Hacker News: jrpt

Securing America's grid: a strategic transformer reserve

jrpt — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 17:08:06 +0000

Article URL: https://breakingdefense.com/2025/11/securing-americas-grid-through-transformers-and-workforce-resilience/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838441

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jrpt in "Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed in animal models? Study"

jrpt — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 18:15:17 +0000

There’s a lot of umbrella diagnoses that would benefit from more specific diagnostics first. What we call Alzheimer’s is probably actually caused by number of different causes depending on the person. This is true of a lot of things in medicine that get grouped together. That’s why testing a drug in mouse models with all the same characteristics sometimes works but fails to translate into humans who have more variety amongst each other.

The same is true of many diagnoses like pneumonia, cancer, alopecia, essential tremor: there’s multiple different groups that would benefit from different things, and if we had better ways to identify the groups, we’d give them what works for them instead of wasting their time with the wrong treatment. As an example, antibiotics won’t work for viral pneumonia and in addition to wasting the patient’s time, actually harm your microbiome. If you had a perfect way to know which is which, you’d always get the right treatment.

Precision medicine takes this even further.

New comment by jrpt in "Inflammation now predicts heart disease more strongly than cholesterol"

jrpt — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 23:12:07 +0000

hs-CRP is well known as a useful biomarker and it is cheap to test too. If you look at page 13 of the GrimAge 2 paper, you'll see CRP is one of the factors most negatively correlated with their aging clock, in fact basically as strong of a negative impact as smoking. https://escholarship.org/content/qt6k46n006/qt6k46n006.pdf

This new news is about research published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

It's definitely not some marketing fad.

New comment by jrpt in "The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer"

jrpt — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 19:23:08 +0000

I would like to know how regular sunlight compares to the combination of vitamin D supplementation and red light therapy. If you do both of those, is that equivalent or better since it doesn't have any damaging effects of the sun?

New comment by jrpt in "Towards a Physics Foundation Model"

jrpt — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:15:18 +0000

What do you think about the Nobel prize in physics going for neural networks last year? What combinations of AI + physics do you think will be most impactful and could potentially get a Nobel prize?

Is Altos Labs gearing up for clinical trials?

jrpt — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 02:43:12 +0000

Article URL: https://longevity.technology/news/is-altos-labs-gearing-up-for-clinical-trials/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44820043

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jrpt in "Mayo Clinic's secret weapon against AI hallucinations: Reverse RAG in action"

jrpt — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 16:10:04 +0000

"Mayo’s LLM split the summaries it generated into individual facts, then matched those back to source documents. A second LLM then scored how well the facts aligned with those sources, specifically if there was a causal relationship between the two."

It doesn't sound novel from the article. I built something similar over a year ago. Here's a related example from Langchain "How to get a RAG application to add citations" https://python.langchain.com/docs/how_to/qa_citations/

New comment by jrpt in "Is the world becoming uninsurable?"

jrpt — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 17:33:21 +0000

That would not have solved the problem in this fire since wind speed was so high. The videos showed embers traveling far and fast. Having a 10 foot fire break would not have prevented the spread. One thing to look into is how the fire started and if the electrical equipment can be made safer, like being underground in some places.

New comment by jrpt in "LLM based agents as Dungeon Masters"

jrpt — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 17:42:45 +0000

I made something like this to let people explore the lore of my game. It has an AI act like a dungeon master as you play through a story. You can try it for free at: https://orbsccg.com/adventures

The main game is a strategic collectible card game, but the “adventure mode” is just for fun AI-powered stories.

New comment by jrpt in "GM exits robotaxi market, will bring Cruise operations in house"

jrpt — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 03:39:07 +0000

Even Waymo has external investors. It’s not all funded by Alphabet.

New comment by jrpt in "Fructose in diet enhances tumor growth: research"

jrpt — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 23:04:08 +0000

I don’t know why this is downvoted. The lack of profit motive is a big reason that nutrition and supplements aren’t as well studied through rigorous trials as drug therapies. The ones that are run are funded by grants. Rather than just “more funding” I think there needs to be more systemic ways at reducing the cost of clinical trials or using alternate methods of getting high quality scientific data for answering these questions.

For example, there is a good trial running now on ketogenic diet in glioblastoma patients, NCT05708352, I think with a NIH grant and maybe the NCI as well. Here is a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W31kR0MzyRA

Food and nutrition is a big business though.

New comment by jrpt in "IEEE President's Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE"

jrpt — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 19:56:35 +0000

IEEE Spectrum used to be good. I don't know whether it still is. Does anyone know?

New comment by jrpt in "Cursor Has Raised $60M"

jrpt — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 03:40:57 +0000

That feature is getting built into the IDE, for example: https://www.jetbrains.com/ai/

New comment by jrpt in "Peloton to charge $95 activation fee for used bikes"

jrpt — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 18:07:14 +0000

Peleton is not a monopoly. Anyone can make an exercise bike. Anyone can offer an online class. I own an exercise bike made by a different company.

New comment by jrpt in "A wonderful coincidence or an expected connection: why π² ≈ g"

jrpt — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 20:20:54 +0000

I mean it is pretty common to set c=1 though.

New comment by jrpt in "Blood test for colon cancer screening approved by US regulators"

jrpt — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 05:12:36 +0000

There are many cases where you're getting blood drawn already and if adding another test onto that is inexpensive, that's a pretty convenient add-on. That's useful for many reasons.

I was also wondering how it performed compared to a stool test, so I looked it up, and found "While the blood test caught 83% of the cancers found by colonoscopy, it missed 17%. That’s on par with stool-based tests."

New comment by jrpt in "Blood test for colon cancer screening approved by US regulators"

jrpt — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 05:10:42 +0000

It's called a multi-cancer early detection test and they already exist.

There's still value in specific tests, though.

New comment by jrpt in "Stanford student collects her Master's degree at the age of 105"

jrpt — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 02:16:21 +0000

In my experience as a Stanford alum, this is not true. The professors interact with undergrad students all the time.

New comment by jrpt in "The Time I Lied to the CTO and Saved the Day"

jrpt — Thu, 09 May 2024 02:55:37 +0000

If you’re seriously considering lying to the CTO you should instead just get a different job at a different company. That’s a really bad working environment if you think lying is acceptable or something to be proud of.

New comment by jrpt in "Two lifeforms merge in once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event"

jrpt — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 06:06:57 +0000

It was probably mentioned in the textbook and you just forgot. I just checked my textbook and it’s one of the first things they say when introducing mitochondria and chloroplasts.