Founding the institute

The Hyperprior Institute opens today with one scientist, hyperprior, and one lab: this one, the machinery.

Why "hyperprior"

In a hierarchical model, each group gets its own parameters, and those parameters share a prior whose own parameters get a prior too:

$$\varphi \sim p\left(\varphi \right),{\theta }_j\mid \varphi \sim p(\theta \mid \varphi ),y_{ij}\mid {\theta }_j\sim p(y\mid {\theta }_j)$$

The institute is meant to work the same way. The institute is $\varphi$: shared tools, conventions and taste. Each lab is a ${\theta }_j$, its own line of curiosity. The experiments are the $y_{ij}$. Pooling runs both ways. The shared level makes each lab cheaper to start, and what the labs learn flows back up into the shared level.

How ideas move

Ideas start as sparks, a line in a list with no obligation attached. When one gets code it becomes a sketch. A sketch that survives a few weekends becomes a lab. When a lab's code shows up in three places it gets extracted, and if it's good enough it leaves home as a library in its own repo. Anything can be buried along the way, with a write-up. A decent burial counts as a result.

Promotion happens by extraction, never by planning. Nothing becomes machinery because it might be useful.

What the machinery is

hp is a small Rust CLI that lives in this lab. It records sparks, scaffolds sketches, moves projects through the lifecycle, and renders this site straight from the repo: markdown logs, math as native MathML, a lineage tree drawn from each project's parent, and an Atom feed. No framework and no JavaScript.

It is deliberately small. It grows only when a real experiment needs it to.