Hacker News: mvcalder

New comment by mvcalder in "TabFM: A zero-shot foundation model for tabular data"

mvcalder — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:46:07 +0000

There's a story sharing the front page right now about scaling laws, so it's not an unreasonable assumption.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689744

A Mote in AI

mvcalder — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:15:30 +0000

Article URL: https://mvcalder-01701.medium.com/a-mote-in-ai-8c544becc958

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436799

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mvcalder in "Claude Sonnet 4.6"

mvcalder — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 01:28:23 +0000

Wait, my job is not cushy. I think hard all day long, I endure levels of frustration that would cripple most, and I do it because I have no choice, I must build the thing I see or be tormented by its possibility. Cushy? Right.

New comment by mvcalder in "The Value of Things"

mvcalder — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 02:05:03 +0000

I really enjoyed the article and want to both praise and encourage the author.

You get it. It’s about value. Keep you eye on that north star and you won’t go wrong.

Whose value? How do I value? Can I reconcile disparite value? Yep, those are the right questions.

For me, I read this and want to give a shout out to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but that’s just me.

I enjoyed the read, thank you.

New comment by mvcalder in "Free Speech in Tucson"

mvcalder — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 17:28:08 +0000

It’s not “freedom of speech I agree with”, no one needs protection to speak agreeably.

Free Speech in Tucson

mvcalder — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 17:05:28 +0000

Article URL: https://yousaytoday.com/story/3ab31ff0-d955-408a-851d-ac77a9d7c23d

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46385622

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by mvcalder in "Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock"

mvcalder — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 01:23:00 +0000

My Massachusetts home has both radiant floor heating (water pipes in floor) and baseboard water pipe heating (separate part of the house). My son’s New York home has radiators driven by hot water. I can’t recall a home where heating was vented air and not circulating hot water in North East USA.

New comment by mvcalder in "[dead]"

mvcalder — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 22:46:53 +0000

Nope, all human all the time.

New comment by mvcalder in "The AI bubble today is bigger than the IT bubble in the 1990s"

mvcalder — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 12:46:26 +0000

“They say sixty-five percent of all statistics Are made up right there on the spot”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUK6zjtUj00

Yield curve for engineers has inverted

mvcalder — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 22:37:58 +0000

Article URL: https://mvcalder-01701.medium.com/the-inverted-yield-curve-48d48959ba6a

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44576615

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by mvcalder in "When Did Nature Burst into Vivid Color?"

mvcalder — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 22:59:28 +0000

And there’s only one photon, vibrating like mad, singularly unable to contemplate its own magnificence.

New comment by mvcalder in "Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'"

mvcalder — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 02:22:57 +0000

It was an odd sight at that hour of the day. I wanted pictures as something to talk about with friends. I really wish I had been astute enough to take video.

New comment by mvcalder in "Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'"

mvcalder — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:10:32 +0000

I read several comments referring to: idiots, morons, delusional, and hysteria.

New comment by mvcalder in "Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'"

mvcalder — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 02:20:35 +0000

At the risk of being labeled a kook or an idiot, I photographed drones flying over my suburb of Boston neighborhood a few weeks ago. This was about 6am, definitely drones not regular aircraft. I assumed it was something flying out of Hanscom or the city mapping streets. And yes I took photos not video, sorry.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Lwfn134LqdEp6xbG9

New comment by mvcalder in "Game of Life, simulating itself, infinitely zoomable"

mvcalder — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:20:16 +0000

For the experts in the house: would it be possible for this to wrap around, so the highest and lowest level join? A torus of GoLs? Can such a thing, assuming it exists, have a finite number of layers? Just curious, this is amazing.

New comment by mvcalder in "The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement"

mvcalder — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 14:24:07 +0000

Does anyone know what the copyright status of LLM generated content is? That is, if I feed a NYT article into GPT4 and say, summarize this article, and then publish that summary, is there argument or precedent that says that is or is not copyright infringement? Asking for a friend.

New comment by mvcalder in "Otter, Fastest Go in-memory cache based on S3-FIFO algorithm"

mvcalder — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 20:13:57 +0000

I wrote up this analysis of cache one-hits after reading the FIFO is all you need paper.

https://www.polyscale.ai/blog/one-hit-expectation

New comment by mvcalder in "A Deep Dive into Neon and PolyScale"

mvcalder — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:10:27 +0000

Disclosure, I work at PolyScale.

Prepared statements work fine. Views can be tricky.

The statistical invalidation will in general disable caching on views since their results will change without any corresponding writes (because we only associate writes with the backing tables of the view). Currently our best answer to views is the new stale-while-revalidate flow which revalidates against the db while still serving a hit. With this feature enabled, one can turn off invalidation (if the resulting eventual consistency is acceptable).

More details about how invalidation works here:

https://www.polyscale.ai/blog/approaching-cache-invalidation...

New comment by mvcalder in "When gradient descent is a kernel method"

mvcalder — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 12:09:52 +0000

Whenever this topic comes up I like to provide a citation to some work I've done:

https://towardsdatascience.com/gradient-kernel-regression-e4...

Not out of vanity (ok, a little) but because I think the idea has importance that has not been fully explored. The article's Bayesian perspective may be the whole story but somehow I don't think so. Unlike the article's author, my work left me feeling model architecture was the most important thing (behind training data) whereas they seem to feel it is ancillary.

New comment by mvcalder in "How Soap Works: The Science Behind Handwashing"

mvcalder — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 14:50:01 +0000

If you, like me, often find yourself covered in pine sap. The product: Shout, for removing laundry stains will make quick work of removing sap from skin. Maybe the answer to your chemistry question is in there.