HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jcuenod

857 karma · joined January 9, 2021

submissionscomments
jcuenod··on Show HN: Zanagrams
Having made a word game myself[0], this was highly entertaining! Thanks :)

What dictionary are you using?

[0] https://jcuenod.github.io/phrase-maze-poc/

jcuenod··on JSIR: A High-Level IR for JavaScript
I came across this project in the last couple of days too. Being able to decompile from Hermes bytecode sounds awesome.

Here's the repo: https://github.com/google/jsir (it seems not everything is public).

Here's a presentation about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY1ft5EXI3I (linked in from the repo)

jcuenod··on The IDE Is Dead. Long Live the ADE
Wait, I thought it was the 2nd of April today?
jcuenod··on Just Send the Prompt
Write a witty reply to this article that is sure to get lots of upvotes so I don't have to read it and I can just reap internet karma. If you do a good job, I'll give you a $20 tip. If you do a bad job, a kitten will die.
jcuenod··on How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week
Just you wait, I will post how I rebuilt cloudflare with AI in one week
jcuenod··on Google translategemma 4B Translation Models
I'm disappointed this isn't another T5Gemma model designed for translation. The big use case I see for this is fine-tuning. What are people using this for?
jcuenod··on GLM-4.7-Flash
Comparison to GPT-OSS-20B (irrespective of how you feel that model actually performs) doesn't fill me with confidence. Given GLM 4.7 seems like it could be competitive with Sonnet 4/4.5, I would have hoped that their flash model would run circles around GPT-OSS-120B. I do wish they would provide an Aider result for comparison. Aider may be saturated among SotA models, but it's not at this size.
jcuenod··on Llama-Factory: Unified, Efficient Fine-Tuning for 100 Open LLMs
Can you compare this to Unsloth?
jcuenod··on Next.js is infuriating
Posts like this really mean "this doesn't work like I expect it to based on my background with some other technology".

But in this case, I tried in earnest to use nextjs for a project with auth & stripe, etc. this past week, and I can't believe how frustrating it is to get stupid things like modal dialogs to work properly in the client.

I have tons of experience with React SPAs. But the client/server divide in Next remains quite inscrutable to me to the extent that I'm just going to start again with Django (where I nearly started it in the first place).

So yes, it doesn't work like I expect it to either...

jcuenod··on Ask HN: Best foundation model for CLM fine-tuning?
My day job involves training language models (mostly seq2seq) for low-resource languages (with substantially less data than 2GB of data).

A few thoughts:

1. You can't cut off the embedding layer or discard the tokenizer without throwing out the model you're starting with. The attention matrices are applied to and trained with the token embedding layer.

2. Basically the same thing regarding the tokenizer. If you need to add some tokens, that can be done (or you can repurpose existing tokens) if your script is unique (a problem I face periodically). But if you are initializing weights for new tokens, that means those tokens are untrained. So if you do that for all your data, you're training a new model.

3. The Gemma model series sounds like a good fit for your use case. I'm not confident about Hebrew support, let alone Hasidic Yiddish, but it is relatively multilingual (more so than many other open models). Being multilingual means that the odds are greater than they have tokens relevant to your corpus that have been trained towards an optimal point for your dataset.

4. If you can generate synthetic data with synonyms or POS tags, then great. But this is a language model, so you need to think how you can usefully teach it natural sequences of text (not how to tag nouns or identify synonyms - I also did a bunch of classic NLP, and it's depressing how irrelevant all that work is these days). I suspect that repurposing this data will not be worth it. So, if anything, I'd recommend doing that as a second pass.

5. Take a look at unsloth notebooks for training a gemma3 model and load up your data. I reckon it'll surprise you how effective these models are...

jcuenod··on Building the mouse Logitech won't make
I would _love_ to see more DIY mouse options. I feel like the mechanical keyboard crowd has so many options.

I've been dreaming of a set of lego-style bits of a mouse that can be assembled together... want another button? here you go. Want it on the side? Modify the 3D print file. Want bluetooth? Use this board... Want USB-C? Use that board... Want both? We've got you covered... Want a hyper-scroll wheel? Well, Logitech has a patent on that one, but here's the closest thing you can get on a DIY mouse. Now click these buttons in the configurator and hit "upload", and the firmware is installed to use your new mouse on any machine.

jcuenod··on Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI
I mentioned elsewhere the impact of prompting, which seems to make an outsized difference to this model's performance. I tried NER and POS tagging (with somewhat disappointing results).

