skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It looks like DeepMind invented a completely new method for this round that's not just an extension of their previous work, showing how much you can gain if you don't shoebox yourself into just trying to improve existing methods. That all the scientists were highly skeptical about the scope of ML (and these are computer scientists to begin with mind you) just shows how little they knew of what they did know of what a computer or a program can possibly do, which is a bit appalling to be honest."

My PhD (now over a decade ago...yikes) was in applying much simpler ML methods to these kinds of problems (I started in protein folding, finished in protein / nucleic acid recognition, but my real interest was always protein design). Even back then, it was clear that ML methods had a lot more potential for structural biology (pun unintended) than for which they were being given credit. But it was hard to get interest from a research community that cared little about non-physical solutions. No matter how well you did, people would dismiss it as a "black box solution", and that pretty much limited your impact.

Some of this is understandable: even today, it's not at all clear that a custom-built ML model for protein folding is of much use to anyone -- particularly a model that doesn't consider all of the atoms in the protein. The traditional justification for research in this area is that if you could develop a sufficiently general model of protein physics, it would also allow you to do all sorts of other stuff that is much more interesting: rational protein design, drug binding, etc.

The alphafold model is not really useful for any of this, so in a way, it's kind of like the weinermobile of science: cool and impressive when done well ("hey! a giant hot dog on wheels!"), but not really useful outside of the niche for which it was designed. So it's hard to blame researchers in this field -- who generally have to chase funding and justify their existence -- from pursuing the application of deep learning to this one, narrow problem domain.

Obviously there will now be a wave of follow-on research, and it's impossible to know what methods this will spawn. Maybe this will revolutionize computational structural biology, maybe not. But I think it's a little unfair to demonize the entire field. Protein folding just traditionally hasn't been a very useful or interesting area, and like all "pure science", it leads to a lot of small-stakes, tribal thinking amongst the few players who can afford to compete. This is right out of Thomas Kuhn: a newcomer sweeps into a field, glances at the work of the past, then bashes it over the head, dismissively.
the return on holding is not risk free. in the absence of progress money will be inflationary as there are more people competing for fewer goods. there's no free lunch
I will say that I got a useful degree ( computer science ) from a university I could afford and have already paid off my debt.

I mostly agree, I don't know what people were thinking what was going to happen when they majored in underwater basket weaving.

I don't pretend know why people chose to go so deeply into debt. I do know a lot of smart people I respect made this decision, so it is more complicated than simply saying "screw the millennial."

However: There is now a mess that is damaging our society. When there is a fire going on, one does not stand around pointing fingers trying to figure out who started the fire. We put the fire out and figure the rest out afterwards. Millenial student debt is stifling their ability to build wealth, participate in the economy, and damaging their quality of life to the point they choose not to have children. I think this is a problem worth solving.
UI forms looks too basic.
But those would get the vaccine first, no?
Just to quantify your adjectives, per the Anandtech article:

> The M1 is really wide (8 wide decode)

In contrast to x86 CPUs which are 4 wide decode.

> It has a huge 630 deep reorder buffer

By comparison, Intel Sunny/Willow has 352.
The article states that the sound from Krakatoa was well over the 194dB limit.
Intel probably isn't the best example here, a better comparison would be AMD. Their r&d budget were 20-25% of intel's, yet were able to produce a better performing part with zen3.
Are there any chips like this being sold at all by AMD or Intel? Can you get this performance and power consumption anywhere else?
Ahh, a classic. Original source is still online: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/installing-l...
MS, in hindsight, was fortunate to not buy Slack.

They've built a compelling competitor in Teams that is more capable of competing with Zoom than Slack can.
Before I started working remotely I worked in the same small room as my boss. He, as the only one in the office, had large speakers and liked to blast music all days. And when we had a meeting he turned up the volume.

I tried to counteract this with noise cancelling headphones and music of my own, but sometimes you just have to have quiet to hear your own thoughts.

