Hacker News: kyllo

New comment by kyllo in "AI usage patterns in software teams"

kyllo — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:25:35 +0000

> You could say the same thing about compilers versus assemblers, high-level languages versus low-level ones, and services and libraries versus monolithic programs.

Right, but we didn't invest a trillion dollars of capital into any of those things in the span of a couple years, thus forcing them to capture value and show a return on such a massive investment.

New comment by kyllo in "AI usage patterns in software teams"

kyllo — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:04:32 +0000

On the value capture question, it's really not clear that the ability to write code at superhuman speed actually translates to an increase in the speed with which we can create new, better technology products that customers will pay more money for, vs. just enabling layoffs.

New comment by kyllo in "Our position on open-weights models"

kyllo — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:29:01 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by kyllo in "Our position on open-weights models"

kyllo — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:26:50 +0000

Reads like fearmongering about oppressive and violent applications of AI that the Chinese government hypothetically could deploy, which the US government is already actively working on in the meantime.

New comment by kyllo in "How linear regression works intuitively and how it leads to gradient descent"

kyllo — Thu, 08 May 2025 16:36:36 +0000

Only perfect multicollinearity (correlation of 1.0 or -1.0) is a problem at the linear algebra level when fitting a statistical model.

But theoretically speaking, in a scientific context, why would you want to fit an explanatory model that includes multiple highly (but not perfectly) correlated independent variables?

It shouldn't be an accident. Usually it's because you've intentionally taken multiple proxy measurements of the same theoretical latent variable and you want to reduce measurement error. So that becomes a part of your measurement and modeling strategy.

New comment by kyllo in "How linear regression works intuitively and how it leads to gradient descent"

kyllo — Thu, 08 May 2025 16:28:43 +0000

In other words, as economists say, because OLS is provably the BLUE (Best Linear Unbiased Estimator) aka the Gauss-Markov Theorem.

New comment by kyllo in "How linear regression works intuitively and how it leads to gradient descent"

kyllo — Thu, 08 May 2025 16:26:11 +0000

You make a good point, though the difference between ML and statistics isn't just about interpreting and validating the model. It's about the "novel discoveries" part aka Doing Science.

Statistical modeling is done primarily in service of scientific discovery--for the purpose of making an inference (population estimate from a sample) or a comparison to test a hypothesis derived from a theoretical causal model of a real-world process before viewing data. The parameters of a model are interpreted because they represent an estimate of a treatment effect of some intervention.

Methods like PCA can be part of that modeling process either way, but analyzing and fitting models to data to mine it for patterns without an a priori hypothesis is not science.

New comment by kyllo in "Seven basic rules for causal inference"

kyllo — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 19:03:57 +0000

> A sailor is sailing her boat across the lake on a windy day. As the wind blows, she counters by turning the rudder in such a way so as to exactly offset the force of the wind. Back and forth she moves the rudder, yet the boat follows a straight line across the lake. A kindhearted yet naive person with no knowledge of wind or boats might look at this woman and say, “Someone get this sailor a new rudder! Hers is broken!” He thinks this because he cannot see any relationship between the movement of the rudder and the direction of the boat.

https://mixtape.scunning.com/01-introduction#do-not-confuse-...

New comment by kyllo in "Seven basic rules for causal inference"

kyllo — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 19:01:19 +0000

Collider bias or "Berkson's Paradox" is a fun one, there lots of examples of it in everyday life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

New comment by kyllo in "Seven basic rules for causal inference"

kyllo — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 17:31:38 +0000

Indeed, causally linked variables need not be correlated in observed data; bias in the opposite direction of the causal effect may approximately equal or exceed it in magnitude and "mask" the correlation. Chapter 1 of this popular causal inference book demonstrates this with a few examples: https://mixtape.scunning.com/01-introduction#do-not-confuse-...

New comment by kyllo in "Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions"

kyllo — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 20:34:27 +0000

This. I bought toothpaste on Amazon, used it up, and the next time I went to buy the exact same toothpaste, the price had doubled.

New comment by kyllo in "How Olympics officials try to catch “motor doping”"

kyllo — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 22:17:08 +0000

USPA has a tested division now and it's been gaining in popularity--it will soon be more popular than the untested division if it isn't already. Most of the top untested powerlifters have moved over to the WRPF (which does also have its own tested division). There are a lot of other smaller, regional, untested feds. Then there's the IPF and USAPL and their affiliates, which are fully tested, and are now far more popular than any of the untested feds. Untested might never go away, but tested has rapidly surpassed it in recent years.

New comment by kyllo in "Virologist who was first to share Covid genome sleeps on street after lab shuts"

kyllo — Wed, 01 May 2024 15:09:42 +0000

Which is based not on your ability to produce value, but your ability to capture value and charge a cut of every unit, and is thus a massive disincentive to produce public goods.

New comment by kyllo in "When do we stop finding new music?"

kyllo — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 19:23:54 +0000

When I lived in South Korea, one of the things that struck me was how much "flatter" the generations there were in terms of pop culture and music taste and awareness, compared to the US. I worked in an office with a bunch of suit-and-tie businessmen who were mostly in their 40s to 60s, and if you were to ask them about any current K-pop group, they all knew their hit songs.

New comment by kyllo in "When do we stop finding new music?"

kyllo — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 19:21:00 +0000

My friend (who's the same age as me) has a 14 year old son who's learning guitar and he asked me for a lesson. The first thing he wanted me to show him was some riffs from AC/DC songs that came out before I was born.

New comment by kyllo in "The design philosophy of Great Tables"

kyllo — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 21:06:27 +0000

I use plotnine whenever I need to make (static) plots in Python. It's really quite well done, a close match to R's ggplot2, and more feature complete than any of the other Python grammar of graphics packages I've tried.

New comment by kyllo in "Scripts should be written using the project main language"

kyllo — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 18:21:13 +0000

I'm not sure I've even seen a recent, large C++ project that didn't depend on Python or some other external scripting language just to build it, so it's kind of hard to imagine using C++ itself to solve the problem that using C++ creates.

New comment by kyllo in "Did fermented foods fuel brain growth?"

kyllo — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 17:51:19 +0000

Ever had a dry-aged steak?

New comment by kyllo in "Database Fundamentals"

kyllo — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 19:18:50 +0000

It's a lot easier to go distributed if you're append-only, that's for sure.

New comment by kyllo in "Men should abstain from drinking at least three months prior to conceiving"

kyllo — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 21:14:46 +0000

Substances affect different people differently. I can have 3-4 drinks in an evening without changing my eating or sleep habits at all and without feeling any different the next day.

Some people experience drinking-related issues other than alcoholism and I just don't want to conflate those issues with alcoholism. I know some actual alcoholics. It's different.