16 ms·

Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

• maurits 3y ago
  LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models [1] [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685
  • ComputerGuru 3y ago
    Off topic: LoRa is forever low-power long-range communication for me (as in LoRaWAN).
    • awestroke 3y ago
      LoRA != LoRa
• the_snooze 3y ago
  "Blue Is the New Black (Market): Privacy Leaks and Re-Victimization from Police-Auctioned Cellphones" https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/re-victimization-from-police-auctioned-cell-phones/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/re-victimization-from-po... Researchers bought up a bunch of seized phones from police auction sites and found about 25% of them were trivially unlockable and still held sensitive data about suspects and victims.
  • paxys 3y ago
    Is this really "mind blowing"? Knowing the competency of the average police department, I'd consider it more par for the course.
    • the_snooze 3y ago
      The result is obvious, but the question is demonstrably not. Good researchers know how to ask interesting questions that no one had bothered to ask before. Seeing clever work like this makes me reflect and continually ask myself "What cool angles am I missing?"
    • jjoonathan 3y ago
      Novelty is overrated. Finding proof and pushing for accountability is so much more important.
      • klabb3 3y ago
        Isn’t novelty also arbitrary and subjective? I recall when everyone seemed to think there was novelty in applying ML to X, where X was something very specific. “Look, it works here too!” I doubt that’s considered novel now.
• dooraven 3y ago
  Can Language Models Teach Weaker Agents? Teacher Explanations Improve Students via Theory of Mind https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09299 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09299 TokenFlow: Consistent Diffusion Features for Consistent Video Editing https://huggingface.co/papers/2307.10373 https://huggingface.co/papers/2307.10373 Need to see code for second one.
• bitxbitxbitcoin 3y ago
  “A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives” By McPartland and Small. Moving on from cannabis sativa indica and cannabis sativa sativa to cannabis sativa indica Himalayansis and cannabis sativa indica asperrima depending on distribution from the original location of the extinct ancient cannabis wildtype. Following this new classification, I believe there’s a third undocumented variety in North East Asia. If anyone else has noticed the samesameification of cannabis strains and is wondering what the path forward is, this may be illuminating. https://phytokeys.pensoft.net/article/46700/ https://phytokeys.pensoft.net/article/46700/
• manvel_hn 3y ago
  Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 Older one, but still very nice work.
  • jrmiii 3y ago
    I just posted the Voyager paper at exactly the same moment you posted this - a lot of the same ideas. https://voyager.minedojo.org/ https://voyager.minedojo.org/
• jrmiii 3y ago
  I was impressed by the Voyager paper on a GPT-powered Minecraft bot. https://voyager.minedojo.org/ https://voyager.minedojo.org/
• jeffbee 3y ago
  https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tullsen/halfandhalf.pdf https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tullsen/halfandhalf.pdf Half&Half: Demystifying Intel’s Directional Branch Predictors for Fast, Secure Partitioned Execution
  • 1letterunixname 3y ago
    Related: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/syslab/pubs/demkea_context.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/syslab/pubs/demkea_context.pdf
• GregarianChild 3y ago
  Someone managed to GPU-accelerate program synthesis, a form of symbolic ML. First time for ML that is not deep learning: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591274 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591274 Deep learning took off precisely when the ImageNet paper dropped around 2010. Before nobody believed that backprop can be GPU-accelerated.
  • naillo 3y ago
    How is program synthesis the same as regular expression search? Honest question
    • GregarianChild 3y ago
      Good question. All supervised learning is a form of search with three components: - Specification: what are you are looking for? - Search space: were are you looking? - Search mechanism: how are you going through the search space? Program synthesis is simply learning where the search space is syntax. In deep learning, taking the ImageNet paper as an example, the specification a bunch of photos with annotations, the search space is multi-variate real functions (encoded as matrix of floats) and the search mechanisms is gradient descent (implemented as backprop) with a loss function. I think this paper uses regular expressions an example of how to search fast over syntax. It claims not to be tied to regular expressions.
