Hacker News: mbeavitt

New comment by mbeavitt in "Our Approach to Bioresilience: Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind"

mbeavitt — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:31:59 +0000

One thing I really admire about isomorphic and DeepMind in general is that they really try and encode human ingenuity into their models. The only reason that AlphaFold worked wasn't because they had better hardware or more money to train models - it's because they used every bit of information they had access to.

The same goes for AlphaGenome - it only takes a few hours to train the model, but it's freaking amazing what it can predict.

New comment by mbeavitt in "How to sequence your own DNA at home"

mbeavitt — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:24:51 +0000

This is simply not true, advances in basecalling and using Duplex give you >Q25

New comment by mbeavitt in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

mbeavitt — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:05:25 +0000

I really don’t understand why this social credit concept has become so widespread. It does sort of exist but not in the big government breathing down your neck kind of way.

Here’s an example - you can rent e-bikes and power banks at low cost, they are everywhere. If you don’t return an e-bike or power bank after using it, not only will that company charge you, but you’ll likely get blacklisted from renting more, even at other companies.

This is a good thing, no???

SSH-Keysign-Pwn: Reading Root-Owned Files via a Ptrace Logic Bug

mbeavitt — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:39:15 +0000

Article URL: https://needhelp.icu/blogs/ssh-keysign-pwn/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48150037

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The UK's Answer to DARPA Wants to Rewire the Human Brain

mbeavitt — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:37:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/kathleen-fisher-jacques-carolan-aria-wired-health/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026655

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mbeavitt in "'Like science fiction': How a new wave of immunotherapy is eliminating cancers"

mbeavitt — Sat, 02 May 2026 23:55:09 +0000

Yeah for many cancers, CAR-T is the cure which is insane and cool. We just need to make it cheap enough that everyone can benefit…

New comment by mbeavitt in "Stupid NYT"

mbeavitt — Sat, 02 May 2026 17:12:32 +0000

Haha this is cool, it reminds me of the simple.wikipedia.com alternatives to English language pages. Is there an about page linked somewhere? I’m wondering if the images are AI generated or if someone handmade all of this

New comment by mbeavitt in "Pushed by Trump policies, top U.S. battery scientist is moving to Singapore"

mbeavitt — Sat, 02 May 2026 11:43:54 +0000

I wonder - everyone keeps talking about brain drain and how impactful it is, but is it quantifiable?

New comment by mbeavitt in "Ask.com has closed"

mbeavitt — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:57:27 +0000

In 6 months we’re gonna see a HN thread: “I bought ask.com for £250k - here’s what I did with it”

New comment by mbeavitt in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"

mbeavitt — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:54:19 +0000

These kind of project reports showing consistent breakthroughs and clearly a finger on the pulse of what users are encountering as pain points are a good indication that the Asahi team are real pros :)

Look forward to switching back to Asahi full time soon!!

New comment by mbeavitt in "Claude Opus 4.7"

mbeavitt — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:47:38 +0000

Honestly I've been doing a lot of image-related work recently and the biggest thing here for me is the 3x higher resolution images which can be submitted. This is huge for anyone working with graphs, scientific photographs, etc. The accuracy on a simple automated photograph processing pipeline I recently implemented with Opus 4.6 was about 40% which I was surprised at (simple OCR and recognition of basic features). It'll be interesting to see if 4.7 does much better.

I wonder if general purpose multimodal LLMs are beginning to eat the lunch of specific computer vision models - they are certainly easier to use.

New comment by mbeavitt in "Sizing chaos"

mbeavitt — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:19:08 +0000

Having briefly experienced weight loss drugs - and the bliss of that constant “EAT!” voice in your head just going quiet - I’m pretty convinced most humans have a genuine genetic predisposition to overeating.

And when you zoom out to the population level, the “we’re all autonomous individuals” argument gets a lot shakier. Like yeah, at the individual level you have agency, you make choices, fine. But at scale? We are absolutely at the mercy of whoever has figured out how to tickle our monkey brains in just the right way to get us buying their fattening food.

New comment by mbeavitt in "EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear"

mbeavitt — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:23:56 +0000

if you read the article...

Instead of discarding stock, companies are encouraged to manage their stock more effectively, handle returns, and explore alternatives such as resale, remanufacturing, donations, or reuse.

I guess remanufacturing/reuse might be the intended solution if it's absolutely not to be worn.

New comment by mbeavitt in "I'm 34. Here's 34 things I wish I knew at 21"

mbeavitt — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 12:54:25 +0000

> Don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from.

The funny thing I find about criticism is that you actually don’t have a choice about whether or not it affects your future actions. Criticism that I have dismissed has persistently come back to haunt me, perhaps via my subconscious.

New comment by mbeavitt in "House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias"

mbeavitt — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 19:29:43 +0000

what evidence do you have to back up this baseless claim? They openly publish their financial reports: https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports

$178 million might sound like an extremely large amount of money if you're a member of the general public, but for a global resource kept up to date that serves hundreds of billions of visitors per year this is actually not a huge quantity of money.

New comment by mbeavitt in "Rao Reading Algorithm (2024)"

mbeavitt — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 11:02:06 +0000

Oh, I get it. Missed the joke.

New comment by mbeavitt in "Rao Reading Algorithm (2024)"

mbeavitt — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 10:37:15 +0000

Is it though? The algorithm you reference is meant to be a joke:

1) Write down the problem.

2) Think real hard.

3) Write down the solution.

This is not a useful algorithm in any sense, apart from that it might be thought provoking.

What's the "universal nike algorithm"? I didn't find anything on google.

New comment by mbeavitt in "Rao Reading Algorithm (2024)"

mbeavitt — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 09:24:54 +0000

You can't tease me with "Algorithm" in the title and then not actually define an algorithm... TL;DR: Read lots of widely acclaimed books that are close to the source of what you want to learn?

New comment by mbeavitt in "Russia's China Ties Spur Boom in Learning Mandarin"

mbeavitt — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 09:19:25 +0000

https://archive.is/20250801081751/https://www.bloomberg.com/...

Russia's China Ties Spur Boom in Learning Mandarin

mbeavitt — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 09:19:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-01/russia-s-china-ties-spur-boom-in-learning-mandarin

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44754586

Points: 3

# Comments: 1