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mcint

899 karma · joined May 27, 2015

Working to live a better, more dense, more interesting, longer life.

Looking for contracting. ML, ML infra.

Considering building —- more fluid messaging service.

hi@[user].io

mcint.io - working on it

mcint.at.hn

submissionscomments
mcint··on iPhone keyboard: Learns what you type, dynamically resizes key "hot zones"(2008)
I had not hear about this. Surprising early, quiet success of simple models. Wayback Machine does not seem to have the demo videos saved.
mcint··on Sieve is simpler than LRU
In reference to a key aspect of ARC's design.
mcint··on Playing with Fontconfig (2020)
Classic thorough post venam! Glad you're sharing them!

I don't have the spare cycles to substantively engage. These posts would make for really good discussion seeds in the linux infrastructure meetup I run. Comprehensive, but still approachable answers to what it takes to solve X well, here font rendering.

mcint··on Light-induced whole-molecule vibration can rupture melanoma cells’ membrane
Even if this just becomes chemotherapy but locally activated by near-infrared light, that would be great.

It means, at worst, don't go outside or be in bright sun-lit spaces, but also, we can shine a flashlight on where the cancer is to kill it. Even if it weren't very selective (which could be adjusted with other targeting molecules), light-trigged theraputics are easy to understand the propagation of.

mcint··on Scientists Destroy 99% of Cancer Cells in the Lab Using Vibrating Molecules
They've quoted a kill rate, but that's neither sensitivity nor specificity. Sounds much better than general chemotherapy. Hope it stays selective in vivo. The light-triggered aspect seems promising.
mcint··on First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
Nuclear is costly _now_*. It wasn't getting built, for years. There is so much energy to be had from that, and cost learning curves can come down. France's ("small") modular reactors, SMR, they even aim to sell internationally, in their 2030 plan, are a model. To China no less.

China also builds nuclear reactors, and we can't fall behind them. I cannot abide an SMR gap.

mcint··on Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces
The distinction I remember from the paper, is that discrete data (text, DNA) could be modeled effectively with only real-valued components, while continuous data (audio, video) benefited from complex numbers -- in their state. Evidently summarized from the authors statements characterizing existing work, preexisting wisdom on SSM/S4 models.

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ouF-H35atOY (same video, I'd watched previous to seeing this hn post)

  other model details the authors note
  that most prior State space models use
  complex numbers in their state but it
  has been empirically observed that
  completely real valued State space
  models seem to work fine and possibly
  even better in some settings so they use
  real values as the default which work
  well for all but one of their tasks next
just following this, another impressive snippet

  it succeeds on test sequence lengths of
  up to a million tokens which is 4,000
  times longer than it saw during training
  while none of the other methods compared
  to generalize to Beyond twice their
  training length
mcint··on Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces
(A smaller later dup thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38606590)
mcint··on Mamba outperforms transformers "everywhere we tried"
The distinction I remember from the paper, is that discrete data (text, DNA) could be modeled effectively with only real-valued components, while continuous data (audio, video) benefited from complex numbers -- in their state. Evidently summarized from the authors statements characterizing existing work, preexisting wisdom on SSM/S4 models.

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ouF-H35atOY (same video, I'd watched previous to seeing this hn post)

  other model details the authors note
  that most prior State space models use
  complex numbers in their state but it
  has been empirically observed that
  completely real valued State space
  models seem to work fine and possibly
  even better in some settings so they use
  real values as the default which work
  well for all but one of their tasks next
just following this, another impressive snippet

  it succeeds on test sequence lengths of
  up to a million tokens which is 4,000
  times longer than it saw during training
  while none of the other methods compared
  to generalize to Beyond twice their
  training length
mcint··on Go Testing by Example [video]
Wow! Someone brought up and demonstrated go's "example tests" just yesterday to me and a group. He praised them highly for tech-adjacent fields where people don't have familiarity with software engineering practices for modular, tested, or ready to share projects. We discuss infrastructure, and it was enlightening to be reminded of the tech-adjacent fields that could benefit greatly from a few more of the practices common in the tech industry. I suppose the Joel test and 12 Factor app would be indicative guides.
mcint··on Music-Map – Find Similar Music
Project by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mg

All manually user-generated by people contributing <= 3 names through https://www.gnoosic.com/, then voting on other names suggested in the same neighborhood of the graph.