      • abstractcontrol 3y ago
        https://deepai.org/publication/search-based-regular-expression-inference-on-a-gpu https://deepai.org/publication/search-based-regular-expressi... Here is the full text. Regexps aren't even Turing complete as far as I know, if whatever they have in their paper works for arbitrary programs it would be shocking. I'll give it a read. *Edit*: The algorithm in the paper is a DP like algorithm for building regexes. They use a matrix, and it has all the potential strings to be checked on one axis, and all the potential regex programs on the other axis, and in-between values (the actual matrix values) are booleans saying whether the string matches the program. The algorithm builds the matrix iteratively. I haven't understood how regex evaluation is done, probably directly, but obviously this algorithm is only for checking whether a particular regex program matches an output rather than general purpose synthesis. We'll have to wait for AI chips to really scale genetic programming, GPUs won't cut it.
• dan-g 3y ago
  Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior[1]. Make sure to check out the recorded demo! [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442 https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442
• snarfed 3y ago
  Not recent but legendary: "Latency Lags Bandwidth" David Patterson http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.115.7415&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.115... Recent: "How to Hack the Simulation?" Roman Yampolskiy https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364811408_How_to_Hack_the_Simulation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364811408_How_to_Ha... "On the Computational Practicality of Private Information Retrieval" Radu Sion, Bogdan Carbunar https://zxr.io/research/sion2007pir.pdf https://zxr.io/research/sion2007pir.pdf (via "Explained from scratch: private information retrieval using homomorphic encryption," https://blintzbase.com/posts/pir-and-fhe-from-scratch/ https://blintzbase.com/posts/pir-and-fhe-from-scratch/ )
• the-mitr 3y ago
  More is Different by P. W. Anderson (1972)'arguing that “at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear” — that is, although, for example, chemistry is subject to the laws of physics, we cannot infer the field of chemistry from our knowledge of physics.' The paper https://cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf https://cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/ander... Also its impact https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-022-00483-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-022-00483-x
  • codethief 3y ago
    > that is, although, for example, chemistry is subject to the laws of physics, we cannot infer the field of chemistry from our knowledge of physics I mean we could, with infinite computing power and enough time to look into every interesting phenomenon (and to evaluate the corresponding multi-particle Schrödinger equation numerically) but there are simply too many such phenomena, Schrödinger equations are tough to solve, and quantum mechanics is also not a great level of abstraction for the reason you mentioned.
    • the-mitr 3y ago
      no, that is the point of the paper, even with infinite computing power you could not predict. it is a very strong case against reductionism in science. The phenomenological examples he considers in the paper cannot be derived from basic principles of quantum mechanics.
      • trevyn 3y ago
        I don’t think the paper rigorously addresses the case of infinite computing power.
      • codethief 3y ago
        Huh, I find that very surprising. Looks like I need to have a deeper look at the paper then.
      • smokel 3y ago
• edent 3y ago
  "Overview of SHARD: A System for Highly Available Replicated Data" it's the first paper to introduce the concept of database sharding. It was published in 1988 by the Computer Corporation of America. It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. But, here's the thing. It doesn't exist. Everyone cites Sarin, DeWitt & Rosenb[e|u]rg's paper but none have ever seen it. I've emailed dozens of academics, libraries, and archives - none of them have a copy. So it blows my mind that something so influential is, effectively, a myth.
  • jansan 3y ago
    They should have kept the paper as highly available replicated data.
  • yung_steezy 3y ago
    Is this an example of reference rot or did it never exist?
    • cinericius 3y ago
      If it did exist, there's some delicious irony in an original paper on replicating data in a highly-available manner being lost.
      • agumonkey 3y ago
        An endless runaway replica wave. Poetic.