The difference with having a completely quiet work environment is incredible.
I'm not an expert, though I have been adjacent to experts, so I'm speaking from there. I don't mean to over-represent my credentials.

Farms operate on very slim margins, so small changes can make a big difference. Some trees require more babying when they graft (including time to be ready for market), and some require more fertilizer (of the various types) than others (and perform poorly with too much).

Some apples do bruise more readily than others, and the red varieties tend to show the brusing less. That doesn't prevent some from being successful anyway; Granny Smiths are my favorite. But a small percent differential of loss can make the difference between a farmer's choice to grow that or not.
It's almost as if there are good arguments on _both_ sides of the debate!
"Now you got a big problem, because neither Intel, AMD or Nvidia are going to license their intellectual property to Dell or HP for them to make an SoC for their machines."

This isn't quite correct. AMD and Nvidia have made custom SOCs for game consoles for years now; they could create customized SOCs for PCs if this was a critical issue. But I don't believe it is. The PC workloads and use cases follow well-known patterns and market segments and you don't really need a lot of different custom accelerators, or be on a single SOC for that matter. Video-related processing has been part of GPUs for many years.

For that matter, making RISC CPUs is not actually a huge obstacle for these guys. (Nvidia does.) Yes even Intel.

The article also seems to entirely omit the M1's heterogenous core strategy, where 4 of the cores are high performance and the other 4 are optimized for power efficiency. A deeper analysis of this and how software manages them would be more interesting.
I'm honestly not familiar with "deep mutational scanning." Can you share a link? I'm first author on papers related to the structural biology of coevolution and I competed in CASP about a decade ago, but I haven't kept up much since then.
Show HN: Tiny 1k Rust binary on Windows
> https://predictioncenter.org/casp14/zscores_final.cgi

`.cgi`... we've come full circle
You mention most of the big changes, except one. Assuming a random (but TLB friendly) pattern the M1 manages a latency of around 30-33ns to main memory, about half of what I've seen anywhere else. Impressive.

Maybe motherboards should stop coming with dimms and use the apple approach to get great bandwidth and latency and come in 16, 32, and 64GB varieties by soldering LPDDR4x on the motherboard.
That's easy to disprove. See the bugtrackers for those projects. They're not bug free. See why "aptitude" was introduced to cover "apt"s failures. Also one of the reasons we had the yum to dnf migration is to replace the worse resolver in yum with a sat-solver in dnf.
DevRelOMeter
Mysterious Monolith Update: New Mysterious Monolith Appears in Romania
Hang about. Poetry is SLOW because it does not operate in parallel. It’s the one thing holding me back from a large project.

Unless this has recently changed?
Hey, Brandon With JumpCloud here — we do indeed have customers in Colombia, we even have support engineers there. You can give us a try for free at either https://www.jumpcloud.com/demo or https://console.jumpcloud.com/signup.
oh no! via the API or webapp?
I found this recent ColdFusion video on the background of ARM and RISC processors really educational, I think most will learn _something_ from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuF9weSkS68
>> Grist tables are literally SQLite tables.

So whenever a new form/table is created, is it getting stored within a sqlite table on your backend ?
Combined with their legal immunity from any liability, that can be concerning.
This sounds like textbook "first world problem". Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty in the past few decades so that the items you listed are not the status quo, and there is a chance that some of the items might become better. My grandparents lived under almost all of the items in your list, my parents lived under some of them, and even I was not able to evade all the items growing up.
Basically every laptop from here on out is going to be benchmarked against these devices.

And battery life seems to be the sleeper performance metric here. Every review is going to be "you could get 6+ more hours if you just bought the macbook"
The first definition of natural returned when I google the word is

> existing in or derived from nature; not made or caused by humankind.

So when you are trying to say that what is caused by humans is natural too, then you are clearly contradicting the dictionary definition of the word. Which is what I was trying to draw your attention to when I asked the question.
The next question: What prevents Intel or AMD from doing this on their processors?
ELF 101: A Linux Executable Walkthrough (2013) [PNG]
I don't know enough about filesystems to speak as to whether it's a good or bad design, but I quite like the concept.

