skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: If you turn research into business, could you share your story/insights?
Dear all,

People often say that other than academia, math PhDs also do ML research at FAANG and similar companies, like the recent famous OpenAI, with the opportunities of doing interesting research and publishing. While doing research work at big companies with lots of data and resources is fun, I am also interested in exploring starting my own "startup" / software business in the future (possibly after getting phd in math), with focus on optimization, graph theory, and algorithms (Graph Neural Networks, aka GNN, seems to be popular right now).

There are many successful and famous companies that built upon the work of mathematicians, to name a few:

1. Matlab/MathWorks was built on the PhD thesis of Cleve Moler, focusing on linear algebra programming.

2. Mathematica was developed by Stephen Wolfram and others, due to the conflicts over SMP with Caltech.

3. Gurobi was founded by three mathematicians, Gu, Rothberg, and Bixby, hence the name. Its flagship product is obviously the solver/optimizer for linear programming and math optimization.

4. The story behind SageMath and CoCalc is also interesting: http://wstein.org/talks/2016-06-sage-bp/bp.pdf

5. A new Chinese company Cardinal Operations [1] was founded by computer scientists with focus on applications of operation research.

6. Google and the PageRank algorithm

So I am curious that for researchers (especially mathematicians) here who founded startups/companies after getting your degree (regardless of Bachelor, Masters, or PhD), especially those who commercialize your research, how did you achieve this and did you do applied math in your research? Does cutting-edge research results help your business in some technical ways?

Thank you.

[1]: https://www.shanshu.ai/
If it weren't for the salt, I'd expect them be using locally sourced water. They are not deliberately adding any contaminants to the water, just heating it with flames from burning methane. It should be relatively harmless, but we'll see if there's a show stopper soon.
On the balance, I have found the opposite to my experience. Your phone spends more time passively carrying out a multitude of background tasks and analystics stuff then it does with you actively web browsing.
Are they still RTO or are any remote? I was reading about how most are now mandating RTO or hybrid.
Tech Moves: Flexport execs depart
I am skeptical of the long term viability of such projects that rely on VC funding.

However, if I recall correctly, the early days of node.js was mostly funded by Joyent. It took time and some major conflicts for Node to be controlled by a foundation.
Python Dataframe Interchange Protocol
You win the Internet today.

Still, there's a deeper analogy here. Very much in the "enshittification" vein, today's tech companies are about making something cool, getting folks to use it, and then monetizing while gradually turning said cool thing into a bad parody of itself.
Magic and Loss, Part 1: Magic in the Cards
Is there any evidences that this is actually a trend? (my curiosity)

Except for Silicon Valley VC slowdowns, I don't see major causes.
Emacs 29 is bundled with version of modus-themes that doesn't include tinted variants, you need to install them from Elpa.
Not faith in the religious sense, no. I get the sense you are overloading the term to make a false equivalence to bolster religious faith as valid. It’s not.

Faith in science, even basic assumptions on fundamental axioms, is grounded in reality .
Sounds great; didn't find out what he uses to control the solo sound with his voice/microphone.
Agreed that you have to squint a certain way. Specifically to see the very small part of the timeline over human history which is relevant. The period where the rate of change in global temperatures has been significantly altered is very small when zooming out. That certainly doesn't mean it's not real.

https://xkcd.com/1732/
I worked for NSO and later at a very similar company in Barcelona. AMA
As others said above, `mathlib4` has quite a lot of Sheaf theory, and in particular the category of sheaves of Sets (i.e. Types) over an arbitrary site. In this sense, it is possible to talk about Grothendieck toposes. We don't have the characterization in terms of Giraud's axioms, though.
You're assuming that there is something wrong with policing in its current form that an alignment of incentives could fix. The problem though is that there isn't, because it isn't broken.

"The purpose of a system is what it does." The purpose of police is to maintain current structures of inequality, and to divert, undermine, and oppose mass movements that could lead to a radical upheaval of those structures.