  • cyrillite 3y ago
    I am infinitely disappointed to discover you are also the only person who seems to care about this online. I found a website, but it’s you apparently. Now I’m going to be bugged by this too! Great trivia also a heck of a mystery
    • iib 3y ago
      It seems like he is not the only one (in case he did not use a pseudonym here): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Shard_(database_architecture)#Overview_of_SHARD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Shard_(database_architect...
• dargscisyhp 3y ago
  I thought the AlphaZero paper was pretty cool: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815 https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815 Not only did we get a whole new type of Chess engine, it was also interesting to see how the engine thought of different openings at various stages in its training. For instance, the Caro-Kann, which is my weapon of choice, was favored quite heavily by it for several hours and then seemingly rejected (perhaps it even refuted it?!) near the end.
  • not-my-account 3y ago
    totally! MuZero is my favourite[1] The super cool thing about MuZero is that it learns the dynamics of the problem, i.e. you don't have to give it the rules of the game, which makes the algorithm very general. For example, DeepMind threw MuZero at video compression and found that it can reduce video sizes by 6.28% (massive for something like YouTube)[2][3]. Curious if anyone else knows examples of MuZero being deployed outside of toy examples? [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08265.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08265.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.06626.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.06626.pdf [3] https://www.deepmind.com/blog/muzeros-first-step-from-research-into-the-real-world https://www.deepmind.com/blog/muzeros-first-step-from-resear... (edit s/Google/DeepMind)
    • smokel 3y ago
      > you don't have to give it the rules of the game To be fair, it uses MCTS, which requires many simulations of the game. For this, it needs to know which moves are valid, and when a player wins or loses the game. So it does need to know the rules of the game, but it doesn't need any prior knowledge about which moves are better than others.
      • not-my-account 3y ago
        Not quite, you can define an illegal move as losing the game, and winning/losing is a “meta-observation” - ie if the player wins/loses, you don’t invoke another search.
• w-m 3y ago
  Integral Neural Networks (CVPR 2023 Award Candidate), a nifty way of building resizable networks. My understanding of this work: A forward pass for a (fully-connected) layer of a neural network is just a dot product of the layer input with the layer weights, followed by some activation function. Both the input and the weights are vectors of the same, fixed size. Let's imagine that the discrete values that form these vectors happen to be samples of two different continuous univariate functions. Then we can view the dot product as an approximation to the value of integrating the multiplication of the two continuous functions. Now instead of storing the weights of our network, we store some values from which we can reconstruct a continuous function, and then sample it where we want (in this case some trainable interpolation nodes, which are convoluted with a cubic kernel). This gives us the option to sample different-sized networks, but they are all performing (an approximation to) the same operation. After training with samples at different resolutions, you can freely pick your network size at inference time. You can also take pretrained networks, reorder the weights to make the functions as smooth as possible, and then compress the network, by downsampling. In their experiments, the networks lose much less accuracy when being downsampled, compared to common pruning approaches. Paper: https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2023/papers/Solodskikh_Integral_Neural_Networks_CVPR_2023_paper.pdf https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2023/papers/Solods... Code: https://github.com/TheStageAI/TorchIntegral https://github.com/TheStageAI/TorchIntegral
  • dicroce 3y ago
    Damn. It's like jpeg for neural networks.
  • ninjaa 3y ago
    smart
  • llaolleh 3y ago
    Supercool.
  • numbers_guy 3y ago
    Going just by your description this sounds like they are doing operator learning. It's actually a very old idea. The proof that started operator learning is from 1988 I believe. Mathematicians have been playing around with the idea since 2016 at least.
• Silamoth 3y ago
  I recently read "Enabling tabular deep learning when d ≫ n with an auxiliary knowledge graph" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.04766.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.04766.pdf) for one of my graduate classes. Essentially, when there are significantly more data points than features (n >> d), machine learning usually works fine (assuming data quality, an underlying relationship, etc.). But, for sparse datasets where there are fewer data points than features (d >> n), most machine learning methods fail. There's just not enough data to learn all the relationships. This paper builds a knowledge graph based on relationships and other pre-existing knowledge of data features to improve model performance in this case. It's really interesting - I hadn't realized there were ways to get better performance in this case.