Cool work!
> with perhaps 32GB of onboard memory and the external RAM being used as swap?

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple was working on some ways to optimize swap so that SSDs can fill the roll of "external ram." At this point, PCI Express has the theoretical bandwidth to compete with DDR5, but it can't handle anywhere near the number to transactions. But I bet with some clever OS-level tricks, they could give performance that's good enough for most background applications.
It was a combination of the value to others we could liberate by doing that, and the value it would bring to us. As Grist took shape, it felt like a nice self-contained tool (and format) that could be useful at many points in a data pipeline, given its editing, visualization, and summarization functions. And spreadsheets have a long tail of features users want, so it makes sense to open it up to collaborative development, especially given how tech-savvy our users can be.
We are better with paywalled articles than without. Moreover, writing articles doesn't necessarily have to be free work.
Interesting, I wondered if the same can be done on hn. Likely easier since the IDs appear to be sequential. But one can simply edit their post to point to the URL too if they wanted, so it defeats the fun of the exercise.
You can see the gaps in the lineup that they have yet to fill, since the 4-port 13" Macbook Pro and high end Mac Mini are still being sold with Intel CPUs.

Both of those machines need at least 32GB options to properly replace them. I would guess we see that support in an M1X with more cores and more Thunderbolt lanes next year as they work their way up the lineup.
If I were apple I would of shipped a dozen developer transition mac minis to them free of charge at least a few months ago, as part of developer relations, to kickstart the process if they haven't done something similar.
I've heard this sentiment from several friends:

It's not working from home, it's living at work.
Not even a little bit. There is nothing here that would require Google to be a monopoly to accomplish. If anything companies become lazy without competition.

I feel like that is not too far from saying it makes one reconsider communism because good things can happen with authoritarian control.
Net neutrality never regulated Google/Facebook or the other social media tech giants. It only regulated the ISP which have never posed any threat to free on the internet. Net neutrality was only about shoving the costs of the internet infrastructure to the consumer.

Net neutrality died, and all of the doom and gloom we were told would happened never materialized.
Much of the narrative compares Teams w/ Slack.

While that's true, the better narrative compares Teams w/ Zoom. And Teams has done a good job making video seamless and easy to initiate.
> LPDDR4 is just 128-bits per chip.

It is? I thought it was up to 32.
If cache size was the answer then Intel would have already stuck more on their CPUs, and AMD's 32MB on Zen3 would be carrying far more weight against the M1 than it is.

Bigger caches mean higher latency caches, it's not strictly a matter of bigger is better.
poetry is slow. and ultimately uses pip underneath. yeah python packaging needs to be fixed. but using a virtualenv + pip | pip-tools goes a long way.
Has cloud computing changed this?
32-bits per channel. Multiple channels per chip.

I'm doing this from memory btw, so I might have gotten something wrong. But my understanding of LPDDR4x is 32-bits per channel, 4x channels per chip (typical: different LPDDR4x chips can have different configurations).
Gallery 404
Have you performance benchmarked this? Would be interested in giving it a try if performance is not compromised. Currently use XFS.
Oh, I'm with you that vaccines should be triaged by risk factors, and that reopening should be guided both by % of high-risk population vaccinated and case statistics. I was responding to OP's assertion that we shouldn't bother to vaccinate "healthy" people at all.

IIRC the IFR is ~0.2% for people in the 20-39 age bracket. I still find that risky (though I'm risk-averse), but the better argument is the lingering effects of moderate/severe cases, which I'm not sure is counted.

Also, I assume your policy decision would include younger people with risk factors like heart disease and diabetes, rather than going strictly by age. I'm chronically ill and I want my vaccine.
I cannot give constructive feedback to something which is incomprehensible.

