Hacker News Reader

lamenameon Big O Notation – Explained as easily as possible

Also a nice quick ref here https://www.bigocheatsheet.com/

lamenameon U.S. insurrectionists received $500k in bitcoins from French donor

It's a reminder of how ancient our brains really are, despite our advancement of the average state of society as a whole.

lamenameon We don't need data scientists, we need data engineers

This sounds reasonable. The trick is to identify companies/cultures of each type at interview time. But is that even possible?

lamenameon Computational Model Reveals How the Brain Manages Short-Term Memories

As a neuroscientist, I can tell you with high confidence that many if not most neuroscientists would agree with you.

You might also be interested in "Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?"

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

lamenameon Understanding the role of individual units in a deep neural network

Perturbing units and observing change is so much like the early days of neurology and neuroscience. Lesion studies in post-surgery patients or those with stroke or brain damage told us a lot, removing part of the circuit and observing what changed.

lamenameon Attention Must Be Paid: The Electoral Lessons of the Working Class

I am young and am ignorant of a lot of this history, but the claim here is that Democrats have lost working class voters, particularly white working class voters. What I do not see is how this is consistent with:

1) policies advocated by people in the D party like Bernie Sanders, e.g. social safety nets for such job losses in manufacturing as described. Isn’t this part of the progressive dream?

2) How working class voters end up aligning themselves with a party that is less likely to care about them, e.g. by cutting taxes for earners well above the working class income bracket.

To be fair, it doesn’t seem like either party does a _great_ job helping the working class. Populism comes in ‘left’ and ‘right’ flavors...maybe it just happens to have come from the right (Trump) at the right time.

lamenameon Millions of animals missing from scientific studies

Oops. Yes. What I meant to say was that US granting agencies often require published results to be catalogued through PubMed. Not that PubMed only catalogues US-based research.

lamenameon Millions of animals missing from scientific studies

It depends on the country but an approximation for US biomedical research is https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ although that's only journal-published information.

lamenameon Millions of animals missing from scientific studies

I think a common misunderstanding in this thread, and something not explained in the article, is the difference between internal accounting of animals and publication-level. Labs track animal usage internally in the way you mention, and typically share that information with the university vet, IACUC, etc. but that is simply not useful information to publish.

Despite the possibility of differing opinions in this thread, I think the article has not done a good job of explaining the realities of the process, so anyone here who is not familiar with how animal work gets done is coming in with a purist misunderstanding. Everything is reported (in the US), but not in publications.

Looking at publications alone for animal accounting would be like if I looked at the checking accounts for everyone in a country and wondered where all the money went. Of course it's in savings, investments, cash under the bed... but I only looked in one place. I cannot conclude money is unaccounted for when my search was incomplete by design.

lamenameon Millions of animals missing from scientific studies

This is the most spot on comment. This is field- and technique- specific, but animals approved in a grant and animals that end up in the paper are, in my experience, extremely unlikely to be the same number. Even in an experienced lab with well-oiled technical expertise, there's nearly always a fraction of animals that go to pilot experiments (i.e. didnt work), have some confound, or just didn't work. And by didn't work I mean didn't even get far enough to count as negative data, e.g. if you're trying something very technically demanding or new.

Jumping to the conclusion that negative results aren't being reported (which is indeed its own big problem) from a difference in animal number suggests lack of understanding of the process, but perhaps formal accounting of research animals differs by country.

lamenameon Good sleep, good learning, good life

I'd say it's more useful to think of these as a 3 point cycle. Each leads to the other, and if any one gets perturbed out of control it will cause the other two to go south. The cause and effect is not linear but interactive. Then again, perhaps sleep is more basic than a "good life", so there is a little bit of hierarchy embedded...not sure what the article argues as it's currently down for me.

lamenameon Mind Emulation Foundation

I'm not as critical of these goals as some, but to not even mention another dimension of complexity beyond connections: electrophysiological firing pattern, is quite an oversimplification.

lamenameon Ask HN: How can I pick a side project and stick with it?

This is common for most people, at least in the beginning. This is the nature of creative projects because it's just always going to be easier to think of an idea than execute it.

1) you have to recognize that the dopamine rush of new ideas will not carry you through the project to completion in the same way it drove you to start. Inspiration is useful, but it's fleeting or at best inconsistent. The sooner you stop relying on inspiration to last, the sooner you'll learn to find other ways of motivating yourself. That being said, it's useful for inspiration to fade. This can help you decide the difference between a project that's really useful or was just an idea you had that is not necessarily worth your time.

It also depends on how you work. Some people prefer long bouts of work and long breaks, others prefer a little bit each day. It doesnt matter which or both you try, just keep moving forward.

2) Nearly everyone who creates things has way more ideas or unfinished projects or projects that didnt work out than completed projects.

