<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: inciampati</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=inciampati</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:43:45 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=inciampati" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I prefer to think of it as a reference <i>in</i> the Torment Nexus.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:25:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47276088</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47276088</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47276088</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "What AI coding costs you"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>get the system to build a clean architecture and explain it to you. it will help it to build a better system. a huge part of working with these models for engineering is getting them to create reports. for themselves and of course for us to read and understand. the bottleneck is actually our verification capacity.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:44:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195938</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195938</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195938</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Don't trust AI agents"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Lines of code are nothing. It's verification that creates value.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:43:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195922</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195922</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195922</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Canada's deal with China signals it is serious about shift from US"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you don't service the debt, your assets will be repossessed and sold off.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 20:20:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661655</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661655</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46661655</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Always bet on text (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But a graph, which provides a view at a certain level of resolution, can often be described in a few consise statements. That's why we make them, to get a view we can condense.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Dec 2025 11:40:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401095</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401095</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401095</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Always bet on text (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> CAD. Sure, you can do that in text... but it takes much more room to do and magnitudes more time to interpret.<p>Fascinating example for me. I do CAD... using text! My only experience with it is programmatic in openscad. We check the visualization, but only on output of the final product. For me it's dramatically easier to work with. That may be a personal defect but it's also consistent. Underneath the rendering is always data, which is text, markup, but strings of fundamental data.<p>And in science it's not a stretch at all that numbers come first. I'll argue you're reaching. Today no one is drawing their numbers from experiments directly on a graph. They record them digitally. In textual form typically, and then render them visually to obtain generic understanding. But also there, in the end, your conclusions (per tradition) need to be point estimates with error bounds expressible in concise textual terms. You may obtain them from looking at images but the hard truth is numerical, digital, textual.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Dec 2025 11:35:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401071</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401071</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401071</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Always bet on text (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is true that graphs communicate very well. But they do come from text... And in the end we need to be able to describe what we see in them in text.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Dec 2025 07:47:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46400017</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46400017</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46400017</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "NOAA deploys new generation of AI-driven global weather models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To have a competitive code writer with ngrams you need more than to "scale up the ngrams" you need to have a corpus that includes all possible codes that someone would want to write. And at that point you'd be better off with a lossless full text index like an r-index. But, the lack of any generalizability in this approach, coupled with its markovian features, will make this kind of model extremely brittle. Although, it would be efficient. You just need to somehow compute all possible language before hand. tldr; language models really are reasoning and generalizing over the domain they're trained on.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:58:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337549</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337549</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337549</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Size of Life"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Very beautiful. Love this.<p>If it helps, AFAIK (I do atomic force microscopy of DNA), DNA's height is closer to 2nm than 4.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:25:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220554</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220554</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220554</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "The universal weight subspace hypothesis"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The authors study a bunch of wild low rank fine tunes and discover that they share a common... low rank! ... substructure which is itself base model dependent. Humans are (genetically) the same. You need only a handful of PCs to represent the cast majority of variation. But that's because of our shared ancestry. And maybe the same thing is going on here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2025 04:28:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201226</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201226</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201226</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "We're learning more about what Vitamin D does"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The entire reason for skin color variations is a genetic optimization for UV absorption at specific latitudes vs sunburn risks.<p>This seems obvious but was not confirmed by genetic evidence. The rate of adaptation turns out to be much higher than can be explained by skin cancer.<p>The real cause appears to be fertility. UV radiation breaks down folate (vitamin B9) in the bloodstream, and folate is critical for DNA synthesis and repair. Folate deficiency causes serious problems in pregnancy, neural tube defects like spina bifida, and may impair sperm production. So darker skin in high-UV equatorial regions likely evolved partly to protect reproductive capacity.<p>In the other direction, lower melanin production helps with vitamin D synthesis in lower sunlight environments. Vitamin D requires UV-B radiation to be synthesized in the skin, and melanin inhibits this. Vitamin D is also linked to fertility. It's involved in sex hormone production and has been associated with successful implantation and pregnancy outcomes.<p>If you're curious, check out Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin's work. Their hypothesis is that skin color evolution as fundamentally about reproductive fitness: dark enough to protect folate, light enough to synthesize vitamin D. Both nutrients affect fertility, fetal development, and offspring survival. They have an immediate primary impact on fertility and success, while skin cancer even in the most extreme environment/phenotype mismatch, has an onset after reproductive age.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:52:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090240</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090240</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090240</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Ask HN: How are Markov chains so different from tiny LLMs?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Markov chains have exponential falloff in correlations between tokens over time. That's dramatically different than real text which contains extremely long range correlations. They simply can't model long range correlations. As such, they can't be guided. They can memorize, but not generalize.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 19:01:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45996316</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45996316</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45996316</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Spatial intelligence is AI’s next frontier"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just had a fantastic experience applying agentic coding to CAD. I needed to add some threads to a few blanks in a 3d print. I used computational geometry to give the agent a way to "feel" around the model. I had it convolve a sphere of the radius of the connector across the entire model. It was able to use this technique to find the precise positions of the existing ports and then add threads to them. It took a few tries to get right, but if I had the technique in mind before it would be very quick. The lesson for me is that the models need to have a way to feel. In the end, the implementation of the 3d model had to be written in code, where it's auditable. Perhaps if the agent were able to see images directly and perfectly, I never would have made this discovery.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:29:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882315</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882315</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882315</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Love that a term from Vinge has almost entered our lexicon. The author is a "programmer archeologist".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:19:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45865768</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45865768</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45865768</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Meta-analysis of 2.2M people: Loneliness increases mortality risk by 32%"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And if you're alone it's worth running with a chair into the street to do it as visibly as possible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2025 16:32:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45415731</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45415731</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45415731</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "The AI coding trap"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Effective coding is not code first think later.<p>LLMs aren't effective when used this way.<p>You still have to think.<p>IMO a vibe coder who is speaking their ideas to an agent which implements them is going to have way more time to think than a hand coder who is spending 80% of their time editing text.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 Sep 2025 16:23:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45405576</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45405576</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45405576</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Were RNNs all we needed? A GPU programming perspective"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It turns out you can use a fused triton kernel for a true RNN GRU and run just as fast as the minGRU model in training. Yeah, it doesn't work for very long context but neither does minGRU (activation memory...)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 21 Sep 2025 13:04:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322355</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322355</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322355</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>matrix doesn't get used "in the wild" by normies because it's not marketed for anything. However, it does get use "in the wild" by groups who need an IRC/slack/discord system that's open source and truly federated.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:48:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45289658</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45289658</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45289658</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "Tesla changes meaning of 'Full Self-Driving', gives up on promise of autonomy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wish I had radar eyes</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Sep 2025 12:42:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45148789</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45148789</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45148789</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by inciampati in "I bought the cheapest EV, a used Nissan Leaf"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Alewife parking and the T in?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Sep 2025 12:38:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45148763</link><dc:creator>inciampati</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45148763</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45148763</guid></item></channel></rss>