It would be cool data to get access to. But it's a nice singleton in the mean time. Like Netflix's challenge dataset, it would be interesting to have another layer of associations to compare with more formal genre lists. I wonder what kind of data Spotify releases.

mcint··on Herbie: Find and fix floating-point accuracy problems
Excellent demo! It cool to see egraph transforms supported in producing alternative equations with different numerical stability properties. Nice end to end work!
mcint··on Llamafile lets you distribute and run LLMs with a single file
Yes, with a patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#macOS

from https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...

I thought my 2015 MBP wasn't able to upgrade. Good to know it's still supported.

mcint··on Ask HN: Why do people use password managers?
> Through these hackers can generally get passwords of all users of these services.

Assuming you mean password manager services. If they can get a copy of the vaults at all, in a well-designed system they have to attack each one individually.

They also serve business use cases for sharing, and revoking access, to other services.

> So, why don't people use local password managers?

Because synchronizing between devices is an important factor in usability, even just for an individual, not even considering groups or businesses that would share access.

Local password manager vaults can also be stolen by malware, would result in the same catastrophic loss you suggest.

> Just a txt file encrypted with "master password" should be pretty damning to break into. And the reward for breaking in would be password for 1 person. (compared to 100k businesses).

Password managers do just "do the thing you'd want them to do", and because they have a well-defined use case, they can support extensive discussion about threat models, and can easily and coherently support lots of people benefiting from the best research and security, without each having to individually roll a solution.

A hosted service without persistent compromise is likely less vulnerable to an old copy of a vault, and an accidentally disclosed master password causing catastrophic failure.

Lastpass has some issues that look egregious in retrospect. The early exceedingly low-strength vaults that were never upgraded (only possible on login).

1password publishes research and pushes forward authentication management beyond password, e.g. passkeys, in a credibly cross-ecosystem way.

mcint··on Formation °
Has me wanting to use them as a screensaver. Ease enough to download, though original the sources would be nice. I would want to play with each of these visualization modes with non-noise inputs, FFTs, intricate spectrogram outputs.
mcint··on On actionable and useful logs
Appreciate the post! Sharing with someone I'm mentoring informally.

Not a fan of the

  html { font-size: .78125vw; }
Let browser zoom be free!
mcint··on Windows 11 Update 23H2 is stealing users' IMAP credentials
Catch up? This is an attempt to re-claim, or solidify, monopoly.
mcint··on RegEx Crossword (2013)
Well, at this scale, it would take longer to set up a SAT solver than it would for the SAT solver to list all valid solutions.
mcint··on RegEx Crossword (2013)
I felt the same way. Furthermore, it's a little dissatisfying to not have a unique solution, in terms of characters. If you think of character sets, it's still unique, but it's a bit unsatisfying.

I made more progress once I accepted (possibly) non-uniqueness and worked on finding some valid assignment, as opposed to a sole valid assignment.

The last dozen clues were increasingly interesting to solve, the intersecting constraints.

mcint··on The Concept of the Ruliad (2021)
Found it much easier to hear him talk about it on ML Street Talk, 2 months ago (also on 7 months ago).

https://www.youtubetranscript.com/?v=dkpDjd2nHgo&pp=ygUWbWwg... though only /rulia/ matches, only once. Not a great transcript from YouTube it seems.

mcint··on Show HN: Updates to Search Hacker News
Note, search "all" is available again. (And type= story & comment now fails.)