It is effective at that! Its incentives are already aligned with the forces that have the most influence and mutual benefit with them. It is working as intended.
Falcon 180B: Model Overview
>I think I'll be getting this at release

TFA: Available November 22

On first view of the website, I read that as November '22, so I thought I was late to the party. After reading your "at release" I see it is Nov 22, (assuming 2023) at this point.

Am I over thinking this could be clearer?
You would still use the TPM to verify the software chain. But don’t use the TPM to Auto unlock disks. That’s the part that feels like a bad idea
That's what financing is for, although its availability is dependent on what a bank can recover if you stop paying -- e.g. they can take back your car or repossess your house.

Installation costs can't be recovered, but a battery can certainly be repossessed. Unmounting solar panels is probably much more work, so I don't know. Or just add it to your home's existing mortgage, since then it's just repossessing the house with solar+battery included.

But the point is that, if the down payment is made small enough, the desired result is that you start saving money immediately, because your monthly financing payment is less than what you're saving on your electric bill.

Of course, ideally there's some kind of government subsidy here that makes it a no-brainer for banks, where the government pays the interest or down payment or something.
their timeline reminds me of the lottielab one, with the thumbnails and zooming and all that
Widewine and similar DRM schemes pretty much require hardware assistance; the lower levels that do not will provide you with 720p, which is exactly what you are getting in Linux. For 4k, it requires tee application, or similar mechanism that's not in the reach of mere mortals.

The early bypass of widewine meant burning an nvidia shield (invalidating its keys) for each and every single rip.
Fuck that.

Everybody just gives up at the slightest inconvenience and uses Chrome.

It's not even that much work to just use Firefox.

Keep up the good fight.
Adding trusted certificates in Firefox directly, instead of at the OS level, is very straightforward. Requires few clicks and does not shout too much.

I prefer using Firefox on my laptop so I didn’t check to see what the process is like for Chrome-based browsers to add trusted certificates (or if Chrome-based browsers only use OS-level certs).

But at least with Firefox, the user doesn’t have to go fiddling with OS level stuff.
It depends. Lots of families need two cars -- but some just prefer it. And as with housing (and everything else), families can often make due with something smaller, older, etc. because it's cheaper.

There is this "modern" expectation of a lifestyle, but most of those things aren't _necessary_. There are lots of families which need two incomes to maintain the necessary stuff, but it's not the majority and few of them are reading HN.
SpaceX had to rework the business end of the deluge systems at LC39A and likely also at the other pads when they were rebuilt to launch the Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy.
And it is nothing remarkable compared to any other tech company CEO's salary. Sure, shitty thing to do, but to smear Firefox's name over it..
Gotta say, I was not expecting one of the first casualties of the AI revolution to be most of the CSAM industry, but I'm dang happy about it.
> I get the sense you are overloading the term to make a false equivalence to bolster religious faith

I think this is a poor argument. It's swinging the "no true scotsman" because it's convenient to what you want to define. Faith in science and faith in another religion is not a false equivalence. Religion is the poorly defined term. Science fits well within it.

Ironically, this is a common holy war on HN.
> microservices breed like rabbits in spring once developers make the first one

microservices talking to the same db... thats not microservices thats a disaster. you basically combine the negatives of the microservice world with the negatives of the monolith - tight coupling.
What about open source Cookie Management Platforms?
Another solution would be generational and family housing.

Kind of amusing that the solutions to modern problems are quickly becoming what were once thought of primitive lifestyles and culture.
Apple AirPods patent can monitor the wearer’s brainwaves and other biosignals
Why did you leave?

How capable are the hackers vs solid engineers working on a basket of known threat models + some additional R&D as the platforms change?

What is the next iteration of these types of companies?
Reality...
Not forever, but they're enough to save us from specifically the energy part of the problem, for the next 45 years even at PV growth rates, or for 390 years if it reduces to only 3% annual compound growth.
Rewriting would introduce new bugs; it would take a large number of engineering hours away from delivering shiny new things; and a formally correct version would probably be less power-efficient.

