Comment by craftkiller
1 day ago
This article does two things which make it unhelpful for me:
1. It uses math notation. This is a software development site, wouldn't this be much more clear to this audience written as psuedo code instead of a complex series of greek and latin letters?
2. It doesn't step through a concrete example. What is hollow R raised to the (M * d_v) ? Is it a number, a set, a list, a matrix?
To use an example I understand: RAG used to seem complicated to me when only math people were talking about it in math words. For example, let's take a line from wikipedia on embeddings:
> the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that the words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning
What made it clear was learning that generating an embedding is just a function(string) -> list[float], and RAG is just taking a list[float] for your prompt and finding other list[float] that are close to it in your dataset.
So what would make this article more clear, is step through a simplified example of putting a value into a memory store and querying that memory store, showing the actual data structures.
> This is a software development site, wouldn't this be much more clear to this audience written as psuedo code instead of a complex series of greek and latin letters
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a forum where people can post arbitrary links to other sites, some of which might have audiences that might not be "the exact set of people who read Hacker News". I'm not sure you'd be able to make a compelling argument that alexwang.ai is aimed at software developers and no one else.
Yes, but you need to consider your audience when posting links to this site. For example, if I posted to HN a link to a really good cookie recipe, it wouldn't be a good fit for this site. The author did nothing wrong, but that doesn't make it a good submission to HN.
This article is a bit more of a grey area. It is on a subject that is deeply relevant to this site and I'm sure some HN readers will get value from it. My point is that an even better submission to HN would have been an article on the same topic but written for programmers rather than mathematicians.
I'm surprised to this take, because I feel like I see math stuff posted here fairly often, and often with a large number of people commenting on it in substantive ways. Often times the math savvy crowd will even help explain stuff to people like me who are not particularly fluent in advanced math.
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> software development site ... you need to consider your audience when posting links to this site ... a link to a really good cookie recipe ... for programmers
That is really your interpretation only - and it directly clashes with the explicitly intended: "intellectually curious" (which will be, if not polymaths, at least open).
Of course an intellectual curiosity space hosted around the world of startup enterprises will attract membership of people with experience in engineering.
If you check the submissions, it should be immediately evident that there is no closure.
I see plenty of things shared here that don’t fit your preconception of what is a fit for a site you don’t operate.
> For example, if I posted to HN a link to a really good cookie recipe, it wouldn't be a good fit for this site.
Going to have to disagree with you here. That would very much depend on the particulars of and circumstances surrounding the recipe. This is a site for anything that would interest the typical hacker (whatever that actually is) after all.
I'm frustrated I can't downvote you more than once. You are the example of anti-intellectualism that is allowing the world being controlled by dumbed down mass media.
If I consider the hacker news audience as "smart people" and/or "people with curiosity about science and technology", a couple of equations are exactly what should appear in every single post.
Have you considered that you are simply not the audience that Alex or speckx had in mind? It would be healthy to recognize this simple fact and move on while letting the intended audience (Hi! Longtime HN member for over a decade!) enjoy it.
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FWIW, I found the idea of interference-to-signal ratio as a way to think about memory capacity to be intuitive and was really interested in getting a better sense of how models increase capacity, until it hit the first math notation formula. My disconnect was based on the approachable tone of the intro, from which I assumed it would be a more generally accessible article.
To be clear, I have no problem with math people conveying math stuff with math notation but it seemed like the type of article which, even if it will get into notation, first at least explains "the main idea of it" without notation, then expands with notation as necessary when fleshing details or implementation.
Wait, you're saying that mathematics isn't useful to software engineers?
You should give it a go.
That is not an accurate read of my post. My post was about two things:
I'm not saying they should remove any of the content, just put it in a form more accessible to us. For example, I can read and mostly understand a news article in French, but it will take a lot of time and effort. If it was written in English, it would be easy for me to read. The two news articles have exactly the same content, one is just written in a form easier for me to understand.
Well putting this article in math notation without defining any of the data structures behind it, that's not like putting the article in French, it's like putting the article in Japanese. I can't understand any of it. Some Japanese speakers on this site are saying "I don't understand the problem, just learn Japanese." which is pretty much the least constructive comment they could make.
HN is not a place where people post content made for HN (or at least it didn't use to be). Relevant links are posted. They get upvoted if they are interesting. Articles from many other fields like physics, cryptography, hardware design, crocheting, nuclear safety, farming, etc, are posted very often and can still be an interesting read for people not familiar with the subject matter. Finally, engineers have a wide variety of backgrounds, and I bet a good chunk can read math notation or drive a soil compactor - there is no "us".
They might not all be a good read for you in particular; the choice is yours to make an effort, or "move on" as someone else suggested. You're being downvoted because you are making it sound like you are entitled to an easier explanation, an hypothetical version of the article that caters to you in particular. There are many ways you could have framed your comment differently without that baggage.
I guess you're not the target audience for this article then.
This is pretty approachable maths, and explain really well. I've seen far worse in programming language theory papers, which would qualify as "software development" in my mind. There are plenty of users of this forum that would find this paper useful and interesting, with sufficient math background to read it to boot.
Those are valid bits of feedback to make an articel more accessible, but it's totally fine and apprpriate as it is
What made it not useful to you likely makes it much more useful for me.
Fortunately, LLMs can work wonders in adapting content to be more accessible to a wide variety of audiences. Just give it a link and feed your exact post to it. It will be able to translate it into pseudocode and provide examples.
The author has a link to the actual code behind the blog post. https://github.com/KeAWang/associative-memory-blog/blob/main...
Well, you could tell your AI of choice to read the article and explain the math. I did that with ChatGPT and it helpfully translated a lot of it into Python for me.
Upvoting you for this is quite fair. Mathematicians do seem to suffer from the Feldspar Problem:
https://xkcd.com/2501/
>It's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for Olivine and one or two Feldspars
That being said the llm is indeed the universal translator — the babelfish supreme — and is excellent at translating whatever you want into pseudocode in your language of choice.
Send the link to Claude or your favorite alternative, and cut-and-paste your comment into the box, and you'll get exactly what you want.
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