…
> one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence). I was with you up to “usually by coincidence”. There’s a long and sordid history in areas of chemistry and areas of biology of holding up a…
There’s a reason that many CEOs have a stint in sales. In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a…
> we've had Superhuman Intelligence for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the form of corporations and institutions. It’s true that collective groups of humans can accomplish tremendous things, but I…
> And by the mid 80's the moats were already very deep. You raise some good points, but I don’t think the idea of moats from the 80s really holds up. None of the obvious moats in the mid-80s are still dominant players.…
What you’re saying is that they should be charging $2000 or more per month then. Perhaps that’s true, but it’s a price tag that’s a lot harder to swallow for many orgs than $200/mo, and would require some hard…
Funny how one of the arguments against Medicare in the 60s was that providers wouldn’t accept it. Turns out when you have the choice of accepting lower payment per patient for Medicare or having a lot fewer patients,…
> Sorry, nobody does stochastic simulations where the number of uniform random numbers obtained per second is any sort of bottleneck. If you've spent considerable time on stochastic simulation, you already know this.…
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, exactly, but a use case for better non-CS generators has always been stochastic simulation, especially simulation/sampling approaches that are bound by the number and…
> I'll push back against this, despite it being so popular. I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" It’s a cute way of saying that you can only do 2-3 new things. The post is written for an engineer at a startup as…
You don’t learn Big-O in Calculus because it requires CS algorithmic concepts. But the core question of “how does this behave as N -> \infty?” is asymptotic behavior (ie: limits) which were developed for calculus and…
Nice analogy. I loved graphing calculators until I learned tools like Mathematica and Matlab. Still waiting for the Mathematica version of LLMs. Agents / loop engineering / whatever is hot with the AI Twitter kids still…
> The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards. Given that the term is explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual of Style, I suspect that this is much more of unicode…
> Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style…
Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+…
Preferring badly handled-drawn art to AI slop does not mean “use better AI slop.”
You wouldn’t need five tables. Each trit takes up two bits when unpacked into 0,1,2 values. You can do a full unpacking-via-lookup with a uint16[256] and then do bit shifting and masking to extract the individual trits,…
I think it’s pretty wishful thinking to believe that the Iran war was some complex N-dimensional chess to make Chinese oil costs higher. Even if the current President was known for his strategic global thinking and…
Pretty much. For all the current US administration has complained about the opposition being “socialist,” they’ve certainly gone all-in on the state partially owning private companies. Almost like cries of “socialism”…
> My point is not that hard to understand. Have you done any serious graphics programming? Even at the OpenGL 1.x level? What you’re saying just doesn’t make sense. Just because you’re rotating and translating things in…
PCA is an orthogonal transformation of the covariance matrix, so like all orthogonal transformations, it’s _literally a rotation_ in N-dimensional space. SVD is more complex but ultimately it’s just another useful…
> It has always been overpriced and had huge margins. This is the engineer’s take on things. I am entirely sympathetic to it. I also think it missed a lot of what management values in consulting. At its best, you can…
> They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed. I have never worked at a place where this was true. Either senior devs would pound through the tasks, or we’d cut them as unimportant. The…
There are a lot of companies and academic institutions working on genomics. Most don’t do self promotion at the scale that Google does. And most aren’t on the HN radar.
It’s a very common experience that people in the physics-adjacent sciences have. It’s so common that there’s an xkcd about it: https://xkcd.com/793/
My job hasn’t completely changed. It’s changed, but fundamentally I solve problems. Sometimes LLMs help me do that now. The job market sucks, but there are so many confounding factors: pandemic over hiring, the loss of…
> one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence). I was with you up to “usually by coincidence”. There’s a long and sordid history in areas of chemistry and areas of biology of holding up a…
There’s a reason that many CEOs have a stint in sales. In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a…
> we've had Superhuman Intelligence for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the form of corporations and institutions. It’s true that collective groups of humans can accomplish tremendous things, but I…
> And by the mid 80's the moats were already very deep. You raise some good points, but I don’t think the idea of moats from the 80s really holds up. None of the obvious moats in the mid-80s are still dominant players.…
What you’re saying is that they should be charging $2000 or more per month then. Perhaps that’s true, but it’s a price tag that’s a lot harder to swallow for many orgs than $200/mo, and would require some hard…
Funny how one of the arguments against Medicare in the 60s was that providers wouldn’t accept it. Turns out when you have the choice of accepting lower payment per patient for Medicare or having a lot fewer patients,…
> Sorry, nobody does stochastic simulations where the number of uniform random numbers obtained per second is any sort of bottleneck. If you've spent considerable time on stochastic simulation, you already know this.…
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, exactly, but a use case for better non-CS generators has always been stochastic simulation, especially simulation/sampling approaches that are bound by the number and…
> I'll push back against this, despite it being so popular. I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" It’s a cute way of saying that you can only do 2-3 new things. The post is written for an engineer at a startup as…
You don’t learn Big-O in Calculus because it requires CS algorithmic concepts. But the core question of “how does this behave as N -> \infty?” is asymptotic behavior (ie: limits) which were developed for calculus and…
Nice analogy. I loved graphing calculators until I learned tools like Mathematica and Matlab. Still waiting for the Mathematica version of LLMs. Agents / loop engineering / whatever is hot with the AI Twitter kids still…
> The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards. Given that the term is explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual of Style, I suspect that this is much more of unicode…
> Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style…
Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+…
Preferring badly handled-drawn art to AI slop does not mean “use better AI slop.”
You wouldn’t need five tables. Each trit takes up two bits when unpacked into 0,1,2 values. You can do a full unpacking-via-lookup with a uint16[256] and then do bit shifting and masking to extract the individual trits,…
I think it’s pretty wishful thinking to believe that the Iran war was some complex N-dimensional chess to make Chinese oil costs higher. Even if the current President was known for his strategic global thinking and…
Pretty much. For all the current US administration has complained about the opposition being “socialist,” they’ve certainly gone all-in on the state partially owning private companies. Almost like cries of “socialism”…
> My point is not that hard to understand. Have you done any serious graphics programming? Even at the OpenGL 1.x level? What you’re saying just doesn’t make sense. Just because you’re rotating and translating things in…
PCA is an orthogonal transformation of the covariance matrix, so like all orthogonal transformations, it’s _literally a rotation_ in N-dimensional space. SVD is more complex but ultimately it’s just another useful…
> It has always been overpriced and had huge margins. This is the engineer’s take on things. I am entirely sympathetic to it. I also think it missed a lot of what management values in consulting. At its best, you can…
> They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed. I have never worked at a place where this was true. Either senior devs would pound through the tasks, or we’d cut them as unimportant. The…