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Hey, I just wanted to say that this is, um, the fucking best.

I've been waiting for a literal decade for this, for the same reasons as the grand-parent poster. I literally had a chapter of my NSF CAREER proposal on this (failed, woof, but the reviewers were wrong! this rocks). The potential here is absurd. Eg, novel query optimizers and novel DB indexes could be created that, when connected to the right charting tools, would automatically emit efficient graphics and query results. Very, very cool work, thank you.


I am a big fan of DB-style thinking, very much on the same wavelength as you :)

Pauli exclusion is a QM thing. Black holes are a GR thing. Famously, we don’t know how to mix the two.


We don't know how to mix the two in general. There are plenty of tame enough special cases where we know how a mixture has to look like.

Finding a tame enough special case was how Hawking discovered his radiation.


> Finding a tame enough special case was how Hawking discovered his radiation.

It's how it was formulated, but the radiation is far too weak to measure to know it's a real thing on an actual black hole; from this calculator, a 1 solar mass black hole has a Hawking radiation power of 9e-29 W: https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiati...

We do see analogous effects in physical analogues of black holes, but we don't know for sure that Hawking radiation actually comes off of actual black holes.

Worse, when they're small enough(!) to be luminous enough to actually observe, they should be hot enough to be spewing out a whole load of exotic nonsense particles (not just photons) that we don't really know how to model correctly with regards to Hawking radiation even if it is part of whatever ends up unifying QM and GR.

Given even the event horizon of a BH doesn't play well with QM, it's probably best to wait for some physicists to work out how to combine QM and GR better.


This is so cool. It's a much better version of what Bill Cheswick and I did almost 15 years ago with footage from a SFO->EWR flight: https://cscheid.net/static/windowseat/


I'm just going to answer this one candidly. Yes, you are doing something wrong. Immediately: the commit history is useful to understand the context in which a bug was introduced, because it's the best context to understand the _reason_ the mistake was maybe, which is a really good way to prevent regressions. But more generally: when an entire industry has arrived at an accepted practice, you the junior developer (sorry, 5 years is _nothing_: you need to be told this too) have a chance to pick up on it.

Have you heard "have you played guitar for 20 years, or have you played guitar 20 times for a year?" Time only helps with accumulating wisdom if you let it.


Seriously, though, there's one nomogram you (yes you) should know about and have it well-enough engraved in your mind's eye that you can use it with eyes closed. A nomogram for Bayes' theorem: https://www.ovid.com/journals/nejm/abstract/10.1056/nejm1975...


That was a bit small on my screen. Found an interactive one here that's scalable - https://www.medcalc.org/en/calc/fagans-nomogram.php


That is cool, although it took me awhile to understand it because the posterior probability is on the left and the prior probability is on the right, and because it uses D=Disease and T=Test when I am used to seeing D=Data.


Neat. This is based on Bayes' rule in its odds form[1], or more specifically in log-odds form, where evidence is additive[2].

[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/bayes-rule-odds-form

[2]: https://entropicthoughts.com/sensitivity-counts-against-you


Actually I find nomograms in log form really cool for making naive bayes classifiers 'explainable'. One can even add density for continuous values.

IMHO this is so much nicer than e.g. decisions tree visualizations (which everyone quotes for the most explainable AI models).


It is indeed a great tool for visualizing Bayesian relations. You can even "feel" the sensitivity.


Can you use actually use it eyes closed? Never heard of that level of precision in the mind's eye


You're right that I can't reproduce it like a phone camera could, and that the more precise you are the better (and it might be that with my eyes closed I'm doing something closer to addition in log-odds, like a separate comment responded), but this is super useful even coarsely. The visual affordance gives Bayes's theorem a physicality unlike any other tool I've found.


Gentry Lee is in this? That's very funny.


I'm a HUGE fan of Rush


If you stare at the CYK algorithm long enough and see it for the dynamic programming approach it is, you'll then realize that you can do the same parallelization trick for any context-free grammar!


CRAN has very different social structures and culture than other languages' package repos. CRAN _will_ pull your package from the repository if you fail to play nice with all packages, for example. This is evidently controversial, but it's accepted practice and one possible explanation for why CRAN feels more cohesive than NPM or PyPI.


I remember the controversies well :) but I guess even their extra gating is starting to creak by the sounds of it.


(People might not know the inside joke here, namely that WotC has in the past sent the actual Pinkertons after some people suspected of leaking unreleased cards)


Might also be a reference to the Homestead strike et al. Pinkertons were often employed as strikebreakers.


I want to point out that you are posting from a 5-months old account (squarely within a time frame where LLM-powered accounts would be created), with an UUID-sounding username, claiming a 10-year-old professional history in the field, and using those credentials to bring up the possibility that a 14-year-old account claiming to be an MD with `md` in the username and _lots_ of comments is LLM-generated and asking for skepticism.

It's not particularly helpful; you could easily have done the 5 minutes of work.


Congrats, you've discovered people are always joining an anonymous platform, and some want pseudonymity? If I put "md" in my name, am I suddenly a doctor then? Your reading comprehension needs some work, I've been working for 16 years and it isn't being used as a cudgel to appeal to authority, but sharing some context about who I am and what my perspectives are.


Someone using md in their account name for 14 years is really committing to the bit if they aren’t a doctor.

I went back in their comment history before LLMs existed and found comments where they claim to be a doctor and sound like they know what they are taking about. I’m not a doctor but my wife and many of our friends are, so I know what they sound like.


I appreciate your feedback, I did not dig through their comment history to make that discovery, but saw someone showing full trust in a random user on an anonymous forum and wanted to encourage more critical behavior.


I get the intention, but you made an assumption that the person you replied to didn’t spend 30 seconds find some more supporting evidence before they made their post.

But as far as trust goes, Hacker News has historically been a fairly high trust community. LLMs have the potential to change this dynamic, but I don’t think encouraging people to assume that every post is an LLM is helpful. I don’t think a community with that level of distrust is possible, and at that point we should just all walk away.


Maybe it's the time I've joined at, but I've noticed a lot of bot users and stories which has soured my view a bit. Thanks for engaging in good faith and giving me context, I'll try to have more grace in the future


> Maybe it's the time I've joined at, but I've noticed a lot of bot users and stories

It is.


The parent comment is demonstrating the exact type of internet savvy critical thinking that you’re ostensibly arguing for, but you seem to be reflexively defensive.


Making an ad hominem attack on a random poster asking for critical thinking on who to trust and then making false claims is not "internet savvy critical thinking" since they can't string two thoughts together coherently (a bio blurb vs. an appeal to authority in a random comment).


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