It won't happen because these targeted attacks don't affect the bottom line whatsoever. Nobody is switching to Android just because a journalist or NGO employee occasionally gets pwned.
EOS is just a conventional zinc-nickel battery, or so I thought. Their Coulombic efficiency is bad (<80%) and grid storage demand isn't high enough to justify using a much less efficient battery to achieve a much larger scale system so the company is effectively dead:

https://iceberg-research.com/2021/01/14/eos-energy-fake-cust...

Gelion has a Zn-Br with a higher but not great Coulombic efficiency (87%), though they still have a questionable near-term demand outlook. No company AFAIK is commercializing Zn-air due to the severe power density issues.
I definitely felt this was happening at some point, but it seemed like it peaked. But, fair enough, maybe I just stopped paying attention.

You should be happy that Reddit just trashed all the apps, then. It would never have occurred to me to look for an app to use Reddit; nor did I ever hear discussion about it.

It seems that people tend to use the same few key applications now: Instagram/TikTok/whatever-flavor-of-the-year-social-media app, messaging, the YouTube app, a browser.

But you're right, in that you do still get hounded to install pointless apps to do a single thing. The other day I needed to download some soccer tickets that were being hosted by TicketMaster. After the TicketMaster-hosted site told me to download them to my wallet but offered no way to do so, the team wanted me to install their own app. Nope.

Another thing that pisses me off is when vendors will make it impossible to do something from A COMPUTER. NO, I am not going to install a goddamned app and dick around on a tiny phone screen when I'm running an event and executing transactions with customers standing in line, Square!
It’s not just the titillation that will sell - there is the old trope that men go to prostitutes to have a therapist they can have sex with.

As loneliness washes over the population, these AI connections will appear very inviting. Who knows if it turns out like “her” (the movie) or if it is beneficial to humanity. Like all technologies I suspect it will be a mix.
Did you ask why does JetBrains have so many IDEs, each for different language? PyCharm, WebStorm, RubyMine, CLion, Idea.

Emacs has LSP client that works will all LSP servers. It's your responsibility to bring an LSP server or implement your own, not Emacs'.
Lol I got the reference but I wouldn’t put it past my kids. The second one is hanging out the back of my desktop so it doesn’t mess with airflow of the primary card, and they’ve already washed two of my iPhones.
LLMs Are Not All You Need
I know, I thought it was a mistake but then I literally laughed out loud once I understood.
Intuit is guilty of using a whole range of dark UI patterns to trick people into paying for products they don't need. Last year I almost paid $80 (surprise at the END of the entire TurboTax flow) and clicked back 10 steps to realize that they showed a deceptive screen that implied that you had to select that option.

Their marketing emails are particularly deceptive, and if you try to opt out of them and unsubscribe, they force you to enter personal information you don't readily have access to to "confirm your identity."

I lost a lot of respect for Intuit from the lack of respect they show consumers.
Thanks for the keywords. I've given a few googles of those words to see what you're talking about.

So it seems like CivitAI has base models / training data. This seems to be more of the base artistic style for StableDiffusion or something to draw off of. LoRA is some program to tweak models / training data into a specific style (but needs a base style to work with). So the combination of those two techniques seem to generate characters (especially an anime/cartoon, where there's a lot of reference art from the show to take).

But since some characters are very popular (Konosuba is a very popular anime), the LoRA would have already been done (and is possibly being shared on forums online somewhere??). So the advertiser probably just downloaded (base model) + community-sourced LoRA of the Konosuba anime, and then used a prompt to create the advertisement?

Finally, take a classic "pin-up" model shot to provide a sexual base image and bam. Automatic, low effort image that probably gets a lot of clicks.
Isn't there a point where solipsism becomes more appealing than reality though?
One issue with this is that at we have peaks in demand for electricity exactly when cars are more likely to be on the roads (morning and evening commute times, roughly).

