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aakil

630 karma · joined January 26, 2012

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aakil··on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
This shows why biology is so much harder a problem area for LLMs than math, finding RTs is tedious but pretty doable today, they had to scope the problem down a lot from something that would be the equivalent of Navier Stokes in biology. Glad they’re doing it though, even if it’s just marketing.
aakil··on Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?
I built a flask app based chrome extension that takes content from the DOM and sends it to chatGPT for summarization, I also configured it to work on YouTube videos and PDFs, helps when you want to share the tl;dr of a site or video to a friend, I'm thinking I'm going to add some more specific summary functionality next, like listing out a recipe's ingredients and cooking steps

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/news-article-summar...

aakil··on "Et Tu, Ilya?"
I’m a bit surprised of how antagonistic HN is against the builders, Sam was/is a Seller, it’s a needed function to pair with Builders, but no one can reasonably say that Sam built anything, Ilya and the safety contingent are the builders, but somehow the mob is angry at them for protecting what they made from the Sellers, kind of hard to see us becoming so profit motivated that we choose IBM over Woz
aakil··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2014)
Downtown San Francisco Full Time

Full Stack Developer at Academia.edu

To apply just send us an email: ashley@academia.edu

Company:

* Our mission is to build a new system for scientists to share their results and broadcast their work

* We have over 10 million users and they are extremely important to us!

* Our investors include Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital and True Ventures

Team:

* We move quickly, everyone is in charge of their own projects but also very collaborative

* We get catered lunches from zerocater and lunch usually ends with a round of foosball

* We're a diverse group with backgrounds in philosophy, biology, music and art.

Technical:

* We are a Rails shop (you don't need to know Rails though, just how to tackle difficult technical challenges)

* Peer Review: We are revisiting peer review with a novel product built from the ground up that will allow layers of discussion on top of a single document and we are building this using Rails and Backbone

* Recommendation Engine: Lots of machine learning to parse science papers and figure out what people want to read. Pretty cool stuff.

* Servers, Speed, Security and Storage (Postgres / Dynamo / Elasticsearch / Redis): Speed and stability are really important to us because areas in the world with slower internet connections tend to be where researchers can benefit the most from open access to research

About you:

- You have a curious mind and enjoy tackling hard technical problems

- You work best when given a lot of autonomy

- You want to have a huge impact on a product that is making a positive impact on the world

- You like piña coladas, and getting caught in the rain

Please send ashley@academia.edu an email if you would like to apply or if you have any questions.

aakil··on Ask HN: I am programmer, i wan't to die, what can i do?
Hey hack_edu, been trying to get in touch with you, could you shoot me an email? akila@uci.edu
aakil··on Show HN: What would Paul Graham do?
Awesome! We're glad you like it, we actually used your rice and beans recipe, was delicious
aakil··on Show HN: What would Paul Graham do?
It's really just a tool we built for ourselves to get information from a specific trusted source. It helps that he has a huge catalog of work to draw from. We thought the ability to tap into that through a search dynamic would be interesting, it's been very useful for us. We hope it can be useful for you.
aakil··on The Tata AirPod: a car that runs on compressed air w/150-200km range
These would be great for city travel. The two main issues would be safety and parking. They'd have to make a strong case for the vehicle being safe in the case of an accident, not unlike the challenge the Smart Car had. For the issue of parking it would be unlikely that a city would set aside real estate just for these cars as they'd have to do it all over the city and it would be relatively expensive. I think a better solution would be a car-sharing one like Zip Cars. I can pay a monthly fee to have access to the cars at certain spots and if I want to leave in rush hour, I'd pay a premium, or something to that extent. It's a really interesting idea, I live in NYC and I'd love it here.
aakil··on Science Exchange Reproducibility Initiative
Plasmyd does this via crowdsourcing, it lets users comment on papers so that researchers can point out anomalies or post their inability to reproduce the same results. It also gives the author a chance to explain their work.
aakil··on How the Curiosity Rover's Nuclear Battery Works
Isn't there also an issue of impulse though? There must be an acceleration dip compared to earth since I'm basically pushing a mini cooper on earth but only a bicycle on mars. Note: I'm a scientist so I'm embarrassingly bad at physics.
aakil··on How the Curiosity Rover's Nuclear Battery Works
There's probably a radiation issue that wouldn't make it suitable for close to human contact. I wonder how much energy the rover needs to move around since the gravity there is considerably weaker.
aakil··on Why Do We Expect So Little of Our Youth?
I don't agree that we need "less liberal arts degrees" but having more stringent STEM courses that push students to excel is never a bad thing. Bill Gates used to say "smart people go where the money is" and so if by the author's assertion that the new economy needs people who are good at math, then the market will reward those people and the system will change to focus on math skills. This does not mean that liberal arts degrees are useless as the best innovations usually come at the intersection of liberal arts and STEM fields.
aakil··on How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes
I guess I feel that there'll always be loopholes and ways to exploit the system if you try hard enough, so having that be something that can tarnish a company's public image is a much bigger deterrent than the law can be. Also, realistically, it's a lot easier to have a bunch of students refuse to buy the iPhone 5 until apple pays its fair share of taxes, than to have legislators change the tax code.
aakil··on How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes
There really should be some sort of movement to shame apple (and hopefully other California companies) for doing this. They've benefitted immensely from the infrastructure we've provided and are doing nothing to invest back into it now that they're on top. At the very least they should help with the rising tuition costs at public schools (UCs, Cal States, etc.)