Hacker News: bfrankline

New comment by bfrankline in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

bfrankline — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:58:33 +0000

In numerical analysis, elementary function membership, like special function membership, is ambiguous. In many circumstances, it’s entirely reasonable to describe the natural logarithm as a special function.

New comment by bfrankline in "Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team"

bfrankline — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:36:27 +0000

> Remember the whole point of fair use is to benefit society by allowing reuse of material in ways that don't directly copy large portions of the material verbatim.

How do you think masked language models work?

New comment by bfrankline in "'It's a money game to them':son takes on UnitedHealth over elderly father's care"

bfrankline — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 20:33:07 +0000

Yet people love Medicare and Medicaid.

New comment by bfrankline in "Ask HN: What is the Most "Impressive" Person you know working on?"

bfrankline — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 18:37:37 +0000

My wife is writing a novel.

Exact analytical algorithm for solvent accessible surface area

bfrankline — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 23:30:21 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10462

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40046815

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bfrankline in "A look at the Mojo language for bioinformatics"

bfrankline — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 22:26:24 +0000

Sure, but I think, for example, representation learning, doesn’t involve manipulating an array of strings.

New comment by bfrankline in "Sega AI"

bfrankline — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 01:32:52 +0000

I’d bet this was funded by the Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) initiative.

Yet Another ICML Award Fiasco

bfrankline — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 18:08:31 +0000

Article URL: https://parameterfree.com/2023/08/30/yet-another-icml-award-fiasco/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37326349

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bfrankline in "Tinygrad: A simple and powerful neural network framework"

bfrankline — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 18:27:37 +0000

If you care exclusively about numerical stability and performance, why _this_ set of operators (e.g., there’re plenty of good reasons to include expm1 or log1p and certainly trigonometric functions)? It’d be an interesting research problem to measure and identify the minimal subset of operators (and I suspect it’d look differently than what you’d expect from an FPU).

If you care exclusively about minimalism, why not limit yourself to the Meijer-G function (or some other general-purpose alternative)?

New comment by bfrankline in "Unix command line conventions over time"

bfrankline — Sat, 07 May 2022 19:07:24 +0000

It was very primitive. It was essentially a mechanism for composing operations on vectors. I don’t know for certain but I would guess that it was inspired by IBM and their work on APL.

New comment by bfrankline in "Unix command line conventions over time"

bfrankline — Sat, 07 May 2022 19:04:44 +0000

The most popular today outside of the shell environment is the statistical environment “S.” John Chambers would recreate it as “R” and I understand that it’s very popular and does a nice job of performing statistics and graphics together.

New comment by bfrankline in "Unix command line conventions over time"

bfrankline — Sat, 07 May 2022 19:00:16 +0000

The other environment that is still popular today is the “statistical environment” that Rick Becker, Allan Wilks, and John Chambers created. It eventually became “S” and John would essentially recreate it as “R.” It’s a very nice environment for performing statistics and graphics together.

New comment by bfrankline in "Unix command line conventions over time"

bfrankline — Sat, 07 May 2022 14:10:53 +0000

I was at Bell during the options “debate.” I think something that this otherwise wonderful article misses is that some believed that commands were never intended to be the only way to use the system as the shell was intended to be just one of the many user interfaces that Research Unix would provide. From that perspective, it was entirely reasonable to believe that if a command was so complex that it needed options than it was likely more appropriate for one of the other user interfaces. I believe this is unfortunately now understood by some as it shouldn’t exist. However, because of the seemingly instantaneous popularity of the shell and pipelining text it became synonymous with Unix. It’s a shame because McIlroy had a lot of interesting ideas around pipelining audio and graphics that, as far as I know, never materialized.