HN user
studyrecon.ai
Do we really need a $200M study? It seems like the literature is already pretty clear. https://demo.studyrecon.ai/search.html?id=214&preview=true#
This example stands out: Eat a balanced diet focused on fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains and healthy (non-saturated) fats. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/healthy_eating/index.html
I wouldn't trust any powdered turmeric. Especially in the quantities people are consuming it these days. Buy it fresh and grind it yourself. It tastes better that way anyway.
I've seen a scientific researcher do literature review manually. Search, refine, print, read, highlight, collate.
Lots of time can be saved by automating those steps (and many researchers don't enjoy it so their job satisfaction could be increased). Also the resulting output could be improved if the researcher had a well structured summary to use as the foundation of their outline.
Improve search with semantic search (search by concept not keyword) Improve refinement by preprocessing and summarizing Don't print, display clean and concise data. Summarize, cite and display.
This stops short of literature based discovery, you have to bring your own research question.
We've also had some luck finding a gap in existing research. We did a POC where we scraped pubmed and graphed study results by concept. We then used the graphed concepts to explore the conceptual space.
It seems that vitamin D protects against cancer and heart disease. It seems that vitamin D supplementation protects against cancer but not heart disease. Is this because of some previously unknown effect of sun exposure (the primary natural source of vitamin D) or is it just that people with adequate vitamin D go outside a lot more and therefore also get more exercise? Don't know, would love to read the paper if someone studies it ;- )
It's actually possible to use LLMs to assist literature reviews. We built a product that works smashingly. The key is to keyword extract, use a vector database and do search based generation.
Our key insight is that the process of citation needs to be handled outside the LLM. They're good for text processing and summarization but as you said, the LLM itself is poor at citation.
I founded a company working to help companies use AI to organize their private knowledge. We have focused on semantic search and knowledge graphs, but we started integrating a chatbot last week and it seems a short leap from where we are.
We'd be happy to help implement something. You'll certainly want an embedding database. The open models are getting pretty good, but you'll want to stand up a testing framework. I have a reasonably good model running on a desktop machine in my office with a reasonably priced consumer grade nvidia GPU.
We also have some tactics and practices around hallucination prevention that we'd be happy to share. Feel free to reach out: human at summitlabs.ai
Wasn't that the previous wave of remote work? And didn't it end badly for IT and software engineering?
I'm currently cleaning up a mess left by some well-meaning but unskilled and improperly managed overseas teams. They spent months and didn't deliver. My team cleaned it up in a few weeks but it wasn't cheap. And consider months of opportunity cost for lost execution time. In a startup with a fixed runway that can mean death.
The IT story is even worse. Poor outcomes, unhappy employees, data breaches. I heard from a neteng friend that when Google purchased Motorola the offshore neteng contractor was so bad Google that classified the Motorola network as actively hostile. The contractor was so deeply entrenched it was impossible to get them out and they were actively serving malware. Any machine that visited the motorola network had to be wiped before being allowed back on the corp network.
So yeah, if that's the next phase we already know how it ends.
They'd act like a solar sail. Putting them in L1 would not keep them positioned. It would be possible to design an orbital scheme that would keep them in place, but it wouldn't be simple. As other people have mentioned, this idea seems impractical and secondary effects haven't really been considered. Glad to hear someone's thinking creatively though.
Here's a simpler plan: 1) Crack down on the deliberate and aggressive misinformation pretending climate change isn't real. We allow this under the guise of free speech, but it's obvious it's being perpetrated to deliberately push a known falsehood. We know who's doing it, we know why. We know where the funding originates and where it goes. There's no ethical dilemma, no slippery slope. Just one lie that's killing the planet. 2) Shift all subsidies from carbon intensive energy to renewables and make it permanent. (This accelerates decarbonization and costs literally nothing). 3) Create a replacement for the Paris agreement but this time focused around collaboration, technology sharing, and a stack-ranked collaborative plan. (Develop and share technology around methane reduction, grid stabilization, electrification etc)
That's it. 3 step plan, net zero cost. Guaranteed to work. Won't ever happen if we don't address the public opinion campaign turning us against each other. But it is way easier than space bubbles.
The problem is not intractable. It's quite solvable. The one blocker is that we're working against ourselves. Let's stop working against ourselves and actually work together to save the livability of our planet.
The US will never be a leader in climate change reduction till we address tiny the minority that inexplicably wishes to profit from the destruction of the only place in the universe that is perfect for us. This is the literal garden of eden, we are willfully destroying it.
No plan can succeed if we don't address the cause of resistance to the plan. That's deliberate deception and manipulation of public opinion by a handful of billionaire oil barons.
The word "neglect" as it is used creates an incorrect framing. But is actually a great word. The whole problem with Nuclear in the US is that we neglect the projects. Our plan around large, long-term nuclear creates a vicious incentive structure. Recouping billion-dollar investments leads to to nuclear plants being run as long and as cheaply as possible.
This is a recipe for disaster. Until we figure that part out, we are correct to hold off building them.
Perhaps a better framing is "We've neglected to figure out an incentive system that allows us to build, safely maintain and safely decommission nuclear projects."
Can someone tl;dr? Not that the paper is too long, but I think I'd need to go back to university and major in biology or statistics to understand what they discovered and more importantly what it might mean.
I also find this unreadable but for a different reason. I'm on mobile and it's rendering unreadably small. On the one hand maybe I should put more time into my setup. On the other hand maybe we, the target audience of this sort of content should comment when the format is unusable. If your power users find mailing list popups annoying to the point they go elsewhere don't you want to know? Isn't a comment on hacker news a great way for someone to learn what their readers like or don't like?
