New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source • Hacker News Board

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#101

Post by dgfitz » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 1:38 AM UTC

Miraste wrote: post #70

pseudocomposer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I meet people who immediately use hyper-specific jargon with strangers, I either distrust them, or assume they’re not emotionally intelligent (because it’s a choice demonstrates little respect for the person they’re addressing). It also projects that they may be compensating for some emotional insecurity on their own end, trying to assert intellectual “superiority” in some way. The first option (explaining thing…

>extremely uneducated, under-stimulated people, who also have unaddressed insecurities around their own intelligence. But that’s not most humans. This isn't going to be most humans you encounter if you're in the HN demographic, but that's a bubble. It does describe most people in the world.

This is, in a word, nonsense.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#102

Post by ordu » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 1:46 AM UTC

pseudocomposer wrote: post #50

dkarl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found it's best to explain my job using unintelligible jargon. There are three choices, really: You can give a quick explanation in terms they understand, which makes your job sound easy and makes them wonder how anybody gets paid to do it. You can explain what you do and why it's important in terms they understand, but it'll take so long they'll get bored and wish they hadn't asked. Or you can give a quick expl…

When I meet people who immediately use hyper-specific jargon with strangers, I either distrust them, or assume they’re not emotionally intelligent (because it’s a choice demonstrates little respect for the person they’re addressing). It also projects that they may be compensating for some emotional insecurity on their own end, trying to assert intellectual “superiority” in some way. The first option (explaining thing…

> With all that said, I prefer to first explain my job in an “explain like I’m 5” style and, if the other party indicates interest, add detail and jargon

It is just your choice. I'd prefer a short answer full of jargon. It gives people the opportunity to clarify what they want to ask. Do they really want to know details? Or they want a rough idea of an answer? Or they just filling silence with small talk?

Though other times, when I really want to talk about it, I'd go with some ELI5 explanation, while watching people, are they interested or not?

> Honestly, I think not appreciating simple explanations indicates both low mathematical/logical and social/emotional intelligence.

It can be. But mostly it is not. People are sending signals by choosing one form of the answer or another, you just need to decode their signals. And it will be better, if you don't jump to conclusions about their persistent psychological traits, based on the first impression.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#103

Post by zmgsabst » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 1:46 AM UTC

tbrownaw wrote: post #77

jiggawatts wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantum Mechanics is the example of a subject where supposed experts don’t really understand it either and hence can’t explain it adequately. Also, it’s hilarious to get comments like this voted down by non-experts who assume this must be an outsider’s uninformed point of view. I have a physics degree and I studied the origins and history of quantum mechanics. Its “founding fathers” all admitted that it’s a bunch of…

Take for example entanglement. The math that describes it is known precisely. Specific implications of this are known. There's no information transfer, there's no time delay, etc. And yet lay people keep incorrectly thinking it can be used for communication. Because lay-audience descriptions by experts keep using words that imply causality and information transfer. This is not a failure of the experts to understand w…

> This is not a failure of the experts to understand what's going on.

> We don't have a model of why it works / if there's a more comprehensible layer of reality below it.

Counterpoint:

You’ve just admitted they don’t understand what’s going on — they merely have descriptive statistics. No different than a DNN that spits out incomprehensible but accurate answers.

So this is an example affirming that QM isn’t understood.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#104

Post by ZoomZoomZoom » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 1:54 AM UTC

ars wrote: post #31

thorum wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some ideas are too complex to explain accurately in simple terms. You can give someone a simple explanation of quantum chromodynamics and have them walk away feeling like they learned something, but only by glossing over or misrepresenting critical details. You’d basically just be lying to them.

There's nothing wrong with that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children

That's how you get a whole population imagining mitochondria as puffy gelatinous beans, instead of network around other organelles.

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-025-00269-y/index.ht...

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#105

Post by baobun » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 2:16 AM UTC

bell-cot wrote: post #38

EvanAnderson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would only work if you were getting repeat inquiries from the same person. Otherwise it's just the longest possible option for each new inquiry. I always opt for excruciating detail because it's what I enjoy the most.

> That would only work if ... Sounds like none of the people you answered, in excruciating detail, cared to warn other people about what would happen if they asked you.

