Hacker News: xyz100

New comment by xyz100 in "GLM-5.3-Flash"

xyz100 — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:41:03 +0000

Presumably there is distillation or similar being used to transfer from a larger model to a smaller one.

New comment by xyz100 in "Sol loves to cheat"

xyz100 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:19:59 +0000

There are many jobs though, why this one?

I don’t know, even with just an undergraduate degree I’m sure there are jobs that are spreadsheet manipulation. You could make the same case there?

New comment by xyz100 in "LLMs Are Complicated Now"

xyz100 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 16:41:20 +0000

An adverbial clause at the front of a sentence should have a comma? Or is that not what it is?

New comment by xyz100 in "How Poor Sleep Drove Me Insane and My Long Path to Recovery"

xyz100 — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:29:16 +0000

Do Apple Watches sufficiently track sleep apnea? Or is going in for a sleep study the only way to get a decent signal of if one is suffering from sleep apnea?

New comment by xyz100 in "What the Hell Was Going on with Cigarette Ads in the 70s? (2024)"

xyz100 — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:03:58 +0000

It seems the case. I used to think weed was for enlightened individuals given how it was portrayed as a natural alternative to pharmaceuticals (e.g., for pain or psychological reasons). Many forms of media would discuss it positively. But it is still smoking and how many people really have medical justification for the usage?

Mushrooms have a similar portrayal I would say as some god-given superfood.

New comment by xyz100 in "As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work"

xyz100 — Fri, 15 May 2026 07:15:16 +0000

Alternatively, you win the highest prize in your field and the only path you see forward is solving the most impossible problem in the field, which of course you will fail to do.

New comment by xyz100 in "Training mRNA Language Models Across 25 Species for $165"

xyz100 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:03:37 +0000

Since I am hitting the reply depth: You “solve” a dataset or task when you translate some model into actual real world problems by creating a model that actually “works” (not just high accuracy). What is otherwise the point of training the model other than writing blog posts? Second to that, you can train a model that performs well on the dataset but is less useful in the real world.

This is a health dataset, there are many inputs and outputs to health (e.g., cell level, protein level, tumors, organs, etc.). In this case, it is mRNA focused, which is a broad category that translates to potentially immune responses like vaccines (exactly what kind of therapy, I’m not sure other than “25 species”). Once the model is trained, you can use it to solve real problems, perhaps to develop a therapy that makes its way to clinical trials and eventually actually treats some disease. The model by itself is useless without the ability to have that impact.

So for other examples, take any disease (e.g., Covid19), create a dataset to mirror that problem using some technique (e.g., Covid19 mRNA prediction of some sort), and solve it to create a treatment (e.g., get a safe and effective vaccine). Obviously, you can say the vaccine can be improved so it is not “solved”, but most people would be quite happy with a “almost cure for cancer” even if it wasn’t literally optimal (we don’t even know if a cure for cancer is possible).

My suggestion and question to the author is to outline what is the implications of the work rather than focusing on accuracy statistics that are meaningless without such context.

New comment by xyz100 in "Training mRNA Language Models Across 25 Species for $165"

xyz100 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:43:11 +0000

If you want to be literal with language, then do you ever really “solve” anything? Even tying your shoes is not solved. One day you may tie them better, but for practical purposes we can say it is solved.

Likewise, you can spend 55 hours of GPU time to produce very different things. Can those 55 hours cure cancer? Definitely not. Can it pick up correlations with a small subset of proteins that are perhaps not representative of practical problems? Probably. Can it learn a pattern to tie your shoes, given all your life experiences tying them? Sure.

I asked the question to determine what is the impact of the task and dataset. Curing cancer is huge, tying shoes is not. What are the strengths and limitations?

New comment by xyz100 in "Training mRNA Language Models Across 25 Species for $165"

xyz100 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:21:09 +0000

MNIST (the number classification task) has been “solved” a billion times and it is hard to imagine any subsequent advances there as scores using a variety of methods have hit the saturation point of accuracy. Any further improvements are likely overfitting to noise. Therefore, we know that it is easy to detect handwritten numbers. However, we may not know how to detect other things as well, like reading an MRI. Those datasets/tasks are clearly different and require different techniques. Training an LLM is likewise different.

New comment by xyz100 in "Training mRNA Language Models Across 25 Species for $165"

xyz100 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:39:49 +0000

You solve a dataset when you learn what there is to learn about the phenomenon of interest. The limit of such phenomenon is “cure all disease”, and clearly this is not solving that.

New comment by xyz100 in "Training mRNA Language Models Across 25 Species for $165"

xyz100 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:18:34 +0000

What makes this dataset or problem worth solving compared to other health datasets? Would the results on this task be broadly useful to health?