Hacker News: salty_biscuits

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Inverse Chladni Energy Landscape Design"

salty_biscuits — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:43:35 +0000

I'm experimenting with open research notes now I'm a free agent. I thought this might be a fun project to share, because it ended up being a small metaphor for every ML project I've ever done. Not a serious software project, just me thinking out loud.

Inverse Chladni Energy Landscape Design

salty_biscuits — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:43:35 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/PaulBellette/chladni_inverse_design

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48006948

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by salty_biscuits in "ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner"

salty_biscuits — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 12:40:14 +0000

Yes, my experience has been that it is great if you need to do something particularly weird, but less smooth to do something ordinary.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Bayesian Neural Networks"

salty_biscuits — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 23:22:08 +0000

I'm sure there is a way of interpreting a relu as a sparsity prior on the layer.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Panic at the Job Market"

salty_biscuits — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 21:54:45 +0000

It is fun if you ever find yourself in this situation because you can play the uno reverse card on the interviewer and ask to clarify with impenetrable jargon and look for rising panic (can I assume the graph contains a Hamiltonian circuit? etc, etc)

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Calculating position from raw GPS data (2017)"

salty_biscuits — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 10:23:17 +0000

The error budget in the pseudorange to the satellites has various factors due to relativity, but they are just lumped into the errors in the least squares problem that you solve to get the position estimate (as per the article). So relativity is important, but you don't need to know much about it to solve for your position. Various flavours of long baseline/network RTK will need more sophisticated modelling though.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "CO poultry workers test positive for bird flu after outbreak at egg facility"

salty_biscuits — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 10:54:59 +0000

Whooping cough does not come from pigs. Pertussis is a bacterium that is a human only thing.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Convolutions, Fast Fourier Transform and polynomials (2022)"

salty_biscuits — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 23:04:52 +0000

Basically kernel methods right?

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free"

salty_biscuits — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 07:54:56 +0000

I'd say a fairly large percentage would be disappointed that we let a citizen get treated like that and we did nothing as a country to assist, independent of anything else. Maybe I am out of touch though.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Researchers make a supercapacitor from water, cement, and carbon black"

salty_biscuits — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 21:08:22 +0000

Here in Australia the coldest state (tas) uses more energy (8600) than anywhere else (e.g. qld 5500). They have basically 100% hydro power and use reverse cycle AC for heating. Not sure what else is going on there.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data"

salty_biscuits — Thu, 09 May 2024 20:53:42 +0000

You can look at a medieval bestiary to see how people thought animals might look based on descriptions alone. Like these lovely elephants

https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/20...

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

salty_biscuits — Wed, 08 May 2024 22:19:43 +0000

I'd say it's not new. Take fluid dynamics as an example, the navier stokes equations predict the motion of fluids very well but you need to approximately solve them on a computer in order to get useful predictions for most setups. I guess the difference is the equation is compact and the derivation from continuum mechanics is easy enough to follow. People still rely on heuristics to answer "how does a wing produce lift?". These heuristic models are completely useless at "how much lift will this particular wing produce under these conditions?". Seems like the same kind of situation. Maybe progress forward will look like producing compact models or tooling to reason about why a particular thing happened.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "What will humans do if technology solves everything?"

salty_biscuits — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 08:36:40 +0000

Don't forget the orgies

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Launch HN: PointOne (YC W24) – Automated time tracking for lawyers"

salty_biscuits — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 21:01:52 +0000

It seems like a good application of the technology to a real problem, it just sucks so much that the meta problem is so diabolical. Definitely a local optimisation far from the global.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Why isn't preprint review being adopted?"

salty_biscuits — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 21:49:03 +0000

The whole process comes from a time when publishing was expensive, should be cheap as chips now. The system needs a rethink so "quality" can somehow bubble up to the surface given mass publication is so simple.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "The new Windows update made me think I'd installed malware"

salty_biscuits — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 19:54:01 +0000

I was reading the bit complaining about pop ups in the browser at the same time as my browser was blocking one of theirs

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Sampling: What Nyquist didn't say, and what to do about it (2018) [pdf]"

salty_biscuits — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 01:41:39 +0000

The biggest one I have run into is that the bandwith doesn't need to be contiguous. If you know the the important bits of the signal are contained in certain frequency bands then you can get much lower sampling rates. Basically why things like l1 reconstruction work.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Sora: Creating video from text"

salty_biscuits — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 23:27:10 +0000

It's not that long ago in human history that basically none of the jobs we do now existed. So it is kind of myopic to think that any current career is a calling. Art can become a craft again, not a career. There is nothing wrong with that.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Solid-state EV batteries now face "production hell""

salty_biscuits — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 05:22:19 +0000

Because fuel cells are very efficient at turning fuel to electricity, especially compared to an ICE.

New comment by salty_biscuits in "Why is machine learning 'hard'? (2016)"

salty_biscuits — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 03:58:15 +0000

That is also what statistical modelling feels like. EDA and data cleaning.