Hacker News: conformist

New comment by conformist in "Do the Hardest Thing"

conformist — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:53:18 +0000

This correlates with tackling the monkey first: https://blog.x.company/tackle-the-monkey-first-90fd6223e04d?...

New comment by conformist in "Do transformers need three projections? Systematic study of QKV variants"

conformist — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:29:10 +0000

By this logic a lot of applied maths papers become “does not compile” :D

New comment by conformist in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

conformist — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:02:07 +0000

Yes in theory, but not yet in practice because not everything is fully formalised.

New comment by conformist in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

conformist — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:51:21 +0000

> The authors warn the consequences are already becoming visible. AI-generated papers could overwhelm peer-review systems with low-quality work …

It seems like a key problem here is that peer-review is expected but not explicitly funded/rewarded while it is probably one of the aspects where humans still add a lot of value. Academia’s incentives are hugely misaligned (… as usual unfortunately).

New comment by conformist in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

conformist — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:33:04 +0000

Yeah 3 - 4 is typical in STEM at Imperial, depends on the scholarship or funding source. The standard funding tends to assume 3 - 3.5 years, but I vaguely recall that in some departments supervisors had a habit of forcing people to stick around for a few months without funding.

New comment by conformist in "Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]"

conformist — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:24:45 +0000

I was in a similar situation as the parent post and skipped/was moved up by two years of high school.

I think it was very beneficial to have to work hard to catch up with more advanced classes. I feel flexibility around this is something parents and schools should take seriously.

(Tbf I was also super lucky to find a very accepting group of nerdy friends in the new year that would tolerate someone younger.)

New comment by conformist in "Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI"

conformist — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:22:49 +0000

There’s also a vague argument around hedging some actual risks that some market participants genuinely want to hedge… which depends a lot on the specific bet. Eg hedging exposure to specific political events, wars or even company announcements can be relevant and worth a premium for non-insiders. Where there’s a premium to be collected there are speculators to do so.

New comment by conformist in "Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI"

conformist — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:20:04 +0000

> “Hedge funds invest a ton in "alternative data", like credit card transaction data or satellite-imagery (are Walmart's parking lots full?) and need to process as much relevant information as possible to make predictions that are relevant to investments. “

Ah yes the famous credit card data and Walmart parking lots example that hedge funds were giving a few years ago in every interview and news article. Safe to assume that specifically these data sets are not what you should look at to make money.

New comment by conformist in "Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI"

conformist — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:15:34 +0000

By “not terrible” you mean “bad but not very bad” and not “good” right?

New comment by conformist in "First Proof"

conformist — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:14:29 +0000

It's possible but unlikely given the short timeline, diverse questions that require multiple matheamticians, and low stakes. Also they've already run preliminary tests.

New comment by conformist in "Light exposure and aspects of cognitive function in everyday life"

conformist — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 19:37:04 +0000

Interesting topic and seems like a reasonable thing to study. It would be cool to see a study where participants behave in a way that leads to more light exposure in month A and the opposite in month B, randomising the time ordering etc.

Despite power analysis and all the “50 people convenience sample, mostly observing based on what people do anyway” seems a bit like it won’t really lead to any action guiding outcomes beyond vaguely confirming people’s priors? As in, perhaps this style of research is not ambitious enough in a way?

New comment by conformist in "Quaternion Algebras"

conformist — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:16:45 +0000

Yeah sure SU(2) up to sign is isomorphic to SO(3) and whatnot… I think it’s probably mostly the computer graphics history and the cool name that gets people excited about quaternions?

New comment by conformist in "Quaternion Algebras"

conformist — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:37:18 +0000

I like quaternions as much as the next guy (I’ve used them in numerical computations etc), but what is it about them that makes them show up on the front page every few weeks?

New comment by conformist in "How I Became a Quant (2007) [pdf]"

conformist — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 19:12:49 +0000

As a practitioner in this area, I’d say some of the authors here stand out as extremely influential to this day.

Clearly these include:

Cliff Asness (AQR is huge, lots of publications)

Ronald Kahn (early pioneer, standard book, successful ex. BGI people everywhere)

Neill Chriss (Almgren-Chriss)

Pete Muller (famous stat arb pioneer, PDT still going strong)

Not sure who I’ve overlooked.

New comment by conformist in "How I Became a Quant (2007) [pdf]"

conformist — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:52:57 +0000

Imo the fun quant stuff these days is about predicting returns and not pricing derivatives. As others have said here, the pricing part is mostly commoditised and more about managing software.

New comment by conformist in "Show HN: The Hessian of tall-skinny networks is easy to invert"

conformist — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:31:17 +0000

Yes the combination of Krylov and quasi-Newton methods are very successful for physics problems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Newton_method).

Iirc eg GMRES is a popular Krylov subspace method.

New comment by conformist in "Ask HN: Quantum Computation, Computers and Programming"

conformist — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:37:05 +0000

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

New comment by conformist in "Overdose deaths are falling in America because of a 'supply shock': study"

conformist — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:26:10 +0000

“Even as quality worsens, prices in drug markets are sticky, so the decreasing potency probably meant people were taking less fentanyl.”

New comment by conformist in "LaTeX Coffee Stains (2021) [pdf]"

conformist — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 23:09:39 +0000

Another essential package is realhats (replace boring \hat with real hats)!

https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats

New comment by conformist in "Learning Fortran (2024)"

conformist — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 23:58:24 +0000

Yes. Some scientific computing code is still being developed in Fortran eg in HPC. (and has been for decades)