waic go brr
HN user
dluan
experimenter, YC W13
equal parts biochemistry, synthetic biology, game theory, and economics.
The arrogance and ignorance so voluntarily put up on display is mind numbing.
Not only have I worked as a science funder for the past 15 years as the founder of Experiment.com and with countless partner foundations and grant programs, having personally funded and peer reviewed thousands and thousands of projects, I've also sat as a member of countless NBER meta science panels alongside NIH and NSF directors where everyone's main pressure is earnestly trying to improve the efficiency and returns of science funding. Mainly to combat the false beliefs around science funding that people like you have spread.
The number one universal lesson of funding basic research, going back from Vannevar Bush to Carl Sagan to small risky out-of-bounds research, is that you don't pick and choose where impact comes from. You don't get to try and justify based on your political preference where you think the most progress will come from. That's not any of this works. The funding of a random jellyfish protein that eventually turns into the discovery of GFP only ten years later is not the kind of thing you can try and predict ahead of time or concoct on paper.
If you don't understand how basic research and impact works, then yeah you shouldn't be allowed to have hot takes about the system that millions of scientists rely on. You're dressing up anti-intellectualism behind a sham of commitment towards meritocracy when you won't even support the people who deserve it on merit. Get lost.
America is facing a multi-generational technical decline never before seen that will do irreparable harm across all fields of research, let alone the human cost especially borne by young scientists who have more to lose, and your grand insightful take is that well, some of it deserved to get cut, when you're not even the one making the decisions of which ones do receive funding.
Now China has invested heavily in their homegrown industry and all of their cigs are currently 10 years ahead of the rest of the world. Chunghwa thins are the new frontier, with their subtle plum aroma.
was this article secretly written by regexp
This has been a meme in Chinese tech/startup world lately, as it's now the main problem they are trying to solve. They largely consider 1 to 100 solved, and have set their sights on the new goal.
"The codebase is otherwise largely the same. The same architecture, the same data structures."
biology is a monad?
This is obviously 青.
For some context, just presented by Matz at RubyKaigi 2026. It’s experimental but he built it with help from Claude in about a month. Successful live demo.
It’s named after his new cat, which is named after a cat in Card Captor Sakura, which is the partner to another character named Ruby.
Mid 30s, also have kid and sleep loss but not as bad as before.
I actually noticed serious mental decline when I was burned out in my late 20s. There were real physical symptoms like not being able to look at a text editor for more than 2 minutes. Post recovery of that, I actually feel like my brain recovered a lot once I started learning languages very seriously (mandarin and japanese), starting a few years ago. Brain feels healthy now but I'm acutely aware of where it's not as sharp as before. Playing around with this felt a little like when my brain is trying to build a new grammar dictionary.
I feel like now that I'm older, my brain just can't fully understand it say as quickly if I were younger. Makes me wonder if younger more plastic brains can adjust to having to juggle more dimensions than crochety old ones like mine with very rigid 3D grooves baked in. Or brains from other animals.
I guess taken to the logical extreme, what does the brain of someone/thing that's good at playing this (or any game of N dimensions) look like?
Sun Yat Sen, the father of China, was educated in Hawaii when it was still a kingdom (at Obamas alma mater Punahou), and famously said it was during that time that he learned what civilized governance looked like. Back then, Hawaii was seen as something akin to how we looked at Japan in the 2000s or China today. A futuristic, socialist (free education, free healthcare) constitutional monarchy that blended elements of Europe, America, and Asia into its governance structures.
Hawaii was so flush with productive sugar cane and so technologically advanced, that it was seen as a target by the American cartel there that it had to be violently toppled.
There's great movie footage of the first Waikiki electric street car heading up towards Diamond Head, taken by Thomas Edison when he visited Oahu. I get sad every time I'm on Kalakaua Avenue knowing that we could've had real public transit in Honolulu if it weren't for America.
We have a massive poisoning of the commons catastrophe coming, driven by further authoritarian government overreach and control. I've seen no one working on this, and in fact most people on HN seem to be working on ways to further exacerbate this problem. I don't just mean half solutions like tor or social protocols that let you in and out of walled gardens.