• danesparza 3y ago
  Not all of these are research papers. But all are fairly recent. Gene linked to long COVID found in analysis of thousands of patients https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02269-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02269-2 Surfactants safely take down mosquitoes without using insecticides https://newatlas.com/science/surfactants-safely-take-down-mosquitoes-without-using-insecticides/ https://newatlas.com/science/surfactants-safely-take-down-mo... This is what our Milky Way galaxy looks like when viewed with neutrinos https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/ghost-particles-have-given-us-a-striking-new-view-of-our-milky-way-galaxy/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/ghost-particles-have...
  • tandr 3y ago
    >Surfactants safely take down mosquitoes without using insecticides https://newatlas.com/science/surfactants-safely-take-down-mosquitoes-without-using-insecticides/ https://newatlas.com/science/surfactants-safely-take-down-mo... Curious - what would happen to a spider or an ant that ate a couple of mosquitoes with that spice on top? Will they also suffocate?
• intended 3y ago
  Content Moderation / Trust and Safety person Open AI’s como paper, A Holistic Approach to Undesired Content Detection in the Real World. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.03274.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.03274.pdf Lots of interesting facts are strewn around the paper. ——- The first paper that squarely talked about the language resource gap in CS/ML. Before this came out, it was hard to explain just how stark the gap between English and other languages was. Lost in Translation: Large Language Models in Non-English Content Analysis https://cdt.org/insights/lost-in-translation-large-language-models-in-non-english-content-analysis/ https://cdt.org/insights/lost-in-translation-large-language-... —— This paper gets in for the title: “I run the world’s largest historical outreach project and it’s on a cesspool of a website.” Moderating a public scholarship site on Reddit: A case study of r/AskHistorians https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/25576/CSCW_Paper_Final_Final.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/25576/CSCW_Pa... —— This was the first paper I ended up saving on online misinformation. The early attempts to find solutions. The Spreading of Misinformation online, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517441113 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517441113 What I liked here was the illustration of how messages cascade differently based on the networks the message is traveling through.
• aaron695 3y ago
  RNA demethylation increases the yield and biomass of rice and potato plants in field trials (2021) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9
• carapace 3y ago
  "Cyclic Combinational Circuits", by Marc D. Riedel > we present theoretical justification for the claim that the optimal form of some [combinational] circuits requires cyclic topologies. We exhibit families of cyclic circuits that are optimal in the number of gates, and we prove lower bounds on the size of equivalent acyclic circuits. http://www.mriedel.ece.umn.edu/wiki/images/7/7a/Riedel_Cyclic_Combinational_Circuits.pdf http://www.mriedel.ece.umn.edu/wiki/images/7/7a/Riedel_Cycli...
• Jalad 3y ago
  "Bounding data races in space and time" was an interesting one I saw recently! It's discussing the memory models of programming languages, and how they can fail pretty horribly when data races occur, and then talks about ways to avoid those. OCaml's multicore support is based on this work, meaning it's memory safety guarantees in when data races occur are pretty interesting https://kcsrk.info/papers/pldi18-memory.pdf https://kcsrk.info/papers/pldi18-memory.pdf https://youtube.com/watch?v=eXXzUzt_nAY https://youtube.com/watch?v=eXXzUzt_nAY
• d-- 3y ago
  "Enso: A Streaming Interface for NIC-Application Communication" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2023/06/2023_Enso_NIC_Interface_OSDI2023.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2023/0... We've been using the same API to communicate with our NICs since 1994. That API severely limits network throughput and latency. By simply changing the API (no new NIC) you can get 6x higher throughput in some apps and 43% lower latency. Code runs on FPGA NIC only for now: https://github.com/crossroadsfpga/enso https://github.com/crossroadsfpga/enso Won USENIX OSDI best paper award and best artifact award.