So for it to happen at large scale, we would need to see significant reductions in eg night time generation capacity. In my view this is unlikely (nuclear and wind will still run at night even if we close every coal, oil and gas fired generator).
Every morning, I get up early (5AM), and take a 5K walk. It's always the same walk, and I usually play some mindless techno, while doing it.

I use the time to "triage" the day's tasks. Sometimes, I even fix bugs, while thinking about a solution that had perplexed me, the night before.
It's hard to imagine either Linux or Git if Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie hadn't laid the foundation.
They have a section in the robots.txt that allows Google. They must think no other search engine matters.
Well sure, it can legitimately call itself anything. You are wondering if Bun’s standards for 1.0 match up with the standards for 1.0 that you have in your head, but of course only you can answer that.
I for one am interested why it's specifically AI girlfriend ads and not AI boyfriend ads. Heterosexual women are huge consumers of e.g. dating simulators, romance books, et al. that envision perfect men, bad boys with sweet hearts, wealthy powerful high-earning men who somehow always make time for the beloved. You'd think there'd be just as many AI boyfriend ads-- what teenaged girl wouldn't pay huge money to date $popular_male_singer?

[Example comparison: I know for a fact that popular romance publishing houses have straight up algorithmic-level demands of books published with them. Kiss must happen by page X. First sex must happen by chapter Y. Happily Ever After is mandatory, etc. These publishing houses make huge money, maybe the most well-earning genre in all of books.]
This inevitability is inherent to our system. It's not specific to Apple.

I don't need to convince anyone of this. History will repeat itself as it always does.
Dan, you can't deny that most (if not all) the comms from both the React team and Vercel make it obvious that Vercel is not only first-moving on RSC but working intimately with the React team to both vet the implementation and I'm sure offer (opinionated) advice on tweaks/direction.

Also, links to packages with 5 line READMEs and no comments/documentation in the code might as well be called blackboxed. Yes, its open source but that's pretty much it. John or Jane Doe will have to deconstruct and/or assume the team's intention by combing through your links, https://github.com/reactwg/server-components/discussions/5 and the (light) documentation from Vercel on how all this stuff really works.

All I'm asking for is clarity and the ability to potentially create my own implementation rather than watch the "big guys" (read: frameworks) get the advantage by having access to information we don't have.
Yeah, we know this way. It's as convoluted and deliberately complex as building a nuclear plant.
>It’s helmed by John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of AI, who was hired in 2018 to help improve Siri.

I’m sure he’s a smart man, but considering where Siri is, and the fact he’s been there for 5 years, I’m not holding my breath.
Hello.. I have both dev's. Please contact me to set up time for a review of their skillsets
Every time I see "the intelligence community" I just know I am reading propaganda
The Blade Runner 2049 girlfriend style may be the future, and I wonder what effects it will have on society. In a decade or two, we may have AI entities with minds so lifelike that you can't differentiate them from real people. You might wear AR goggles that allow you to see them anywhere in your home, wear a suit that lets you feel their touch and engage in intimate interactions. This perfect AI partner, tailored to your physical ideals, will never betray you, always listen, understand you, and be ready to satisfy your needs. They can share your hobbies, get excited about your interests, be funny and intelligent without any flaws.

Consider the future generations, increasingly isolated and reliant on virtual interactions, and it's hard to imagine how they could resist such a prospect. Now, add the fact that these AI companions could be fully controlled by corporations. It becomes a heaven for advertising companies, akin to having not only microphones and cameras in your home but also the ability to influence you through an avatar of a person you have emotional connections with.
Filter News by Goals
This is why ,as useful as they are, I also loathe llms, so much textual content is endless drivel, either fully created by AI or helpfully rewritten. Of course it's not new, but what is new (to me) is users using llms in discussion topics to either troll or to make their point, or receiving (real, work related) e-mails fixed up by chat-gpt; madness.
The journey of "Goals-driven news reader" continuous.
Not explicitly, I think no. But in some sense, yes. Arguably any tech which we don't really understand is a black box. I think the lack of understanding how something works is a large part of the "magical" effect.
> It looked a lot like that ULTRASystem photograph.

