Hacker News: shpongled

New comment by shpongled in "Rosalind: A genomics toolkit in Rust running whole-genome pipelines on a laptop"

shpongled — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:51 +0000

There is a relatively widely adopted tool (100+ citations, >500k invocations collected via telemetry) for mass spectrometry-based proteomics written in Rust, and quite a few others in the works.

[1] https://github.com/lazear/sage

New comment by shpongled in "Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns"

shpongled — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:46:21 +0000

The title is >Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns.

Isn't being an anti-masker the opposite of this viewpoint? Literally saying, I only care about the returns for myself, even if creates negative value for others.

New comment by shpongled in "I Wrote a Scheme in 2025"

shpongled — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:12:52 +0000

As someone who is "into" programming languages (and making toy implementations of them), I think some of the most important macros are along the lines of Rust/Haskells `derive/deriving` for quickly enabling serialization, printing etc. Using a language without such capability quickly becomes frustrating once you move to any kind of "real" task.

New comment by shpongled in "Zig Libc"

shpongled — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:58:45 +0000

As someone who has been primarily writing Rust for the past 8+ years, I am actually unaware of any political drama surrounding Rust. It's just a programming language.

New comment by shpongled in "How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code"

shpongled — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:37:50 +0000

Looking at their profile I'm inclined to agree. But I think in isolation, this one post isn't setting off enough red flags for me. At the very least, they aren't just using default prompts.

New comment by shpongled in "How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code"

shpongled — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:13:29 +0000

No, it doesn't. The "I'm an expert at AI detection" crowd likes to cite things like "It's not X, it's Y" and other expression patterns without stopping to think that perhaps LLMs regurgitate those patterns because they are frequently used in written speech.

I assign a <5% probability that GP comment was AI written. It's easy to tell, because AI writing has no soul.

New comment by shpongled in "How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code"

shpongled — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 20:54:18 +0000

Unclear why you think this is ChatGPT, doesn't read like it at all to me. Many people - myself included - use punctuation to emphasize and clarify.

New comment by shpongled in "Responses from LLMs are not facts"

shpongled — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 01:26:47 +0000

If you consider correctly citing a source that is explicitly provided in the context via tool use, then sure.

They absolutely cannot correctly cite sources otherwise.

New comment by shpongled in "From VS Code to Helix"

shpongled — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:42:11 +0000

The value proposition is multi-cursor editing, which is very nice

New comment by shpongled in "SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think"

shpongled — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 19:22:32 +0000

It's not totally novel, but it's very cool to see the continued simplification of protein folding models - AF2 -> AF3 was a reduction in model architecture complexity, and this is a another step in the direction of the bitter lesson.

New comment by shpongled in "SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think"

shpongled — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 19:21:03 +0000

Probably because ByteDance and Facebook (spun out into EvolutionaryScale) are doing it

New comment by shpongled in "Cosmic simulations that once needed supercomputers now run on a laptop"

shpongled — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 04:36:11 +0000

Protein folding is in no way "solved". AlphaFold dramatically improved the state-of-the-art, and works very well for monomeric protein chains with structurally resolved nearest neighbors. It abjectly fails on the most interesting proteins - just go check out any of the industry's hottest undrugged targets (e.g. transcription factors)

New comment by shpongled in "Quicksort explained IKEA-style"

shpongled — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 20:51:26 +0000

There's no problem with randomness in FP?

You could use a monad/external state for an OS-level RNG, or define a purely functional PRNG

New comment by shpongled in "Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware"

shpongled — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 03:50:09 +0000

2016 remains one the greatest single player FPS games I've played (Titan Fall 2 is the other)

New comment by shpongled in "OCaml as my primary language"

shpongled — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 15:20:48 +0000

When I mean "use" them, I mean make heavy use of them, e.g. structs or functions annotated with multiple lifetimes, data flows designed to borrow data, e.g. You can often get by just with `clone` and lifetime elision, and if you don't need to eke out that last bit of performance, it's fine.

New comment by shpongled in "OCaml as my primary language"

shpongled — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 03:08:59 +0000

As someone who loves SML/OCaml and has written primarily Rust over the past ~10 years, I totally agree - I use it as a modern and ergonomic ML with best-in-class tooling, libraries, and performance. Lifetimes are cool, and I use them when needed, but they aren't the reason I use Rust at all. I would use Rust with a GC instead of lifetimes too.

New comment by shpongled in "Open models by OpenAI"

shpongled — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 20:08:12 +0000

Thanks! I'm not super up to date on all the ML stuff :)

New comment by shpongled in "Open models by OpenAI"

shpongled — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 17:51:14 +0000

Do you know when this was introduced (or which paper)? AFAIK it's not that way in the original transformer paper, or BERT/GPT-2

New comment by shpongled in "Open models by OpenAI"

shpongled — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 17:35:12 +0000

I looked through their torch implementation and noticed that they are applying RoPE to both query and key matrices in every layer of the transformer - is this standard? I thought positional encodings were usually just added once at the first layer

New comment by shpongled in "I drank every cocktail"

shpongled — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 01:16:01 +0000

I think you cropped out the important part of the quote:

> It’s rare that I have more than a drink or two in one night.

I don't drink that often any more, but 2-3 drinks in a night, done occasionally is not a problem. I've had weeks where I drink a beer (or two!) every night, and also don't struggle with any alcohol problems.

2 drinks every single night? Leaning that way - and not great for you just from a health/caloric perspective.