  • liam0215 3y ago
    This is the best systems paper of the year so far imo
• masfuerte 3y ago
  Grid-free Monte Carlo for PDEs with spatially varying coefficients. https://cs.dartmouth.edu/wjarosz/publications/sawhneyseyb22gridfree.html https://cs.dartmouth.edu/wjarosz/publications/sawhneyseyb22g...
• msravi 3y ago
  Error Bounds for Convolutional Codes and an Asymptotically Optimum Decoding Algorithm [0] Also known as the Viterbi algorithm. Every digital communication device in existence today most likely has an implementation of it. Later proved optimal by Forney [1] 0. https://www.essrl.wustl.edu/~jao/itrg/viterbi.pdf https://www.essrl.wustl.edu/~jao/itrg/viterbi.pdf 1. https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~yxie77/ece587/viterbi_algorithm.pdf https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~yxie77/ece587/viterbi_algorith...
• di4na 3y ago
  All the stuff coming out of the Koka and Effekt development. In particular last week i read their FBiP2 paper https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2023/05/fbip.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2023/0...
  • afroisalreadyin 3y ago
    When I google for "koka effekt" I get pages in German about the effects of cocain. They should maybe reconsider the "Koka" part of the project name?
    • anfelor 3y ago
      These are two different languages, see https://effekt-lang.org/ https://effekt-lang.org/ and https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/index.html https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/index.html -- although I believe that the FP^2 work mentioned by OP currently only works in Koka (and perhaps soon in Lean; https://leanprover.github.io/ https://leanprover.github.io/)
      • di4na 3y ago
        Indeed. That said i am slowly writing my own language that will probably use ideas from both :D
  • anfelor 3y ago
    Thanks, I am surprised and delighted to see our paper here! We also wrote a follow-up recently, which you may enjoy: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2023/07/fiptree-tr.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2023/0...
    • di4na 3y ago
      Oh nice thanks! I am slooooowwly working on my own language that is planned to use work from both you and the Effekt team, so i may send you all an email in the future when i start having questions.
• philipkglass 3y ago
  "Co-cultivation enhanced microbial protein production based on autotrophic nitrogen-fixing hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1385894721041139 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13858... Certain bacteria can directly assimilate a mixture of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen to produce protein. You could consider it an alternative to bacterial nitrogen fixation in root nodules with much higher productivity. Or you could consider it an alternative to the Haber-Bosch process with much milder reaction conditions -- ambient temperature and pressure. It's a way to turn intermittent electricity into protein with simple, robust equipment. I wouldn't be surprised if this or a related development ultimately supplants much of the current demand for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
  • hirundo 3y ago
    We hear that eating vegetables is more efficient in ecological footprint than eating meat, since it cuts out the middle man. Is it yet more efficient to cut out the plants and get dietary protein from the bacteria that feed them?
    • philipkglass 3y ago
      Possibly, yes. This is the dream of so called "single cell protein" production. One type of SCP has been sold for years under the brand name Quorn (derived from a fungus rather than bacteria). Bacterial protein may trigger allergic reactions in people and bacterial biomass is purine-rich which can also be a problem for people prone to gout. It's possible that cell engineering, directed evolutionary selection, or additional post-growth processing can minimize these problems. I personally think that the more likely path is using fast-growing bacteria as feed for animal agriculture or aquaculture. Solar panels are so efficient at sunlight conversion compared to plants that you could farm salmon protein starting from bacterial pellets grown on solar derived hydrogen with per-hectare productivity comparable to conventionally farming soy beans. But the solar farm can go on saline, dry, contaminated, or otherwise agriculturally useless land. And salmon has slightly greater nutritional value than soy protein plus significantly greater market value.
