Hacker News: cottonseed

The best way to advertise a programming language

cottonseed — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:20:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.stylewarning.com/posts/write-programs/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47780364

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Illuminating the Insides of Mlx Models

cottonseed — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:10:46 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/batson/mlux

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436788

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by cottonseed in "New knot theory discovery overturns long-held mathematical assumption"

cottonseed — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 16:32:29 +0000

You cannot bruteforce this. Exhibiting a unknotting of K with n moves only gives you an upper bound u(K) <= n. Proving u(K) = n is an entirely different matter.

New comment by cottonseed in "New knot theory discovery overturns long-held mathematical assumption"

cottonseed — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 16:29:39 +0000

Those are the same. To see that, just flip over L before performing the connect sum.

A Core Calculus for Documents

cottonseed — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:21:07 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04368

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891966

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by cottonseed in "Ex-Meta scientists debut gigantic AI protein design model"

cottonseed — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 20:40:25 +0000

Proteins are linear molecules consisting of sequences of (mostly) 20 amino acids. You can see the list of amino acids here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid#Table_of_standard_a.... There is a standard encoding of amino acids using single letters, A for alanine, etc. Earlier versions of ESM (I haven't read the ESM3 paper yet) uses one token per amino acid, plus a few control tokens (beginning of sequence, end of sequence, class token, mask, etc.) Earlier versions of ESM were BERT-style models focused on understanding, not GPT-style generative models.

Orion Browser by Kagi

cottonseed — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 01:33:07 +0000

Article URL: https://kagi.com/orion/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38441139

Points: 271

# Comments: 188

New comment by cottonseed in "$10M AI Mathematical Olympiad Prize"

cottonseed — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 14:08:08 +0000

I actually prototyped a system like this, mostly as an exercise to learn about crypto. You can't feasibly host or verify proofs on-chain, so you need external trusted verifiers (e.g. oracles). Making sure the oracles can't front-run proof submission is a challenge. Standard formal proof system (like Lean) are sufficiently expressive, although they weren't built for this and need to be modified to make sure a proof hasn't introduced any additional axioms, as you note. The proof system also becomes a point of attack, so you'd probably want multiple, independent verifiers (which themselves have been formally proved correct). I believe these exist for some proof systems, although I'm not sure about Lean's kernel.

Ultimately, I don't think this is really practical, and investing in AI proof agents is the way to go.

Just How Random Are Two Factor Authentication Codes? (2018)

cottonseed — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 22:29:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/2fa-randomness/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35253600

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by cottonseed in "Ask HN: Interesting movies that explore AI?"

cottonseed — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 20:51:18 +0000

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

New comment by cottonseed in "Could an open source/data GPT like chatbot be created?"

cottonseed — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 22:46:17 +0000

Yes. EleutherAI is doing it, probably one of many:

https://www.eleuther.ai/projects/gpt-neox/ https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neox https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06745

They have a 20B parameter model. I think the primary dataset for these open models is The Pile: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027 (web scrape, pubmed, arxiv, github, wikipedia, etc. There is a nice diagram on page 2 that summarizes the contents.)

New comment by cottonseed in "Ask HN: Is there a GitHub analog for electronics?"

cottonseed — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 20:48:16 +0000

AllSpice might be what you're looking for?

> AllSpice: A git platform for hardware engineers

https://www.allspice.io/

New comment by cottonseed in "Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it"

cottonseed — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 21:57:19 +0000

Where are you losing people in your hiring process? Are you getting no initial applications? Do you give the coding exercise but they never do it? Do you give an offer but they turn it down? There is a lot of speculation in this thread but you should have the data.

A New Kind of Science: Review by Cosma Shalizi

cottonseed — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 16:08:57 +0000

Article URL: http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30969249

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Takeaways from 3 Years Working in Machine Learning

cottonseed — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 18:11:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.epistem.ink/p/takeaways-from-3-years-working-in

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30960585

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by cottonseed in "Ask HN: Where are the “docs” for mathematical notation?"

cottonseed — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 17:09:52 +0000

Mathematician here. What do you want this for? Even if you had them, you probably wouldn't understand the definitions anyway.

As others say, there is no standard, and conventions vary by subfield, publication, author and over time. This is esp. true at the research level, where the mathematical content is still being worked out. Subfields have certain conventions, and well-written books and papers will normally introduction notation or include an index of notation, esp. if the notation is novel or they different from the usual conventions. You could start compiling something like this by going through the standard undergrad and grad textbooks for each subject.

New comment by cottonseed in "Ask HN: Completely switching careers at 28"

cottonseed — Fri, 21 May 2021 00:14:36 +0000

One of the best technologists I ever worked with denied his interest in technology until he was around your age. He was a professor at a top school in CS and started some innovative and impactful companies. I quit my job at 34 to study math and got my PhD at 40. After that, I left math to work in biology and I run a data science/engineering group at a premier biology research institute. I will probably change things up again before I'm done. I am not unique, there are many examples of this:

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/7120/too-old-for-advanced... https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/237002/too-old-to-s...

You are young and life is long. Go do what you love.

edit: My email is in my profile. Reach out if you want to chat.

Increased Neutron Levels at Chernobyl-4: How Dangerous Is Corium?

cottonseed — Mon, 17 May 2021 02:22:35 +0000

Article URL: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/14/increased-neutron-levels-at-chernobyl-4-how-dangerous-is-corium/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27179475

Points: 13

# Comments: 0

New comment by cottonseed in "Nuclear reactions at Chernobyl are spiking in an inaccessible chamber"

cottonseed — Mon, 17 May 2021 02:22:03 +0000

I thought this recent Hackaday article did a good job putting the current Chernobyl situation in perspective: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/14/increased-neutron-levels-at-...

edit: submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27179475

New comment by cottonseed in "Chris Lattner: The Future of Computing and Programming Languages [audio]"

cottonseed — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:37:58 +0000

It is pretty clear Jim Keller did something pretty remarkable at Apple and then AMD (I know less about his work at Tesla). I tried to dig into the stuff he's said and written to understand what he did and how he did it. Say what you want about Fridman's interview style, that interview was probably the most insightful thing I found.