THE INTERNET HAS A LONG MEMORY
Research papers that kept finding their way into Hacker News conversations. Less chasing the new. More finding the good.
Each discussed by at least
3 people across 3 months.
William P. Thurston
In response to Jaffe and Quinn [math.HO/9307227], the author discusses forms of progress in mathematics that are not captured by formal proofs of theorems, especially in his own work in the theory of foliations and geometrization of 3-manifolds and dynamical systems.
Tim Kraska, Alex Beutel, Ed H. Chi +2
Indexes are models: a B-Tree-Index can be seen as a model to map a key to the position of a record within a sorted array, a Hash-Index as a model to map a key to a position of a record within an unsorted array, and a BitMap-Index as a model to indicate if a data record exists or not.
Sébastien Bubeck, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan +11
Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition.
Martin Kleppmann
The CAP Theorem is a frequently cited impossibility result in distributed systems, especially among NoSQL distributed databases.
Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder +28
Recent work has demonstrated substantial gains on many NLP tasks and benchmarks by pre-training on a large corpus of text followed by fine-tuning on a specific task.
Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, Toby Ord
The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe.
Eric Chisolm
This is an introduction to geometric algebra, an alternative to traditional vector algebra that expands on it in two ways: 1.
Chiyuan Zhang, Samy Bengio, Moritz Hardt +2
Despite their massive size, successful deep artificial neural networks can exhibit a remarkably small difference between training and test performance.
A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, A. Rapisarda
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking.
Haoran Xu, Fredrik Kjolstad
Fast compilation is important when compilation occurs at runtime, such as query compilers in modern database systems and WebAssembly virtual machines in modern browsers.
Scott Aaronson
In honor of Alan Turing's hundredth birthday, I unwisely set out some thoughts about one of Turing's obsessions throughout his life, the question of physics and free will.
Mariusz Bojarski, Davide Del Testa, Daniel Dworakowski +10
We trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to map raw pixels from a single front-facing camera directly to steering commands.
David Manheim, Scott Garrabrant
There are several distinct failure modes for overoptimization of systems on the basis of metrics.
Tamara M. Davis, Charles H. Lineweaver
We use standard general relativity to illustrate and clarify several common misconceptions about the expansion of the Universe.
Tom Leinster
Mathematicians manipulate sets with confidence almost every day, rarely making mistakes.
Luca Beurer-Kellner, Beat Buesser, Ana-Maria Creţu +11
As AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly versatile and capable of addressing a broad spectrum of tasks, ensuring their security has become a critical challenge.
Dan Tong, David J. Farnham, Lei Duan +4
Abstract If future net-zero emissions energy systems rely heavily on solar and wind resources, spatial and temporal mismatches between resource availability and electricity demand may challenge system reliability.
Timo Schick, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Roberto Dessì +5
Language models (LMs) exhibit remarkable abilities to solve new tasks from just a few examples or textual instructions, especially at scale.
Ross Mcilroy, Jaroslav Sevcik, Tobias Tebbi +2
The recent discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks represents a watershed moment not just for the field of Computer Security, but also of Programming Languages.
Seth Lloyd
Computers are physical systems: what they can and cannot do is dictated by the laws of physics.
Daniel Ingalls
This paper presents a personal view of the evolution of six generations of Smalltalk in which the author played a part, starting with Smalltalk-72 and progressing through Smalltalk-80 to Squeak and Etoys.
Donald E. Knuth
Donald E. Knuth
The author presents two tricks to accelerate depth-first search algorithms for a class of combinatorial puzzle problems, such as tiling a tray by a fixed set of polyominoes.
Art Hobson
Quantum foundations are still unsettled, with mixed effects on science and society.
Jon Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan, Manish Raghavan
Recent discussion in the public sphere about algorithmic classification has involved tension between competing notions of what it means for a probabilistic classification to be fair to different groups.
Will Grathwohl, Kuan-Chieh Wang, Jörn-Henrik Jacobsen +3
We propose to reinterpret a standard discriminative classifier of p(y|x) as an energy based model for the joint distribution p(x,y).
Kenji Kawaguchi, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Yoshua Bengio
This paper provides theoretical insights into why and how deep learning can generalize well, despite its large capacity, complexity, possible algorithmic instability, nonrobustness, and sharp minima, responding to an open question in the literature.
Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar +5
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration.
Leo Gao, Stella Biderman, Sid Black +9
Recent work has demonstrated that increased training dataset diversity improves general cross-domain knowledge and downstream generalization capability for large-scale language models.
Suriya Gunasekar, Yi Zhang, Jyoti Aneja +16
We introduce phi-1, a new large language model for code, with significantly smaller size than competing models: phi-1 is a Transformer-based model with 1.3B parameters, trained for 4 days on 8 A100s, using a selection of ``textbook quality" data from the web (6B tokens) and synthetically generated textbooks and exercises with GPT-3.5 (1B