"the genome is a sequence that can be language modeled/auto-regressed for depth of understanding by the network"

The genome is not a sequence so much as a discrete set of genes which are themselves sequences which specify construction plans for proteins. That distinction is important.

Language modeling in the context of machine learning typically means NLP methods. Genetics is nothing like natural language.

Auto-regression is using (typically time series) information to predict the next codon. This makes very little sense in the context of genetics since, again, the genetic code is not an information carrying medium in the same sense as human language. Being able to predict the next codon tells you zilch in terms of useable information.

"Depth of understanding by the network" ... what does that even mean???

The above sentence is a bunch of popular technical jargon from an unrelated field thrown together in a nonsensical way. AKA word salad.
Antibodies don't themselves help fight infections; their role is simply to identify dangerous pathogens to white blood cells. In immunosuppressed patients, those cells often aren't present (or aren't responding properly), so adding antibodies wouldn't help.
I could see it being a push button switch instead, manually closing the relay.

But if the 12V is dead, the stuff running off of it will also be out
Slack is getting eaten by both the top and bottom.

From the top, Teams has been effective in beating Slack, especially with Office 365 subscribers.

From the bottom, Discord is doing a pretty decent job.

Slack is increasingly stuck in the messy middle.
Fascinating! AlphaFold (and other competitors) seem to use MSA (Multiple Sequence Aligment) and this (brilliant) idea of co-evolving residues to build an initial graph of sections of protein chain that are likely proximal. This seems like a useful trick for predicting existing biological structures (i.e. ones that evolved) from genomic data. I wonder (as very much a non-biologist), do MSA-based approaches also help understand "first-principles" folding physics any better? and to what degree? If I write a random genetic sequence (think drug discovery) that has many aligned sequences, without the strong assumption of co-evolution at my disposal, there does not seem any good reason for the aligned sequences to also be proximal. Please pardon my admittedly deep knowledge gaps.
Not in the bay area today, none are available for pickup
I am wondering how the M1 is doing regarding the various side-channel attacks that came to live with the Spectre/Meltdown publications. Is the M1 less prone to side channel attacks by design, or is this just something not yet known?
Note that Fairphone officially cooperates with /e/: https://www.fairphone.com/en/2020/04/30/keeping-your-data-sa...
that...doesn't make any sense. return 50x is returning 50x. many people would be thrilled to have 50-100k. It means a better house, maybe better schools, better food, better life. and that's just in America!

Envy is the thief of joy
Yeah the article is interesting I just like knowing that Apple will keep iterating and the performance gap between Apple Silicon and x86 will continue to grow. I keep spec'ing out an Apple M1 Mac mini only to not pull the trigger because I am curious what an M2 will hold.
Yes!

I updated my comment hopefully made it more clear. The issue is less about the $$ amount, and more about the practicality of including ever larger amounts of RAM on the SoC.
Not necessarily. That person might have no liquid assets at the time, or might not have the means to short a stock, for example. Pretty weird to assume that everyone has funds to move around at a moment's notice.
Today I Learnt.. eBPF is Awesome
What happens when AI is better at everything measurable than humans?

Better at conversation. Better at making people laugh, and generate attraction or other emotions, better at motivating them, and organizing movements, etc.

Clearly we are not ready for such an efficient system... it would be a big disruption to all human organizations and relations. It would start with Twitter botnets and directing sentiment.
This is my attempt at making the smallest exe with rust for windows using the msvc toolchain. If y'all have any pointers how to get it smaller let me know :)
In hindsight, I think MS dodged a bullet. Buying Slack would have been another Skype-like failed acquisition.

