HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

botro

168 karma · joined January 5, 2023

https://aimodelreview.com/
submissionscomments
botro··on FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
Thank you for sharing.
botro··on FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
Thank you for sharing, the oncologists are saying that at this point in the diseases progression the same things that disqualify him from getting chemo also disqualify him from this drug. That in his current state it would do more harm.

I hope many others are helped by daraxonrasib, the key factor seems to be how early the cancer is detected, because it is an extremely fast acting disease.

botro··on FDA approves first in class targeted therapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer
My father in law was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer that's spread to his lungs about a month ago. This news today raised my wife's hopes immensely and had them immediately doused after hearing the oncologist say that although the drug is approved it will take months before they are able to prescribe it.

Father in law started chemo a few weeks ago and his condition deteriorated quickly, he's been at the hospital since; switching between ICU and general care. His abdomen fills up with fluid, around 6 liters every 5 days, draining the fluid plunges his blood pressure and he end up in ICU. They supply Albumin until blood pressure stabilizes and send him back to general. Only after the first chemo session the oncologists have stopped the treatment saying he's no longer eligible for chemo because of his over all health.

We're lucky enough to live an hour away from Johns Hopkins (though that's not the hospital he's currently at) and had an appointment scheduled but had to cancel since he's unable to walk.

The oncologist mentioned that daraxonrasib was available as an option when he first started chemo, but said he would only be eligible for it after trying chemo, so we know the drug is available.

Are there any tips from HN on how we can approach getting this medicine for my father in law?

botro··on Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
I wonder if LLMs modify their output when they realize they are interacting with a famous person.

By famous I mean someone whose biography is in the training data. All models know a lot more about Terrance Tao than they know about me, when he's working on his projects do the models know they don't need to explain "Besicovitch sets".

Since the system prompt likely includes something about not insulting the user, does the LLM modify it's responses if it realizes it's talking to famous politician, like "dont mention the time $politician was cancelled".

botro··on GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks
What are the challenges you've seen in selling air gapped? Is it the high upfront cost? Challenges with hardware maintenance or something else?
botro··on Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem
How about 'slippery incline'?
botro··on FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs
>On the insurance front - expect your insurance to decline this forever unless you are at serious risk of diabetes.

I'm not understanding this part. If these drugs have solved obesity and the whole host of associated diseases, including the number one killer; heart disease, shouldn't the insurance companies be clambering over each other to cover these drugs and heavily encouraging their use considering the cost reduction on the overall health system.

And if the incentives are misaligned with insurance companies why are governments not handing out GLP-1s to anyone who asks?

botro··on The effect of shingles vaccination at different stages of dementia
Is it known or suspected whether Shingrix offers the same benefits as Zostavax for dementia?
botro··on Study identifies weaknesses in how AI systems are evaluated
This is something I've stuggled with for my site, I made https://aimodelreview.com/ to compare the outputs of LLMs over a variety of prompts and categories, allowing a side by side comparison between them. I ran each prompt 4 times for each model with different temperature values available as a toggles.

My thinking was to just make the responses available to users and let them see how models perform. But from some feedback, turns out users don't want to have to evaluate the answers and would rather see a leaderboard and rankings.

The scalable solution to that would be LLM as judge that some benchmarks already use, but that just feels wrong to me.

LM Arena tries to solve this with the crowd sourced solution, but I think the right method would have to be domain expert human reviewers, so like Wirecutter VS IMDb, but that is expensive to pull off.

botro··on Pharma is a small component of US health care spending
I've suffered from dry eyes for many years and have tried all the over the counter options available in the US with no success, especially for overnight dryness. Could you please share a hint for the Irish pharmacy delivering to the US?
botro··on U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier
I think that statista chart is month to month revisions, while the 900K figure is year over year, March 2024 to March 2025.
botro··on Train a 70b language model at home (2024)
Yes, they put this in footnote 1: "Throughout this article “training” can refer to either pre-training, or fine-tuning." But the article is just talking about fine-tuning.
botro··on The tech that the US Post Office gave us
I posted this on HN back in 2023, reposting now because I don't think this article goes far enough:

I’ll make the bold claim that the following industries / companies would not exist without the USPS:

The Airline Industry: In the early days of American aviation, air transportation was unproven and not financially viable, until the USPS built the necessary infrastructure and gave contracts to airlines to allow them financial feasibility… starting in 1918! [1]

Machine Learning: In 1989 Yann LeCun wrote his seminal paper “Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten ZIP Code Recognition”, which used the USPS’s data set and has today become the hello world of machine learning tasks. More importantly this is the first commercial or industrial application of machine learning. [2]

Netflix: Before Streaming became a thing, Netflix was shipping DVDs via the USPS. The Postal Service adapted its processes and equipment to make this financially feasible, supporting Netflix through its transition to streaming. [3]

Amazon: Early Amazon was only a book vendor, the USPS offered special rates for books that made it possible for Bezos to be profitable from his garage … in 1994, thus birthing the behemoth it is today. [4]

Chickens: okay, not really. But the USPS ships millions of pounds of live chickens and other animals each year! [5]

[1] https://www.history.com/news/us-aviation-airmail-passenger-f...