It really can go both ways. Was told that "Ask baobun about hacking when you're high" came recommended.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#106

Post by rukuu001 » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 2:26 AM UTC

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #10

readthenotes1 wrote: post #3

Earlier today there was an article about neanderthal's rendering fat. The comments pointed out that anthropologist did not know that boiling was possible before the invention of pottery. Another comment pointed out that science teachers knew that it was possible because that was something they would do in class. Final comment was about how people ReDiscover things in different fields - - like the trapezoidal rule for…

I haven't read that thread, but I don't believe that anthropologists thought boiling was impossible before the invention of pottery. Here's one youtube video that demos a method for survival scenarios, I'm sure there are many others: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0zun_UxO2vU . I know I don't have the context, but unless there are sources for the remarkable claim, it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't pass "the laug…

I know right? If I, as a yokel kid knew this, it astonishes me people like that wouldn’t know it

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#107

Post by hansvm » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 2:27 AM UTC

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #9

Neat. I spent a month trying to use sphere packing approaches for a better compression algorithm (I had a large amount of vectors, they were grouped through clustering). Turned out that theoretical approaches only really work for uniform data and not any sort of real-world data. EDIT: groped -> grouped

The usual trick is to use domain-specific knowledge to translate that asymmetry to uniformity.

E.g.: Suppose the data has high-order structure but is locally uniform (very common, comes about because of noise-inducing processes). Compute and store centroids. Those are more uniform than your underlying data, and since you don't have many it doesn't really matter anyway. Each vector is stored as a centroid index and a vector offset (SoA, not AoS). The indices are compressible with your favorite entropic integer scheme (if you don't need to preserve order you can do better), and the offsets are now approximately uniform by assumption, so you can use your favorite sphere strategy from the literature.

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#108

Post by xnsmsjdskw » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#109

Post by pinkmuffinere » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 2:30 AM UTC

smallerize wrote: post #91

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read that thread, but I don't believe that anthropologists thought boiling was impossible before the invention of pottery. Here's one youtube video that demos a method for survival scenarios, I'm sure there are many others: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0zun_UxO2vU . I know I don't have the context, but unless there are sources for the remarkable claim, it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't pass "the laug…

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv1257 "Underlining earlier work by Speth (61), experiments recently demonstrated that organic perishable containers, e.g., made out of deer skin or birch bark, placed directly on a fire, are capable of heating water sufficiently to process food, with the advantages of wet-cooking beginning at lower, sub-boiling temperatures than thus far acknowledged (62)." Reference 61 go…

Thanks for the link! Not to be argumentative, but I do want to highlight a couple points that I think may be the root misunderstanding:

1. The 2015 paper doesn’t indicate that it was unknown that you can boil water without pottery. It is meant to alert people to an already known fact. Maybe silly, but I do think there’s a distinction here — it’s not that the pinnacle of human knowledge was missing this, it’s that common sense was missing it. I’d compare this to the article “things SDEs assume about names”. Edit: then again, playing devils advocate against myself, the first paper does say “…sub-boiling temperatures than _thus far acknowledged_” (emphasis mine), which would seem to indicate that this was more than just a common misunderstanding.

2. The 2015 paper is not about boiling water in general, it’s about boiling it in a specific way. (Whereas the initial discussion was about boiling water by any method)

Re: New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source

#110

Post by derf_ » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 2:32 AM UTC

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #33

dotancohen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you've already explored this, but is there some precompression operation that you could do to the vectors such that they're no longer sparse, and therefore relatively uniform?

They weren't sparse, they were dense but the "density" was quite non-uniform (think typical learned ML vectors). Not too far from an N-dimensional gaussian (I ended up reading research on quantizing Gaussian distributions, but that didn't help either as we didn't have a perfectly gaussian thing).

If you start from N-dimensional Gaussian-distributed vectors and normalize them, you wind up with uniformly distributed vectors on an (N-1)-dimensional hypersphere. Of course, sphere-packing on the surface of a hyperspehere is its own fun problem, and if your data is not actually Gaussian may still not be exactly what you want, but coding the vector magnitude separately from the vector direction is probably a good start.