I was a little confused, before I realized that name only appeared in one of photos. After trying to resolve my confusion, I found this, which appears to be a document from 1985 enumerating all these types of systems then in existence:

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...

It says the

> AM Varityper 4800 (a Harris 2200 product)

There's a few stock image of those in use at the Austin American-Statesman newspaper:

https://www.alamy.com/austin-texas-usa-circa-1980-newspaper-...

https://www.alamy.com/austin-texas-usa-circa1983-backshop-at...

The hardware is different than in the movie, but the software appears to be similar.

Scanning the document, I saw a mention of Interleaf, which some people at my employer were still using until recently (http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/Interleaf.htm). The comments on that page about the file format ring true, since we decided to not even try conversion and just have the users re-key their documents into our home-grown system for that content.
Depends. If you're trying to run a grid entirely on wind/solar, which presumably is the ultimate goal, then you need several days of storage. A low discharge rate is fine in that case.

This is the selling point of iron-air batteries, which discharge over the course of a hundred hours, but are a tenth the cost of lithium-ion. The first iron-air factory is supposed to be operational in 2025.
He is delusional, but there are plenty of guys, me included, that would like to have housewife, and will provide everything and anything she needs to be happy and comfortable in that role.
And as has been proven many many times, more eyes don't result in better code reviews.
Firefox runs at about half the performance of Chrome for our use case and other people doing similar stuff report similar results. I wish it wasn’t so clear cut.
...and has been since the evolution of chlorophyl some 3.5Bn years ago.
It's true. Unfortunately Mathematica simply can't be used in many domains. I would really like to integrate mathematica with a type checker for automatic theorem proving. I think it could greatly alleviate the clunkiness of dependent types.
Isn't the "physical plan" the part that gets the "set of tuples", not the "logical plan"?

And isn't that matter of how that gets done more a concern of which physical plan the query optimizer picks, and as a result the query engine that powers that particular data-layer?
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Touch Pianist – Tap in Rhythm and Perform Your Favourite Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9490372 - May 2015 (100 comments)
We have the metrics to show our productivity soared when we were sent home a little over three years ago. It's only been improving.

It's funny - before the pandemic hit we'd already gone through a RIF. As things started booming back we've been hiring from all over the country. We now have teams that are wholly comprised of people from all over. There's no path forward to do an RTO at this point, and our productivity numbers are simply too high to warrant it.

My understanding is as our leases expire, we're not going to renew many of them. Where people are still in the office, and we have some of those folks and have had them all through the pandemic, we'll consolidate facilities in the same region.
That is simply untrue.
That is the most important lesson the game has to offer you. Humility.

https://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPoss...
My GitHub Status Is a Clock
I wrote a small Go program to turn my GitHub status into a (almost) functional clock.
There is a version of the FujiNET in progress for your C64 or 128, etc... :)

I am getting one for my Apple, and want to get a C128 sometime in the near future.

Was all Atari for a long time, and then a while back, I bumped into an Apple //e and realized just how much fun all these machines are!

The C128 is next.

And, in short order, we could all write programs that talk to one another over the Internet via FujiNET devices. Good times ahead.

And yeah, SIO is pretty cool. Atari got that right. The one thing I envy about the C64 and friends is full 320 pixel color resolution. The Ataris are 160 pixel. And I am not talking about size. Both machines can deliver 320 pixels, but Atari machines can only specify a difference in lumanance between pixels at that resolution.

In the last 10 years, that difference has proven itself with some damn cool demoscene productions on C64 and friends. Plus, the 128 has a real 80 column display. My Apple has that too, and I really miss it on the Atari.

Anyhow... have fun.
Indeed, and we can even summon familiars, though care must be taken that we don't summon something like Microsofts Tay.