3) finished projects rarely end up the way you expected and wanted in the beginning. The sooner you accept this the sooner you can be flexible throughout the process to bring what's feasible to completion, rather than an idea that hit many snags

4) related to #3 is learn to recognize asymptotic progress. In other words, many projects are never "finished". You'll always have more to add, and that's ok. You can keep adding, but dont let that hinder taking a break or showing version 1 to the world. Recognizing "good enough" is important

lamenameon World's Best-Run Pension Funds Say It's Time to Start Worrying

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

Posted just the other day here by another user

Disclaimer: i haven't used it

lamenameon Parenting by the Numbers

I would expect that if there was a valid debate to be had she would also have peer reviewed papers published on the topic.

Skimming https://www.brown.edu/research/projects/oster/ I haven't found any related

It seems like her general cause is a good one: to ease parents to relax a bit on what some perceive as apparently harsh recommendations on health and parenting.

But it also seems like she misses the point on what public health bodies are for (minimizing risk on large scale) versus clear advice to individuals. Take alcohol for example, if the actual evidence is flimsy on whether 1 drink is bad or not, it's an easy choice if I'm speaking to millions of people: play it safe. That's not the same as claiming that low alcohol consumption is bad, and it's certainly not an attempt to shame.

lamenameon Parenting by the Numbers

Thank you for pointing this out. Public health advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics is different than 1 person's lifetime of probabilistic events.

lamenameon BioRender – Professional Science Figures

Not explicitly but in their FAQ: "...upgrade to one of our subscription plans in order to attain publication/commercial rights for your BioRender images." Presumably that means permanent licensing of some kind is included if you pay for the right plan, but need more info.

lamenameon Brain signals translated into speech using AI

In many cases there are multiple avenues for application, but this paper says the research was specifically funded by the National Institute of Health, which means the PR focus will be toward human health/disease.

lamenameon Mathematicians Discover the Perfect Way to Multiply

Could someone explain how one can use the FFT in an algorithm for multiplication?

I guess I would understand if I understood what FFT actually does 'under the hood', but I assumed fft itself required multiplication.

lamenameon Lost in Math?

Can you give an example of beauty (or assumed beauty I guess) just being oversimplification?

lamenameon The world might run out of people

What I didn't see mentioned in the article is the 3rd possibility: that the population will grow but eventually reach a stable plateau. I don't know the number (<12 bil maybe) but this was argued by Hans Rosling.

Can any demographers weigh in?

lamenameon Neuronal Dynamics: From single neurons to networks and models of cognition

When discussing abstract computations the way I interpret it is that the level of biology doesn't matter. A single cell has countless moving parts, which can be interpreted as a network of discrete computations.

The biology matters for biologists, and because perhaps it can give us insight into more abstract lessons in computation. I don't think one level of biology is more informative than the other per se.

lamenameon Implicit model of other people’s visual attention as an invisible beam

You don't stop seeing but your visual attention typically goes hand in hand with what you focus on, except in a few surprise cases of change picked up by your periphery, or your conscious effort to look straight ahead but focus on something peripheral.

lamenameon Implicit model of other people’s visual attention as an invisible beam

The fovea requires that our eyes move constantly for maximum acuity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis

lamenameon Intuition is wrong, unless these conditions are met

1. Regularity (predictability) 2. Practice 3. Immediate feedback

i.e. conditions for learning

lamenameon Ask HN: What did you find in your DNA using 23andme?

I can't speak to most of the things you list, but there is at least some evidence for genetic influence on cilantro preference (via olfactory receptors).

https://www.nature.com/news/soapy-taste-of-coriander-linked-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3589946/

lamenameon How plants evolved to make ants their servants

I used to feel the same way, but I think there's some value in simplifying or making scientific ideas more attractive.

The avg tax payer is not interested in obscurity for the sake of accuracy. This is a flaw of the human mind, but something to be exploited rather than resisted when conveying complex ideas.

Of course there should be subtleties mentioned in these articles, but for a headline? I think it's ok to get people excited.

*I'm aware that evolution in particular is poorly misunderstood by some sections of the public, and anthropomorphism in this case may be worse than the general case I'm talking about.

lamenameon Electrical properties of dendrites help explain our brain’s computing power

I was unclear. My comment was just a tongue in cheek way of saying: it's not odd that we don't have much electrophysiological knowledge of single human neurons because of the practical and ethical problems that come with brain slice electrophysiology on humans -- you need live tissue which is hard to get.

What you've linked to deals with "in vivo" rather than brain slice ("in vitro") electrophysiology, which in humans would encounter the same issues. Cool techniques though nonetheless.

lamenameon Electrical properties of dendrites help explain our brain’s computing power

Dendritic recordings per se aren't novel, but the human brain aspect here is.

lamenameon Electrical properties of dendrites help explain our brain’s computing power

I don't find it odd, I don't plan to volunteer my living brain for patch clamp experiments :)