• philipkglass 3y ago
  "Liquid solution centrifugation for safe, scalable, and efficient isotope separation" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg8993 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg8993 The authors show that a biological type laboratory ultracentrifuge can efficiently function as a near-universal isotope separator. Any element that can be dissolved as a salt in water -- the entire periodic table, excepting the noble gases -- can be enriched according to its relative mass. This can reduce the cost of refining certain isotopes like calcium-48 by orders of magnitude compared to the previous best techniques. Left unsaid, but implied by its universality: the new technique is also a new approach to producing enriched fissile materials for nuclear reactors and weapons. It requires less chemical engineering sophistication than current processes which require production and handling of gaseous uranium hexafluoride.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    Surely something about the technique would make it impractical for enriching uranium though... you're not going to be able to produce kilograms of 20% U235 with this are you?
    • philipkglass 3y ago
      Not with off-the-shelf biological centrifuges, no. I don't know enough about centrifuge design to judge how easy/hard it is to build a 60,000 G centrifuge that can handle liters instead of milliliters of liquid per cavity. The other even more exotic possibility is to use something like this to enrich ordinary reactor grade plutonium to weapons grade plutonium-239. The amount of mass to process with plutonium is orders of magnitude less because spent fuel plutonium is already more than 50% Pu-239, versus 0.7% U-235 in natural uranium, and a bare sphere critical mass of Pu-239 is only 10 kg vs 52 kg for U-235: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of_a_bare_sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass#Critical_mass_of... The United States considered enriching waste fuel plutonium to weapons grade in the 1980s, when it contemplated another big nuclear weapons buildup against the USSR, but the laser based separation technology to be used was much more complicated than centrifuge separation. The project ended shortly after the USSR dissolved. It was called the Special Isotope Separation Project. The 1988 environmental impact statement for the project gives some background information: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f24/EIS-0136-FEIS-Volume_2.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f24/EIS-0136...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ranprieur 3y ago
  Placebo Effect Grows in U.S., Thwarting Development of Painkillers https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/placebo-effect-grows-in-u-s-thwarting-development-of-painkillers/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/placebo-effect-gr... The most interesting thing is that "placebo responses are rising only in the United States."
  • 1letterunixname 3y ago
    I wonder if there is any correlation with either political or socio-political volatility, e.g., bread and circuses, conspiracy theories, cults, political dysfunction, and an inability to double-blind test painkillers.
    • rsolva 3y ago
      Sounds plausible. Would be interesting if we found a way to measure it on a large scale and track it over time. A National Beliefe Index of sorts.
• javajosh 3y ago
  I think you meant "recently published paper" but others are bringing up old stuff. I've always enjoyed Einstein's (translated) papers. They are both precise and readable, and his reputation for genius is well deserved! This one is interesting, "On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light" you can read here: https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol3-trans/393 https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol3-trans/393. This was his initial stab at GR. It was a simple approach, later abandoned, that considered light to slow down in a gravity well rather than remaining constant and specifying that mass warps spacetime. I suppose I like the idea that he pursued an idea that didn't work, and was forced to do something far more complex. It's kinda relatable.
  • DennisP 3y ago
    The book Einstein's Lost Key by German physicist Alexander Unzicker is all about that idea and its history. Unzicker argues that it's still a good idea, hasn't been falsified since it makes much the same predictions as GR, and we should look into it further.
    • vackosar 3y ago
      I read about criticism of General Relativity, that I haven't verified so grain of salt please. The criticism is in that the equations are so complex that only the simplest limits of them are studied and so the theory is therefore not verified.
• cratermoon 3y ago
  On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922>
  • adultSwim 3y ago
    I enjoyed the real world concerns they gathered but found the octopus analogy a bit weak.
