Hacker News: rkp8000

How Pakistan managed to get the US and Iran to a ceasefire

rkp8000 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:06:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/4/8/how-pakistan-managed-to-get-the-us-and-iran-to-a-ceasefire

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47693071

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Nonviolence

rkp8000 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:33:22 +0000

Article URL: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/nonviolence

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46683410

Points: 152

# Comments: 148

New comment by rkp8000 in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

rkp8000 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:05:32 +0000

https://rkp.science

New comment by rkp8000 in "How Markdown took over the world"

rkp8000 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 23:03:18 +0000

I love Markdown. I'm a bit surprised, though, that you still can't open a .md file by default in most web browsers. It seems like it should be quite trivial to have the browser automatically convert it to html and display it.

New comment by rkp8000 in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

rkp8000 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:48:41 +0000

Computing entropies of high-dimensional random vectors for a theoretical neuroscience study. The journey is mostly a repetition of (1) almost giving up because it's completely hopeless, (2) taking a hot shower, (3) realizing there might actually be a path forward, (4) almost giving up because it's completely hopeless.

The Neuroscience of Memory: Implications for the Courtroom

rkp8000 — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 09:04:51 +0000

Article URL: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4183265/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45435727

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by rkp8000 in "Spherical CNNs (2018)"

rkp8000 — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 22:15:54 +0000

A notable and interesting point of this article is that convolutions and correlations (convolutions without flipping the filter) are quite a bit more subtle on the sphere than on Cartesian spaces. For a convolution between a function and a filter on R^N you just "slide" the filter around, integrating at each shift, which produces another function on R^N. On a sphere, however, there is not a clear cut way to slide a filter around a sphere. For instance, there are multiple ways to slide a filter centered at the north pole to the south pole, which will result in different filter orientations.

More generally, the space of rotations, which is the argument of the convolution (analogous to the shift amount being the argument of a standard convolution), is 3D (3 Euler angles), whereas the space of points on the sphere is 2D (polar and azimuthal angles). Thus, whereas convolution over R^N returns a function over R^N, convolution over the sphere actually returns a function over the 3D rotation group SO(3). This has interesting consequences for e.g. the convolution theorem on the sphere, which is not as clear cut as simply rewriting the standard convolution theorem in spherical terms.

Spherical CNNs (2018)

rkp8000 — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 19:28:38 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.10130

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44292652

Points: 22

# Comments: 3

Neuroscience needs to empower early-career researchers, not fund moon shots

rkp8000 — Fri, 30 May 2025 07:53:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thetransmitter.org/funding/neuroscience-needs-to-empower-early-career-researchers-not-fund-moon-shots/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44133957

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by rkp8000 in "Continuous Thought Machines"

rkp8000 — Mon, 12 May 2025 16:25:17 +0000

A (non-exhaustive) list of some notable papers:

Maass 2002, Real-time computing without stable states: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12433288/

Sussillo & Abbott 2009, Generating Coherent Patterns of Activity from Chaotic Neural Networks https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2756108/

Abbott et al 2016, Building functional networks of spiking model neurons https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26906501/

Zenke & Ganguli 2018, SuperSpike: Supervised Learning in Multilayer Spiking Neural Networks https://ganguli-gang.stanford.edu/pdf/17.superspike.pdf

Bellec et al 2020, A solution to the learning dilemma for recurrent networks of spiking neurons https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17236-y

Payeur et al 2021, Burst-dependent synaptic plasticity can coordinate learning in hierarchical circuits https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-021-00857-x

Cimesa et al 2023, Geometry of population activity in spiking networks with low-rank structure https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Ororbia 2024, Contrastive signal–dependent plasticity: Self-supervised learning in spiking neural circuits https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn6076 Kudithipudi et al 2025, Neuromorphic computing at scale (review) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08253-8

New comment by rkp8000 in "Reversible computing with mechanical links and pivots"

rkp8000 — Mon, 05 May 2025 20:52:22 +0000

Thanks for the link to your article!

If you don't mind my asking, how much does the role of mutual information in linking logical and thermodynamic reversibility depend on considering quantum systems? I.e. does your footnote 37, which discusses independent systems vs "subsystems of correlated systems" hold for classical systems as well?

Reconstructing dopamine's link to reward (2024)

rkp8000 — Fri, 02 May 2025 01:19:17 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thetransmitter.org/dopamine/reconstructing-dopamines-link-to-reward/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43865209

Points: 16

# Comments: 3

New comment by rkp8000 in "Reversible computing with mechanical links and pivots"

rkp8000 — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:20:28 +0000

A great pedagogical article on thermodynamic vs logical reversibility, for those interested: https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.1886 (Sagawa 2014).

New comment by rkp8000 in "Ask HN: Any insider takes on Yann LeCun's push against current architectures?"

rkp8000 — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 17:32:24 +0000

There are a few folks working on this in neuroscience, e.g. training transformers to "decode" neural activity (https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.16046). It's still pretty new and a bit unclear what the most promising path forward is, but will be interesting to see where things go. One challenge that gets brought up a lot is that neuroscience data is often high-dimensional and with limited samples (since it's traditionally been quite expensive to record neurons for extended periods), which is a fairly different regime from the very large data sets typically used to train LLMs, etc.

New comment by rkp8000 in "I tasted Honda’s spicy rodent-repelling tape and I will do it again (2021)"

rkp8000 — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 17:38:53 +0000

This is just to say: the poem at the end is a play on William Carlos William's poem, entitled "This is just to say".

New comment by rkp8000 in "Myst Markdown – Markdown for technical/scientific document"

rkp8000 — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 18:18:49 +0000

This reminds me of a project I worked on during my PhD, where you create a network of scientific documents and notes/threads via Markdown, with a similarly structured "rabbit-hole" linking system: https://github.com/rkp8000/hypothesize . I'm not really a software engineer so never made it ready for general use, but I'm very happy to see a similar idea turned into something real! Kudos to the authors.

New comment by rkp8000 in "The Google Willow Thing"

rkp8000 — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 22:26:10 +0000

MSR has a very clear and accessible tutorial on quantum computing for anyone interested in getting up to speed with the fundamentals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_Riqjdh2oM .

New comment by rkp8000 in "An alternative construction of Shannon entropy"

rkp8000 — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 19:30:12 +0000

Yep! This relationship is well known in statistical mechanics. I was just surprised that in many years of intersecting with information theory in other fields (computational neuroscience in particular) I'd never come across it before, even though IMO it provides an insightful perspective.

An alternative construction of Shannon entropy

rkp8000 — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 16:45:13 +0000

Article URL: https://rkp.science/an-alternative-construction-of-shannon-entropy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42127609

Points: 126

# Comments: 11

New comment by rkp8000 in "Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]"

rkp8000 — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 21:58:01 +0000

Here is a link to the press conference with Hopfield at Princeton University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk3Ok1D1xR8