Top all-time · #2313
Mohammed AlQuraishi
Personal blog · moalquraishi.wordpress.comscienceaicareer
Mohammed AlQuraishi writes Some Thoughts on a Mysterious Universe, a personal blog at moalquraishi.wordpress.com about science, ai and career. Since 2013, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 48 times, most often “AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (22) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link AlQuraishi's 2018 'What just happened?' post on DeepMind's AlphaFold at CASP13, cited as background on whether protein structure prediction is solved. Other linked posts cover AlphaFold2 and books.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Called 'fantastic' background reading and 'the best take on AlphaFold'; another says it goes into more detail on why the problem isn't solved.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 22 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
by Mohammed AlQuraishi
Most-linked posts?
- AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?12 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2018-12-10
- AlphaFold2 at CASP14: “It feels like one’s child has left home.”6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-12-08
- A Workaphile's Apology5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-08-10
- The State of Probabilistic Programming2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-12
- The AlphaFold2 Method Paper: A Fount of Good Ideas2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-07-25
- What does a neural network actually do?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-05-25
What Hacker News says?
Two years ago, after DeepMind submitted its first set of predictions to CASP (Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction), Mohammed AlQuraishi, an expert in the field, asked, "What just happened?" https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp... Now that the problem of static protein structure prediction has been solved (prediction errors are below the threshold that is considered acceptable…
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
on “AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology”Submitted AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened? as a story · 188 points
HN discussionv2 looks amazing. that jump is even more incredible than the first. More context from v1 in 2018: https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
on “AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology”Submitted What does a neural network actually do? as a story · 151 points
HN discussionI have wondered about folding@home as well, another distributed project begun in another age that seems not, from the outside, to have lived up to its early hype. In the meantime, it seems that Alphafold has surpassed conventional efforts at understanding protein folding, including folding@home's. https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
on “SETI@home shuts down after 21 years”Submitted AlphaFold2 at CASP14: “It feels like one’s child has left home.” as a story · 138 points
HN discussionThe Glass Bead Game is one of the best books I've read, and I think palpably changed how I think about some things even though I read it as an adult. I even wrote a blog post about it: https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/the-glass-bead... Another book I'd recommend (in a very different category) is Godel, Escher, and Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter.
Comment linking /2013/05/05/the-glass-bead-game-by-hermann-hesse/
on “Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?”Submitted The State of Probabilistic Programming as a story · 109 points
HN discussionAn academic tour de force of little practical benefit, because of insufficient openness from the AF2 team. For nuance, see https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2020/12/08/alphafold2-cas...
Comment linking /2020/12/08/alphafold2-casp14-it-feels-like-ones-child-has-left-home/amp/
on “FOSS app removed from the Play Store for linking to the project's website”Submitted What Hinton’s Google Move Says About the Future of Machine Learning as a story · 92 points
HN discussion> Let me get the most important question out of the way: is AlphaFold’s advance really significant, or is it more of the same? I would characterize their advance as roughly two CASPs in one ― https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/comment-page-1/
on “Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction”Submitted 10 Months at Harvard, Quantified as a story · 84 points
HN discussionMohammed AlQuraishi elaborated on this in his 2018 "What Just Happened?" blog post that was discussed on HN when the news was announced. [1] It's a fairly long read, but he goes into a lot more detail as to why the problem isn't yet solved. Interestingly, he also notes that pharma and academia should feel some embarrassment from DeepMind's achievement: "What is worse than academic groups getting scooped by DeepMind?…
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
on “No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding”Submitted Protein Linguistics as a story · 52 points
HN discussionAccording to at least one expert in the field, it's a bit of both. ( https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp... )
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
on “My story as a self-taught AI researcher”Submitted The Quantified Anatomy of a Paper as a story · 17 points
HN discussion[Levinthal's paradox]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levinthal's_paradox) was the thought experiment that "proved" that protein folding is non-random. This is currently the dominant attitude in the field. As others have stated, misfoldings do occur, and the protein is trying to achieve its lowest energy conformation, but the simplest answer is that we don't have a complete answer, hence the desire to come up with a…
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
on “What is protein folding? A brief explanation”Submitted The Federal Government is Not Useless as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI won't disagree that the data could be better. It can always be better. But it gets better. With every. single. update. You're just wrong about no ways to use this data. I've personally dramatically improved my health via wearables over the past 7 years. A close friend with a heart condition has perhaps had his life saved by these things. Check out the FitBit forums or subreddits. When you have a lot of data with h…
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
on “Google/Fitbit will monetise health data and harm consumers [pdf]”Submitted NIH Spending vs. Diseases That Kill Us as a story · 9 points
HN discussion"There are dozens of academic groups, with researchers likely numbering in the (low) hundreds, working on protein structure prediction. We have been working on this problem for decades, with vast expertise built up on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific, and not insignificant computational resources when measured collectively. For DeepMind’s group of ~10 researchers, with primarily (but certainly not exclusively)…
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
on “A watershed moment for protein structure prediction”Submitted AlphaFold2 at CASP14: “It feels like one’s child has left home.” as a story · 7 points
HN discussionFor background, read this fantastic blog post by the same author, Mohammed AlQuraishi at Harvard Medical School, from a year ago: https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
on “A watershed moment for protein structure prediction”Submitted The AlphaFold2 Method Paper: A Fount of Good Ideas as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis blog post seems to anticipate this happening: https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2019/04/01/the-future-of-...
Comment linking /2019/04/01/the-future-of-protein-science-will-not-be-supervised/
on “Biological Function Emerges from Unsupervised Learning on 250M Protein Sequences”Submitted AlphaFold2 at CASP14 by Mohammed AlQuraishi as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> Therefore we should design programming languages that on the surface look very unoptimized, but specify enough information that compilers can do a really good job. It sounds like no one knows what such a programming language would look like. This entire post would be painfully familiar to anyone working with probabilistic programming. An intriguing overview of the state of the art was posted here a little while ag…
Comment linking /2015/03/29/the-state-of-probabilistic-programming/
on “The death of optimizing compilers [pdf]”Submitted A Year in New England: Boston vs. Silicon Valley as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe best take on AlphaFold: https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...
Comment linking /2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
on “AlphaFold: Using AI for Scientific Discovery”Submitted AlphaFold2 CASP14: “It feels like one’s child has left home.” as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
Linked by the same people?
- K
Kartik Agaramakkartik.name - F
Ferrous Systems Blogferrous-systems.com - L
Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarchblog.computationalcomplexity.org - U
Unenumeratedunenumerated.blogspot.com - B
Bill Gurleyabovethecrowd.com - N
NVIDIA Technical Blogdevblogs.nvidia.com - S
Sabine Hossenfelderbackreaction.blogspot.com - G
Google DeepMinddeepmind.com