[2] http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-89e.pdf

[3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/u-s-postal-service-to-netflix-...

[4] https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-Media-Mail-Book-Rate

[5] https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm

botro··on Huawei releases an open weight model trained on Huawei Ascend GPUs
The International Space Station was an international effort by multiple (of the richest) countries specializing in different areas. There is no one country that does it all.

China built their own.

botro··on US economy shrank 0.5% in the first quarter, worse than earlier estimates
Thanks for sharing your real world experience, it helps in seeing how regular folk are affected by policy decisions.

I understand from your post that you are a business person, buying product, performing value added services and selling for profit. Although I know little about business, I would guess that if one of your suppliers raised the prices on one of the inputs to your finished goods, you would likely increase the price of your product to preserve your profits and continue your business as a venture. I would guess that you would not pay the additional cost out of your own pocket.

My question is; why did you not expect the same logic to play out in the tariffs situation? That any country would pay the additional cost of doing business out of their own pocket and not pass it on to the consumer?

botro··on AI 2027
This is damn near prescient, I'm having a hard time believing it was written in 2021.

He did get this part wrong though, we ended up calling them 'Mixture of Experts' instead of 'AI bureaucracies'.

botro··on The Real Story Behind Sam Altman’s Firing From OpenAI
I read the article on archive and figured there was a big chunk missing. It really does not make any sense.

Sutskever and Murati were methodical, they waited until the board was favorable to the outcome they wanted, engaged with board members individually laying the groundwork... and then just changed their mind when it actually happened!?

botro··on Elon tells Tesla employees not to sell TSLA stock as board and execs are dumping
Thanks for writing this out, it's helpful for me as a layman.

Isn't part of the prohibition on trades among officers and directors also because of the inside knowledge they have? Public companies generally report quarterly but the insiders presumably have up to the minute information on sales etc.

And while we wait on the quarterly data, consistent insider selling is indicative of ... something.

botro··on OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB
The LLM community has come up with tests they call 'Misguided Attention'[1] where they prompt the LLM with a slightly altered version of common riddles / tests etc. This often causes the LLM to fail.

For example I used the prompt "As an astronaut in China, would I be able to see the great wall?" and since the training data for all LLMs is full of text dispelling the common myth that the great wall is visible from space, LLMs do not notice the slight variation that the astronaut is IN China. This has been a sobering reminder to me as discussion of AGI heats up.

[1] https://github.com/cpldcpu/MisguidedAttention

botro··on Show HN: Countless.dev – A website to compare every AI model: LLMs, TTSs, STTs
I made https://aimodelreview.com/ to compare the outputs of LLMs over a variety of prompts and categories, allowing a side by side comparison between them. I ran each prompt 4 times for different temperature values and that's available as a toggle.

I was going to add reviews on each model but ran out of steam. Some users have messaged me saying the comparisons are still helpful to them in getting a sense of how different models respond to the same prompt and how temperature affects the same models output on the same prompt.

botro··on Computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku
And to take a historic analogy, cars today are as wide as they are because that's about how wide a single lane roadway is. And a single lane roadway is as wide as it is because that's about the width of two horses drawing a carriage.
botro··on Show HN: 73,530 free book summaries in 40 languages (with paid audio)
Which LLM is used for the book summaries and which TTS for the audio?
botro··on AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO
This is a great video, thank you for sharing. My favorite part:

"...next we have this rubber sheet, which is very clever, and very patented!"

botro··on Behind OpenAI's plan to make A.I. flow like electricity
"Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.

“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.

“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.

“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.

What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision....We were incredibly impressed, Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”

This is 'smart money' in reference to Sam Bankman Fried.

botro··on Reflection 70B, the top open-source model
"The task consists of going from English-language specifications to Wolfram Language code. The test cases are exercises from Stephen Wolfram's An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language."

I think this benchmark would really only tell me whether Wolframs book was in the training data.

botro··on Low Cost Mini PCs
I have found that laptops with cracked or scrached screens offer a much better value in terms of newer hardware. The battery acts as a built in UPS.

For example this laptop:

Dell Latitude 7400 Intel i7-1165G7 16GB 256GB NVMe SSD

Is $180 shipped.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/266969891671?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid...

botro··on 'Model collapse'? An expert explains the rumours about an impending AI doom
In the model testing I've conducted, I've seen that LLMs from competing companies including GPT-4o, Gemini Flash 1.5, Llama 3.1 and Phi-3 all converge on the exact same joke. For a test of creativity this was alarming. They all tell slight variations of the same joke about ladders.

I've posted about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125309

botro··on The Webb Telescope further deepens the Hubble tension controversy in cosmology
That's fair. I'm trying to point out that the degree to which your statements illicit an emotional response from someone, by any means, has no bearing on the validity of that statement.
botro··on The Webb Telescope further deepens the Hubble tension controversy in cosmology
>The degree of the provocation proves the value of the statement.

This is a great heuristic to practice often. I just told my wife she looks fat in her new dress, and the degree of her provocation proves the value of my statement.

botro··on Schwab users are unable to log in
In this scenario, who are the institutions selling to?
Page 1 of 2Next →