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boltzmannbrain

710 karma · joined September 26, 2014

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
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boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: Tech Stacks at Healthcare Startups?
GCP has a few case studies that are useful, e.g. Recursion Pharma: https://cloud.google.com/customers/recursion/
boltzmannbrain··on Show HN: Calenvy.com – YC alum launches new scheduling app powered by email
I hope this works seamlessly in my emailing/scheduling workflow, or better yet replaces it entirely. Some quick feedback:

1. Terms of service seem over-bearing (see @whydoineedthis)

2. Show me a demo before making me provide personal info (email) and consent.

3. Yellow button on yellow background, ugh

4. "Made with happiness and abundant goodness." Cool, prove it. Show me who's behind this.

boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: What's it like getting better at meditation?
I've always had a good handle on my emotions; ftmp from sports psychology training in my college golf days. Meditation reinforces that kind of mindfulness, but to me provides other value... Introspection is very important and useful to me. Meditation provides a new perspective/dimension from which to observe my mental processes. Not to mention several "ego-dissolution" [1] experiences on retreat have been quite powerful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death

boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2019)
Latent Sciences | San Francisco & Boston | Software Architect | Onsite

Latent Sciences is an AI-first predictive medicines company dedicated to solving neurodegenerative diseases [1]. We're soon emerging from stealth mode, with exciting big-pharma projects and impactful clinical trial deployments. We're looking for a SW Architect to lead the development of our data/ML pipelines, with potential for growing into a Director of Engineering role. Main req's:

- Deep experience implementing platforms and data solutions in at least one of the following industries: genomics, biopharma, med tech/device, payer, provider. Ideally you've run the gamut from infrastructure/devops to consumer-facing desktop/mobile applications.

- Desire to build something new, thinking strategically about business, product, and technical challenges. As one of the first few hires you'll be influential in defining the company culture and path to success.

Sound like you? Drop us a note: careers@latentsci.com

[1] www.latentsci.com

boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: Examples of 'hand drawn' animations in blog posts?
These are great. Are they done by hand, or with a drawing tool?
boltzmannbrain··on Brain imaging study reveals signs of Parkinson’s decades before symptoms appear
> different angles

Yes, and your example of AuralAnalytics points out the two classes of angles:

1. Different modalities -- brain imaging, voice, eye movements, memory exams, etc*

2. Different diseases -- there are many similarities in underlying processes of neurodegen diseases, but there are many complexities that makes each one a unique, difficult to understand pathophysiology

*Etc is the exciting area, w/ startups still in stealth

boltzmannbrain··on Show HN: A corporate card for life science companies
Biotech-AI founder here. Already using Brex and love it!

On the new life sciences support,

1. How do you know which companies? Do we need to explicitly sign-up/transfer to a life sciences program?

2. Are the life sciences rewards in addition to or replacing the standard Brex rewards [1]?

Also a feature request while you're here: Easy payment a la Chase QuickPay.

[1] https://brex.com/startups/

boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2019)
Latent Sciences | San Francisco & Boston | Software Architect | Onsite and Remote

Latent Sciences is an AI-first predictive medicines company dedicated to solving neurodegenerative diseases [1]. We're soon emerging from stealth mode, with exciting big-pharma projects and impactful clinical trial deployments. We're looking for a SW Architect to lead the development of our ML pipelines, with potential for growing into a Director of Engineering role. Main req's:

- Deep experience implementing platforms and data solutions in at least one of the following industries: genomics, biopharma, med tech/device, payer, provider. Ideally you've run the gamut from infrastructure/devops to consumer-facing desktop/mobile applications.

- Desire to build something new, thinking strategically about business, product, and technical challenges. As one of the first few hires you'll be influential in defining the company culture and path to success.

Sound like you? Drop us a note: careers@latentsci.com

[1] www.latentsci.com

boltzmannbrain··on News Websites Are Dumpster Fires
News websites, if you're going to have a monthly limit of n articles (NYT, HBR, etc.), let me first have the option of continuing to read after loading the page. Too many times following some link (from Hacker News, Twitter, etc.) leads to an article I don't want to read but counts against my tiny monthly allowance.
boltzmannbrain··on NASA executive quits weeks after appointment to lead 2024 moon landing plan
Through NASA's Lunar CATALYST program [1] there are three companies contracted for lunar lander dev: Astrobotic, Masten, and Moon Express [2].

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/lunarcatalyst

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-extends-agreements-to-adva...

boltzmannbrain··on Show HN: Learn angel investing and VC with some skin in the game
"Unrivaled Mentorship"... from whom? Would go a long way to throw a few VC logos up there. As-is there is zero credibility -- don't even know who's behind Seed Camp.
boltzmannbrain··on Jordan Peterson debate on the gender pay gap, campus protests and postmodernism
Comments section is on point...

- The most outrageously patient human being alive.

- "1+1 = 2". So you're saying 3 is not a number?

