Hacker News: natechols

New comment by natechols in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

natechols — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:20:52 +0000

"The Shockwave Runner" has aged vastly better than "Stand on Zanzibar", which I found unreadable. The first book predicts an early-21st century society full of smartphone users, ubiquitous privacy violations, and governments run by criminal gangs; the other is like if Paul Ehrlich wrote a sci-fi novel. I don't think "The Shockwave Runner" is as well written as any of the other cyberpunk classics, but as a guess at what 40-50 years in the authors future would look like, it's almost freakily realistic. (Although it feels like reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" at times - familiar tech described with alien words.)

New comment by natechols in "Show HN: An open-source implementation of AlphaFold3"

natechols — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:12:46 +0000

The paper by Paul Adams used an earlier version of AlphaFold that was publicly available, not AlphaFold 3 which is not.

New comment by natechols in "AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules"

natechols — Wed, 08 May 2024 18:03:46 +0000

It's kind of amazing in retrospect that it was possible to (occasionally) produce very good predictions 20 years ago with at least an order of magnitude smaller training set. I'm very curious whether DeepMind has tried trimming the inputs back to an earlier cutoff point and re-training their models - assuming the same computing technologies were available, how well would their methods have worked a decade or two ago? Was there an inflection point somewhere?

New comment by natechols in "AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules"

natechols — Wed, 08 May 2024 17:16:40 +0000

I also worked with the same people (and share most of the same biases) and that paper is about as close to a ringing endorsement of AlphaFold as you'll get.

New comment by natechols in "AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules"

natechols — Wed, 08 May 2024 17:13:15 +0000

The DeepMind team was essentially forced to publish and release an earlier iteration of AlphaFold after the Rosetta team effectively duplicated their work and published a paper about it in Science. Meanwhile, the Rosetta team just published a similar work about co-folding ligands and proteins in Science a few weeks ago. These are hardly the only teams working in this space - I would expect progress to be very fast in the next few years.

New comment by natechols in "U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly"

natechols — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 14:59:31 +0000

This must be some kind of sharp generational divide, right? I'm over 40 and I can't think of anything that has made me feel as old as I do reading the "green message shame" discourse.

New comment by natechols in "Vernor Vinge has died"

natechols — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:44:59 +0000

Seconded, and it touches on the key themes he developed later. I love how a throwaway plot element became a central part of an unrelated novel later, like he had more ideas than he had time to fully explain.

New comment by natechols in "Vernor Vinge has died"

natechols — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:43:11 +0000

I think it's also one of the best descriptions of living at the onset of massive, disruptive technological changes, and how disorienting (and occasionally terrifying) this would feel. The fundamental problem with that book, for me, is that the main protagonist is (deliberately) an utterly loathsome individual, who somehow ends up as a good guy but doesn't seem to do very much learning or self-reflection.

New comment by natechols in "Vernor Vinge has died"

natechols — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:38:19 +0000

> Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices

The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil, and there's never any indication given that they actually care about those terrible prices, or even reflect on them for long. Vinge is very good at channeling the Orwellian language that regimes like these use, but I didn't find his intent at all ambiguous.

The really compelling and ambiguous character in that book is [redacted spoiler], who really does grapple with the moral implications of his decisions, but ultimately chooses the not-evil path. Personally I think this also highlight's Vinge's biggest flaw as an author for me, which is that in all of his books, the most fully realized and believable protagonist is a scheming megalomaniac, with second place going to the abusive misanthrope of Rainbows End, and third to the prickly settlement leader in Marooned in Realtime. All of the more sympathetic characters feel like empty vessels that just react to the plot.

New comment by natechols in "Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer"

natechols — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 19:27:49 +0000

The goal of protein folding simulations like Folding@Home is not to predict 3D structures - it's to understand how folding actually works, and why it sometimes doesn't work. When FAH came out it was already very obvious that there were good computational shortcuts to predicting the end state (the Rosetta approach), but those don't tell you very much about the physical process. Different questions call for different approaches.

New comment by natechols in "Why Is Panera Exempted from California's New Minimum Wage Law?"

natechols — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 21:05:41 +0000

Don't forget, they also had to pass another remedial bill to add exemptions later!

New comment by natechols in "Marine bacteria genus may hold mitochondria's closest relatives"

natechols — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 16:32:27 +0000

7) Mitochondria (and chloroplasts) have double membranes, exactly like they would if they were smaller cells engulfed by the host cell.

8) There are multiple examples of ongoing endosymbiosis where the engulfed cell remains a true symbiont, not yet an organelle. Paramecium bursaria is my favorite - a ciliated protozoan with blue-green algae symbionts.

Bonus: there is evidence for secondary and tertiary endosymbiosis too.

New comment by natechols in "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge"

natechols — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 21:43:13 +0000

If you haven't already read "The Ungoverned" I recommend it as well - although much shorter it's effectively the second part in a trilogy, bridging the two novels and featuring the same main character as "Marooned in Realtime".

New comment by natechols in "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge"

natechols — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 21:40:39 +0000

I had to read the book a couple of times before I completely understood this, but I'm pretty sure there's an implicit metaphor that ties the two plots together, and it's about the feedback between technological progress and intelligence, and how physical constraints (or accidents of evolution) limit progress. The society of the Tines is constrained by their peculiar path to sentience - they can't split up pack members and they can't co-mingle packs without losing coherence. From their perspective, early 20th century electronics are the equivalent of neural prosthetics, and might as well be gifts from the Transcend.

New comment by natechols in "Rwanda joins Kenya to initiate visa-free travel for all Africans"

natechols — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 15:16:36 +0000

> What I think will happen will be extreme concentration of wealth in a few places, and those will put up sky-high walls (literal and figurative) to block out everyone else.

That accurately describes the USA today (and has for many decades), and especially some of the wealthier parts like the SF Bay area.

New comment by natechols in "Heslington Brain"

natechols — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 18:23:27 +0000

A public execution is ritual human sacrifice, the only difference is the label that Western cultures apply to it.

New comment by natechols in "First malaria vaccine reduces early childhood mortality"

natechols — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:48:00 +0000

Do you have a more recent example than Vioxx in mind where your approach might have made enough of a difference to be worth the longer review process?

New comment by natechols in "X-ray laser will ‘film’ chemical reactions in unprecedented detail"

natechols — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 21:19:43 +0000

I helped with similar experiments at LCLS-I and the first half of this comment is correct. The chemical reaction is carefully timed on the order of milliseconds, so they get a series of snapshots of the reaction at a specific known state (but previously unknown structure). There isn't enough information in individual snapshots for the processing software to do very much with besides combine it with other snapshots (thousands of them).

New comment by natechols in "Ultra-wealthy people are working remotely from their superyachts"

natechols — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 23:00:46 +0000

Because raging against the spending habits of billionaires is always easier than self-examination and consideration of one's own wealth and privilege.

New comment by natechols in "The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)"

natechols — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:38:56 +0000

It's weird to me that we've completely normalized having to present ID to buy any medicine at all, especially one that has an excellent safety and efficacy record that I was buying without an ID for a decade. Why should I have to ask the government's permission to cure a runny nose?