There's still a tiny window of opportunity for engineers to come up with or design technical safeguards, but eventually this problem will move past the realm of what's easily solvable and out of our hands, and into policy makers hands. A big part of me feels like that window is already slammed shut.
oops turns out you will all be divided
careful, youre going against the party line worker
it's so funny to me that anthropic was created specifically using the virtue signaling line of defensive safety against bad actors (ie the woo woo bad guy of chinese dictatorship), yet the real danger was always coming from inside the house - your own government being an absolute evil clusterfuck.
this is inacccurate, tesla was the first mover in china's EV market and held by far the largest market share for over a decade. obviously that was in large part to elon hiring chinese systems engineers to build out the first super factories and using chinese robotics tech. but ever since losing those key early leaders, tesla has completely fallen behind.
so EOL announcement without saying when it will be, but eventually.
we've been loyal heroku customers for over a decade. should have switched off long ago, but as a small team, it was too valuable. such a shame.
A lot of people will say to start with the most well known stuff - Naked Lunch, On the Road. I never liked Naked Lunch much, but On the Road is still probably the best gestalt depiction of the post-war America that was smack in the middle of transitioning from post-depression NYC jazz to California hippie. Once you have a feel for what that time and context was, then the poetry makes more sense.
It's been a while, but I remember enjoying a lot the very early writings that were collected posthumously in Atop an Underwood, very easy to pick up arbitrarily. Other good ones - Desolation Angels, Dharma Bums, The Town and the City, Subterraneans, Satori in Paris. Those are all formative. There was another posthumous release And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks which was just a funny and ridiculous retelling of a murder of a friend.
Of course, lots of fun stuff from Bukowski, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Phil Lamantia, John Clellon Holmes, Richard Brautigan, short stories and poems. Neal Cassady Collected Letters, 1944-1967 was probably my single favorite book back then. I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of stuff.
Oh and Dog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk8cMyCUnoo
I used to be a hardcore beatnik collector in my college days, basically gobbling up any of books, pamphlets, first editions from everyone on the bus or even mildly associated. But as I got older, I realized how much of it was really just reactionary circle jerking without much meaningful substance, save for Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg at times. The rest of it, especially Kerouac, was basically just documenting a special time and place in niche west coast history, and the real heroes I've come to recognize were the characters like Neal Cassady who's writings I also had. But it's like people today who had parasocial relationships with pre-Covid Dimes Square. Pretty weird to make Cumtown your entire personality, but those people exist. Probably some dork with 2010s hair like Mark Pincus or Dennis Crowley will buy this.
i'm not typing out all of humuhumunukunukuapua'a, just accept humuhumu
This on top of Subway Builder would be incredible
"lying flat" and unemployment are a thing, but nowhere near as bad as media makes it out to be. My experience is mainly in Shanghai and Hangzhou.
I think it's simpler to just appeal to every entrepreneur's spider sense - go where the great people are. It really does feel a bit like how Silicon Valley and San Francisco felt in 2000s-2010s. Caveat of course, which is even before 2008, aware insiders of SV were trying to warn that the Goodness of the internet was being squeezed too hard, that VC was turning to rent seeking too soon, the cart is way too far ahead of the basic research pipeline, etc. And of course, there's corruptible people, terrible overwork, insane competition, bad stuff etc in China too.
But there's a determined, undeniable sense of "we're going to make the world a better place", and you can physically see and touch it in China. Once you take a big inhale of that air, you realize just how much you missed it and needed it.
This is absolutely going to fall on deaf ears here, but I moved with my wife and 1 year old to China for 4 months and became the most productive in more than a decade.
Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath.
There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.
You have brain worms
Peaceful democratic transition is also on the table when KMT wins back the presidency next.
It's wild to me that so many skeptical westerners who want to nitpick certain unproven technicalities, when the entire world only gets bits and pieces of the on the ground reality of China's progress, like the original Reuters article which was clearly fed information by insiders.
You should be living in the world of "China has successfully developed EUV and equivalent litho supply chain" and basing your decision making off of that.
Reunification in Taiwan has nothing to do with chips, and militarily PRC was able to do so a long time ago. The political will in PRC to "kill other Chinese" is zero.