- This is the most impressive display of dealing with a hostile interviewer I have seen in my life

- Jordan Peterson: Hi

Cathy Newman: So you are saying "Heil Hitler"?

boltzmannbrain··on Sam Altman’s leap of faith
Taking off my devil's advocate hat (horns?)... I agree. Even if we use that logic to punt some problems to AGI -- e.g. solve near-light speed travel, or space-based solar power -- we cannot afford to sit idly by while climate change destroys the planet.
boltzmannbrain··on Sam Altman’s leap of faith
I agree w/ you, but devil's advocate: Perhaps arriving at "I'm not sure how" is the logic underlying Altman's conclusion. That is, for any problem x that human's attempt but cannot seem to wrap their heads around (i.e. resolve to "I'm not sure how to solve x"), then x is in the family of AGI-hard problems. Here x = climate change, and b/c we don't know how to solve x (be it challenges across tech/social/political/etc.), let's build AGI and hope it can figure that mess out.
boltzmannbrain··on I turned my interview task for Google into a startup
Why not do that? Coming from the other side of table, an immense amount of engineer-hours are devoted to the interviewing process, including code review on take-home assignments. Thus we try to make the process efficient. Typically there's a set of unit tests provided in the assignment to help the interviewee, and a hold-out set of unit tests that gives us a score for basic correctness. The score, albeit a low bar, is a useful threshold for eliminating candidates unlikely to succeed in the process. Those above the threshold have their code passed on to an engineer to review beyond basic correctness, and move on in the interview process.
boltzmannbrain··on AI Needs More Why
Quick notes on Léon Bottou's work with causality in deep learning (re the MIT Tech Review article "Deep learning could reveal why the world works the way it does"): https://twitter.com/theAlexLavin/status/1126520379927740416
boltzmannbrain··on Show HN: Person Identification by Keyboard Typing
Part of the streaming anomaly detection benchmark dataset NAB has keyboard typing data (amongst other interesting sources) [1]. Comparing the algorithms would be quite interesting; the algorithm in [2] is unsupervised and doesn't need training data. The benchmark dataset and algorithms are open-source.

https://github.com/numenta/NAB/tree/master/data#real-data

Ahmad & Lavin, Neurocomputing 2016, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092523121...

boltzmannbrain··on Show HN: Nextjournal – seamless data science for teams
Looker? https://looker.com
boltzmannbrain··on Kalman and Bayesian Filters in Python (2018)
GTSAM [1] packs a lot of functionality for robotics projects, including Kalman filters [2]. A product of GTech (Frank Dellaert), a pro is there are many cool projects built on top of it [3], in C++ and Python. A con is GTSAM is not the cleanest, well-architected codebase (although far better than most products of academic labs).

[1] https://bitbucket.org/gtborg/gtsam

[2] https://github.com/borglab/gtsam/tree/develop/examples#kalma...

[3] e.g., https://github.com/gtrll/piper and https://github.com/gtrll/gpmp2

boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: Linux vs. Mac for Developer
"What's OpenBSD" you say? https://sivers.org/openbsd
boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: I will pay you $2000 and code the MVP for your side-project
1. I like the alternative to the status quo for "starting a company". Even more so b/c you're addressing the unmet implicit desire to finish side projects.

2. Premise 1 is agreeable. P2 doesn't hold past the initial VC demo, let alone MVP stage. P3: probably approximately correct. P4: I would agree.

3. Skimming the comments here and seeing mixed/confused feedback, I assume those taking this more seriously are keeping silent.

boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: Experience Transitioning Captable Tools?
Following up in email (thanks!), but for others peeking on this thread...

> I always lean towards solving the problem today vs. problems 5 years down the road

Are you alluding to the problem of setting up w/ Carta, suggesting to bite that bullet now vs five years from now?

If so, the former calls for paying a few grand for the same capabilities of a free captable service, but the latter could a pain b/c the captable/stakeholders would be much more complex in several years.

boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: Experience Transitioning Captable Tools?
Thanks for the comment! I'm wondering specifically about transferring to Carta, as that is what my lawyer prefers using. My concern is it will be more involved than `captable.io export data to csv` followed by `carta import data from csv` -- i.e. it will take a long time and expensive lawyer hours to setup Carta.
boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: Those who moved careers from the West to China, what's your experience?
A couple examples of AI engineers moving to Tokyo (I know it's different) and sharing some thoughts on Twitter:

- David Ha w/ Google Brain: https://twitter.com/hardmaru

- Adam Gibson started Skymind in Silicon Valley and moved to Tokyo a few years back: https://twitter.com/agibsonccc

boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: How can I learn how to paint?
Bob Ross. That is all.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80097532

boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: How to leave a startup early (before equity cliff)?
Some generally useful startup equity resources:

https://gust.com/launch/blog/startup-equity-101

https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/equity

boltzmannbrain··on Ask HN: How do you keep your files organized on macOS?
> Downloads/ gets purged every few years of stale downloads.

Do you have an automated way of doing this? I keep the Downloads/ finder tab open at all times so I periodically clean up.

boltzmannbrain··on Show HN: Deep Work Hours
Signing in gives access to user data. In return there should be some utility to the user. If there is no implication of the latter, the user won't give away the former.
boltzmannbrain··on Dear OpenAI: Please Open Source Your Language Model
Req'd reading: "OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues" by CMU Professor Zachary Lipton, http://approximatelycorrect.com/2019/02/17/openai-trains-lan...

A salient quote from the article:

> However, what makes OpenAI’s decision puzzling is that it seems to presume that OpenAI is somehow special—that their technology is somehow different than what everyone else in the entire NLP community is doing—otherwise, what is achieved by withholding it? However, from reading the paper, it appears that this work is straight down the middle of the mainstream NLP research. To be clear, it is good work and could likely be published, but it is precisely the sort of science-as-usual step forward that you would expect to see in a month or two, from any of tens of equally strong NLP labs.

boltzmannbrain··on Israel airport security stole my laptop
Still no laptop, and no updates from Turkish Air nor the airport.
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