Thanks checkmeyer for devoting some time to this resource, I really appreciate having hn history available at a keypress!

mcint··on Tell HN: HN Search By Algolia has more options
"All" is back, today. Haha, but now `&type=story&type=comment` is broken for me. Thanks for sharing the workaround!
mcint··on Show HN: Updates to Search Hacker News
Thank you! Including inline since I appreciate it so much

  &type=story&type=comment
can be used to replace (the same, or most of the same functionality of)

  &type=all
in the search area.
mcint··on Ask HN: What happened to hackerspaces?
https://www.acemakerspace.org/

https://circuitlaunch.com/ (working hard to brand away from /makerspace/ or /hackerspace/, but serving a similar audience and purpose, in a professional/entrepreneur/business-building direction).

mcint··on Ask HN: What happened to hackerspaces?
I spent Saturday, Sunday, and part of Friday tabling at Maker Faire for Hacker/Maker-spaces[1] and for Noisebridge[2]. With some other folks who tabled all of last weekend too.

There are many! Also, more importantly, other institutions have taken up ideas from them and offer tools and services to address the same needs. Libraries and colleges in many communities host makerspace tools, tool libraries

The maker movement has taken off, Etsy, home crafting, and sharing and selling projects at all varient of levels of polish,

Finding like-minded individuals, for all manner of interests, is possible through meetups.

I suppose, they've unbundled. I would say: look closer, they're maybe more present than ever, but in parts, and adapted in ways that best complement the psychological demographics of the places they serve.

[1]: https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces [2]: https://noisebridge.net/

mcint··on Show HN: Updates to Search Hacker News
I appreciate the post on the update!

I did use the "all" search, I made search engine shortcuts for all "hn", stories "hns", and comments "hnc" in my chromium* search engine settings. The all search now returns nothing. I like to cast a wide net in search results. I don't think I'll search for many of these categories in most queries, if pressed, but I also won't discover them. May motivate me to index hn myself as some of my friends have.

I appreciate surfacing the other formal and informal categories of posts in the hacker news repertoire, and it's fantastic to be able to filter strongly by category, but I don't like that I will now have to always pre-select, pre-commit, to the singular category I want to find matches in. I suspect some halfway solution, like match-counts of other categories, would be nearly comparably expensive to returning results for all, in terms of query cost and maintenance or complexity burden.

I'm also seeing text styling issues in the menus in settings: white text on white background, in both default and experimental skins, and light and dark modes of experimental skin. I checked in incognito to be sure it's not my extensions affecting display, nor Brave resource blocking.

mcint··on We Finally Have Proof That the Internet Is Worse
I think it still helps if you remove it from Watch History. And the "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" can help, if nothing else, to feel like you're doing something.
mcint··on jq 1.7
I didn't time myself, but took 25-50% more queries.

I'll echo the value of ijq, https://sr.ht/~gpanders/ijq/ The live updating makes for less to remember and visualize. Though there is some value in having intermediate history recorded, for the second and later questions you ask of the data. (And supports commenting out for error diagnosis without deleting half the expression, `# ...`, hash and space required.)

I hadn't known of `debug`, quite convenient. I've often used multiple outputs at the tail, for example `... | keys, .` to remind myself of the structure as I explore down. Also `gron` and `fzf --multi`.

mcint··on iCloud Drive silently deletes your content
I want Apple to never make this available to 3rd parties. I wonder if, and hope, MDM can disable this support function too.
mcint··on Hexadecimal clock counting down to 2038 problem
Pretty cool! Although it's not obvious, without reading, that the issue falls at clock-bottom, which is counter to analog clock convention, both for 12 hour and 24 hour clocks. I would encourage some coloring, shading, or a larger mark.

Logically, reaching for a justification, an explanation, sure, it's reasonable that the MSB flips halfway around, but again it differs from the analog clock reading conventions.

v2 (+/v2.html) which he posted on another thread, does make it clearer

https://retr0.id/stuff/2038/v2.html

Other thread of his blog domain

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/unix-clock.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37492371

The color separation is also a bit large, mainly 2-3 and 3-4, while 1-2 are similar but distinct.

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