This in no way matches my experience. My best employee is in his fifties. He has more experience and knowledge than the next three people put together. We call him in for difficult and subtle problems (he's a data tier expert and damn good at what he does). I'd love to have five more like him. Actually, I just signed a big contract yesterday so make that ten.
Go look at a Tesla. The Brakes are the same as any other car. Regenerative braking kicks in first so you use it less, but it is all still there. It is exactly the same as a gas car: Same hydraulic system, same calipers, same pads, same rotors.
Thank you for posting that. I've never read this story before and I love it.
It so perfectly captures the tension of gender and turns a common critique of gender transition on its head. What is it called when you fill the straw man with rebar and concrete?
I am also unsurprised that it generated controversy.
There was an article yesterday about the Cassandra project using sentiment in fiction to track social change and conflict. This piece is a great bellwether for conversations around gender.
I've seen it personally. Totally brazen, no attempt to hide it. Two teenage girls, one had clearly done it before, the other had not and was nervous. They just openly loaded up their bags, walked out the front door and got on the bus. The clerks have apparently been instructed not to intervene. The guy at the counter didn't bat an eye. I'd go so far as to say "studiously ignored them". This was at CVS on Mission and 30th. Shoplifting has been around forever, but I've never seen it like this. It looked exactly like the video. I walked out after them. The girl who was nervous thought they were getting busted. The one who had done it before walked with the confidence of someone who knows nobody is coming after her.
That being said most people wait in line and pay for their purchases like civilized folk. I'm happy to pay, but when the line is long I get frustrated that those girls don't have to follow the rules like everyone else does.
Are you seriously recommending that people disable security updates as though that somehow makes anything better?
Accepted how? Nobody is cheering. Nobody is making value judgements one way (this was good) or another (this was bad). We talk about breaches and password dumps here all the time. It is interesting from the information security perspective. The specifics mechanism of the attack is interesting, the unearthed secrets are interesting. This article centers around a reserved account. It is not that interesting. It seems the CEO reserved an account for our failure of an ex president, but this is not surprising or much of a revelation. The specific mechanism of the attack (a change that disabled input sanitization allowing for sql injection) was posted earlier and was quite interesting. Also the fact that the hashes have been cracked, that's pretty interesting too. Gab should be initiating password resets instead of fighting people on twitter about whether hashes can be cracked.
Hashed passwords. Not encrypted. Encryption is reversible. Turning the hashed passwords into plaintext requires hash cracking.
Part of it probably has to do with his hatred of short sellers. People who short sell have a vested interest in seeing the stock they've shorted drop. They tend to make their opinions known and attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. "I bet a billion dollars this stock will go down." "Well shit. if he bet a billion dollars the stock will go down I better sell it before it does." Gee the stock went down!
People have been vocal about shorting Tesla. Musk probably sees their bets against his company as a personal insult.
GME is massively short sold. By some accounts many multiples of existing shares have been sold. I'm not sure that's legal but it seems like it's being done.
If a bunch of people buy and hold a massively short sold stock the short sellers (who've sold a stock they don't own) have to buy it back to cover their promises. This causes a short squeeze which spikes the price and costs the sort sellers massive amount of money.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/investing/melvin-capital-redd...
Or maybe he just likes the stocks. There's an argument to be made that Gamestop is undervalued. That AMC will emerge from the COVID crisis stronger than ever and that Dogecoin while it seems like a joke is actually a cryptographically and structurally sound cryptocurrency.
Although probably not the latter since he claims he doesn't own stock in any publicly traded company except Tesla.
I think he's just in it for the memes.
Just so ya know, inciting violence is not protected speech.
That works until your colo provider tells you to take a walk. Your landlord evicts you from warehouse where you host your backup datacenter space, your ISP cuts you off. It's almost like everybody drew the line at openly planning insurrection. Maybe they could have tried not doing that?
Yeah but that usually means switching from AWS to GCP not, build a data center from scratch oh and by the way nobody from electricians to truckers will work with you because your platform was used to plan a violent attack on America.
Huh, it's almost like no provider in America is cool with your platform being used to plan an insurrection. Or open calls for violence against and murder of elected officials.
They had months of warning from AWS too. "Hey guys, content calling for violence is violation of our TOS, you should make a plan to keep that off your platform", yeah yeah whatever man.
What else should we be using?
The dude stole all the IP. He literally downloaded it all on purpose the day before he left. And took his team with him. And had a meeting with the head of Uber (a rival) the day before he left, to plan his de-facto selling of the Google self driving car project (which he did not own but which he could basically duplicate with stolen IP and poached people).
If you or I did any of those things we'd have been crucified. The fact that he's still standing is a testament to our dual legal system, one for the wealthy and powerful and one for the normals. Had he just left without stealing the IP he'd be fine. He even could have gotten away with violating his non-solicit agreement. The fact that nobody can prove he used the stolen material doesn't really apply.
MAKING CHALK MARK ON GENERATOR $1. KNOWING WHERE TO MAKE MARK $9,999. -Charles Proteus Steinmetz
But after-school programs DO cause a drastic drop in teen crime, alcoholism and substance abuse. Those effects are probably more important. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
Except they (the gender non-specific singular) is probably running kubernetes and has multiple clusters of 10 or so gpu hosts. Not that I disagree, but spinning that up locally and orchestrating it will take time and money. And explaining why training is paused because you keep blowing breakers in the office will cost political capital.
Correct, heroin addiction is problematic. In fact, I'd go so far as to simply say "addiction is problematic" If we say that instead of "drugs are problematic" perhaps a different approach seems reasonable. Portugal decriminalized drugs and focused on addiction treatment. The model isn't perfect, but it might be worth a look.
You should read the story of the silk road. There was a fascinating piece in Wired.