My PhD research was actually studying the leech nervous system. They're still an important 'model' organism in neurobiology. Probably not as important in the field at large as they were in, say, the 1970s, but still. They're also a good system for neurophysiology education, because they are cheap and easy to obtain, have large-ish neurons that are identifiable from animal to animal, and their nervous system has a relatively simple organization.
Readit Newsnycticorax commented on This is my brain on leeches todaythings.substack.com/... · Posted by u/aebtebeten
nycticorax commented on We shouldn't have needed lockfiles tonsky.me/blog/lockfiles/... · Posted by u/tobr
For what it's worth I think Go's MVS somewhat meets the desire here. It does not require lockfiles, but also doesn't allow use of multiple different minor/patch versions of a library: https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs
I believe Zig is also considering adopting it.
If there are any dependencies with the same major version the algorithm simply picks the newest one of them all (but not the newest in the package registry), so you don't need a lockfile to track version decisions.
Go's go.sum contains checksums to validate content, but is not required for version selection decisions.
Strongly endorse. That paper is really wonderful. It seems to me that MVS is the solution to the version selection problem, and now we just have to wait for awareness of this to fully percolate through the developer community.
The post title implies that all French villages have no more drinking water, which is not the case. Sounds like it's 16 villages, all near each other. Still a big deal, but not nearly as bad as if it was all of France.
DOI link to original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.04.012
I don't agree with him 100%, but I always find Drew DeVault to be thoughtful on this topic:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936114
https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job....
Basically, he argues that application distribution outside of the distro (a la flatpak, snap, appimage) is just a bad model. The right model is the one distros have been using for years: You get software through the distro's package manager, and that software is packaged by people working on behalf of the distro. As he says: "Software distributions are often volunteer-run and represent the interests of the users; in a sense they are a kind of union of users."
The other issue, of course, is that in practice flatpaks/snaps/appimages never seem to 100% work as well as distro packages do.
Matlab's support for more than 2 dimensions in arrays is so bad that it's rare to encounter the situations lamented in TFA.
There are certainly some aspects of it that are inelegant, in the interests of backwards compatibility, but otherwise I don't know what you are talking about. Matlab supports >2d arrays just fine, and has for at least 20 years.
nycticorax commented on We can, must, and will simulate nematode brains asteriskmag.com/issues/09... · Posted by u/l1n
HN discussion of a related recent story in Wired magazine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43490290
I'm excited to see KDE promoted to being an "edition", but does anyone know what is behind this decision? It surprises me that Red Hat would take this step, since they are (seemingly) a big GNOME proponent, and I thought many of the GNOME developers work for Red Hat.
nycticorax commented on Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award awards.acm.org/about/2024... · Posted by u/camlinke
Sure, and his other views - in the scope of his professional expertise but also quite relevant to, uh, other humans - seem relevant in an HN thread about the Turing award. This place isn't exactly restricted to technical discussion of the details of RL algorithms, and it's pretty fair for humans to have views on whether we ought to be replaced.
It's not just one Youtube video, it's a repeatedly expressed view:
https://x.com/RichardSSutton/status/1575619655778983936
Valuing technological advance for its own sake "beyond good and bad" is an admirably clear statement of how a lot of researchers operate, but that's the best I can say for it.
The statement I take issue with is that Sutton "is not to be celebrated or trusted". Which I can only interpret to mean that the speaker does not think that Sutton should be celebrated or trusted. (And they've chosen to state it in a kind of pompous way.) Which I think is too strong on both counts. I (and apparently the ACM) think that Sutton should be celebrated for his technical accomplishments. Also, I think he probably can be trusted on a lot of technical matters. Should he be trusted on matters of whether there need to be safeguards on AI research imposed by the state? Maybe not, but those are only a subset of all the matters.
nycticorax commented on Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award awards.acm.org/about/2024... · Posted by u/camlinke
The video is not about his technical work but rather his view that AI will or should take over the future.
But the Turing Award is for his technical work.