• Uptrenda 3y ago
  I find the most interesting papers I read all come from the same place: The National Library of Medicine https://www.nlm.nih.gov/ https://www.nlm.nih.gov/ Here's some recent papers I liked: - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8413749/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8413749/ -- Lithium is used as a mood stabilizer for bipolar and in other disorders. The form of Lithium used in psychiatry is Lithium Carbonate. But other forms also exist. As a supplement: there is Lithium Orotate which some people use to help them sleep, deal with stress, and so on. This paper puts forwards the idea that Lithium Orotate is preferable to Lithium Carbonate due to lower quantities being needed for the same therapeutic results. Resulting in less side-effects. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1525098/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1525098/ -- In bipolar disorder its known that there are abnormalities in the presence of brain derived neurotrophic growth factor (BDNF.) What's interesting about this is treatments for bipolar help to increase BDNF which may be something of interest to those who are into nootropics. The papers on this site are honestly some of the best written, in-depth, and accessible works I've come across anywhere. There's enough information here to live a better life if you're willing to sift through papers. No joke.
  • billylo 3y ago
    I wonder if Google's Med-PaLM2 use those for training. Best content + quality LLM + quality verifications => Useful health advice.
• freedude 3y ago
  An analysis of studies pertaining to masks in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: Characteristics and quality of all studies from 1978 to 2023 "0/77 were randomized studies." https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.07.23292338v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.07.23292338v... Here is a pdf. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.07.23292338v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.07.23292338v...
• gabitoju 3y ago
  "C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS": https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs345d-01/rl/cstore.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs345d-01/rl/cstore.pdf By among others, the great Mike Stonebraker.
• rurban 3y ago
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04234.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.04234.pdf On why Oppenheimer didn't get the Nobel for his black hole paper decades before some else got it for a rediscovery.
• Daviey 3y ago
  I suppose recent is subjective, but this one totally blew my mind. It's a 260 year old academic publication, which is older than the USA: Mr. Bayes and Mr. Price. “An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances. By the Late Rev. Mr. Bayes, F. R. S. Communicated by Mr. Price, in a Letter to John Canton, A. M. F. R. S.” In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 53.0 (1763), pp. 370–418. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1763.0053. URL: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1763.0053 Not only is this publication amazing because it is the source of conditional probability which is the basis for Bayes's Theorem, but a dated original of the document is available. The thing I find really beautiful is that it was submitted 2 years after the authors death, by his friend who found the material when going through his things. We will never know how much was changed prior to submission, but I find it a really beautiful tribute to his friend and the co-author makes it clear that the attribution should go to his friend, and that letter still exists today (and it is a lovely read). I can't think of anything similar which has been maintained 260 years later, and still a somewhat useful academic publication. I felt privileged to cite this reference in my MSc thesis.
• lwansbrough 3y ago
  Detailed Rigid Body Simulation with Extended Position Based Dynamics https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/publications/PBDBodies.pdf https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/publications/PBDBo... A new way of doing real time physics that dramatically outperforms state of the art by simply introducing a new algorithm. No crazy AI or incremental improvements to existing approaches.
• tracker1 3y ago
  TBH, most of the research papers I've read the past few years have been around diet/nutrition. I can't think of anything in terms of recently blew my mind, some of it is definitely interresting, but most of it is low-quality noise. Probably the biggest thing that blows my mind is the suppression of the Minnesota Coronary Study in the early 1960's. Literally half a century of dis/misinformation from the govt, pharma and medical industries that was disproven long ago. Nothing higher quality or more definitive since. Basically, the whole, limit cholesterol and saturated fat intake in favor of more grains and seed oils is based on a theory that was long disproven. And, it's still pushed to this day. Why, there's big money/business in pharma and agriculture (corn, soy, wheat).
• 0asa 3y ago
  I use Raycast Pro, which includes Raycast AI. It's awesome: it offers a clever integration of LLMs into the operating system.
• pyuser583 3y ago
  “On the frequency and severity of interstate war” by Aaron Clauset. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.05086.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.05086.pdf Analyzes a claim made in the 1950s by a prominent statistician: the frequency of interstate wars follows a simple Poisson arrival process and their severity follows a simple power-law distribution. He was right, but it’s not clear why. The paper is interesting because it shows how a new bit of knowledge creates a large number of known unknowns from previously unknown unknowns. It also shows statistical magic was very much possible prior to computers.