Teams is a solid piece of software, and Microsoft has done a good job making it unique in a crowded marketplace.
Apple weren't giving anyone I know access to M1, but they were giving anyone who asked access to a A12Z running macOS.
Acheiropoieta: On art not made with hands
ServiceNow buys Montreal's Element AI for $500M
Not so rare amongst Trump appointees: See Betsy DeVos, Rick Acott, etc
Yeah, I have a phone with neither Play Services nor MicroG, and Signal works just fine using its own notification delivery system (which it emphasises you should use at your own risk of it not working and slurping battery).
The article specifically answers this:

- x86 instruction set can't be queued up as easily because instructions have different lengths - 4 decoders max, while Apple has 8 and could go higher.

- Business model does not allow this kind of integration.
Instead of simply alluding to long-term risks, can you be more specific about what exactly you're concerned about? What kind of precautions are you advocating? At some point medical technology will give us organs that are far superior to biological organs - should we not make these available to people?
Or maybe use the best of both worlds, with soldered-in ultra fast ram, plus large amount of dimm ram.

Same as you can have a storage driver and a smaller nvme.
I agree. See the first line: "Seek Discomfort". The the first step. There wasn't an implication that this was going to solve his problems, it's that the first step is popping the bubble you live in.
Good riddance. Now he can go back to Verizon and be an even bigger tool for big telco than he already was.
It feels like Heroku has lost its market leadership. These days seems like Netlify is the winner.
My understanding is 16 bits per channel, and 2 channels per chip, typical.

Wikipedia says the same and here's a randomly selected datasheet where you can see the pinout https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/198/43_46LQ32256A_AL-1877...
> When a new person joins a company, they have literally years and years worth of searchable content.

IF your company is paying to preserve it. At my not-very-tiny employer we only pay for something like 1 year of retention. I have no idea if that's a legal or financial decision, but either way it seems like a dumb one.
> never buy gen 1 of any technology

I totally understand that sentiment, but in some ways this isn’t the first generation. While it’s the first desktop chip that Apple has RELEASED, they’ve been making their own chips since the iPhone 5s (IIRC). I imagine all the big bugs are sorted out.
Sure! Here's a paper about the method: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4410700/

And another one about its application in structure prediction: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7295002/
The article goes into what makes it fast on general purpose code in the bottom half. Mainly, it's the better out-of-order execution that is possible with a large ROB, and how this wouldn't work as well on X86.

Your points don't explain why at 3Ghz this chip can outperform 5Ghz chips in single-threaded workloads. Using a 5nm process can give you more cores and less power usage, but it won't improve IPC. The DDR4 is faster than average, but you can get those kinds of speeds on enthusiast PCs and it doesn't make a big difference there.
A lot of the stuff you’re referring to as “application specific” is already present in Intel Macs with the T2 chip. Except obviously slower and older. People aren’t discussing it because it isn’t really “new”
You're still comparing Apple's pricing for Apple processors to Apple's pricing for non-Apple processors. There are Ryzen laptops for less money than the M1 which are faster than the i5.
Lots of people live in cheap rent controlled housing though. They can take low paying jobs and still make ends meet so they drive wages down.
Verizon just texted you, Ajit. You're too hot for them, and now need to look for honest work.
Five years ago, I would have said the following:

"If someone produces an AI that you give a sequence and it tells you the protein conformation, I'd be extremely impressed".

Sure there are many more things to solve in this space; but that doesn't take away that this is an impressive achievement and does unlock quite a few things (including making more tractable the problem you just brought up). I'm excited to see what DeepMind works on now and what the new state of the world will be just five years from now.
I like your to the point dryness. A bit cynical, but to the point. What would you say was the reason for him being so popular then? This is a normal question. I agree with what you wrote.
It's probably that x86 has a better cost/performance than others. If you can get the job that'd require, say, 200 POWERs or 250 SPARC64s with 300 Xeons that cost half per socket than a POWER, x86 will still be a better choice. This could be for many reasons - from intrinsic performance of the CPU to the quality of the code generated by the compiler and/or architectural fitness to the task at hand.

Also, take into account the CPUs are not always the more expensive part of the compute node - GPUs, HBM, lots of DDR4, and fast networking gear are also pretty expensive and will be more or less constant as you change CPU architectures.