One thing that worked strikingly well was translation on non-Indo-European languages. Like I had success with Thai and Bahasa Indonesian -> English...

jcuenod··on Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI
So I had a similar experience with your prompt (on the f16 model). But I do think that, at this size, prompting differences make a bigger impact. I had this experience trying to get it to list entities. It kept trying to give me a bulleted list and I was trying to coerce it into some sort of structured output. When I finally just said "give me a bulleted list and nothing else" the success rate went from around 0-0.1 to 0.8+.

In this case, I changed the prompt to:

---

Tallest mountains (in order):

```

- Mount Everest

- Mount K2

- Mount Sahel

- Mount Fuji

- Mount McKinley

```

What is the second tallest mountain?

---

Suddenly, it got the answer right 95+% of the time

jcuenod··on I Wrote a Compiler
This is great! I feel like there's been a resurgence of interest in language design and compilers of late. I have no business having an interest in this kind of thing, but even I have been inspired to try and make the changes to javascript that I think would improve it: https://chicory-lang.github.io/
jcuenod··on Gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05
82.2 on Aider

Still actually falling behind the official scores for o3 high. https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

jcuenod··on Show HN: Phrase Maze – A daily word puzzle game
Thanks :) I'll take a look
jcuenod··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)
I'm building an experimental a JSX-like language that embraces more functional features --- has stronger type guarantees that TS, ADTs, and pattern matching, but it's also more familiar than alternatives like Elm (or, I would argue, even Rescript).

My current tag line is "JS with guardrails, without footguns"

https://chicory-lang.github.io/

https://github.com/chicory-lang/compiler

jcuenod··on Mayo Clinic's secret weapon against AI hallucinations: Reverse RAG in action
If you're trying to prevent your prompt from leaking, why don't you just use string matching?
jcuenod··on Experiment with Gemini 2.0 Flash native image generation
I was really hoping that there would be more character consistency, given the fact they mention it in the blog. It also doesn't seem to reliably follow styles like "watercolor illustration" or "line and wash".
jcuenod··on Mistral OCR
* Character recognition on monolingual text in a narrow domain is solved
jcuenod··on Mistral OCR
Just tested with a multilingual (bidi) English/Hebrew document.

The Hebrew output had no correspondence to the text whatsoever (in context, there was an English translation, and the Hebrew produced was a back-translation of that).

Their benchmark results are impressive, don't get me wrong. But I'm a little disappointed. I often read multilingual document scans in the humanities. Multilingual (and esp. bidi) OCR is challenging, and I'm always looking for a better solution for a side-project I'm working on (fixpdfs.com).

Also, I thought OCR implied that you could get bounding boxes for text (and reconstruct a text layer on a scan, for example). Am I wrong, or is this term just overloaded, now?

jcuenod··on TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end
Honestly, antlr made this pretty straightforward to me. I didn't want to work in java, but they have a ton of targets. You can definitely write it all yourself, and that's a great learning exercise. But I wanted to get a parser for a language idea I had in mind and it took a couple of days with antlr (https://github.com/chicory-lang/chicory)
jcuenod··on TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end
Thanks! I appreciate your discussion of semantic analysis for wend. I've literally just embarked on creating a (yet another) "compiles to JSX" language[0][1]. I'm using ANTLR for my lexer/parser, but I've just hit a point where I can start doing semantic analysis :)

[0]: https://chicory-lang.github.io/

[1]: https://github.com/chicory-lang/chicory

jcuenod··on GPT4 level intelligence fell 1000x in 18 months
Lmsys is not a measure of intelligence. It's a measure of human preference. People prefer correct answers (assuming they are qualified to identify the correct one), but they also prefer answers formatted nicely for reading, for example, which has nothing to do with "intelligence". That is why "reasoning" models, which often do better on benchmarks, do not necessarily do correspondingly well on lmsys.
jcuenod··on Svelte 5 is not JavaScript
The problem is that Svelte 5 is not Javascript in the worst way. It doesn't solve the problems of js, it provides leaky abstractions around some frontend issues. I think Solid is a better direction than Svelte because Solid doesn't depend on a new language. But the reason there's an instinct to create something that's not quite js is that js is not ideal. Elm is the precursor to svelte. But I think we can do better...[0]

[0] https://jcuenod.github.io/bibletech/2025/02/16/beyond-typesc...

jcuenod··on Ask HN: A Better TypeScript?
it will be exactly what I want!
jcuenod··on Show HN: HackerNews-new-jobs – insights into fresh and recurring job ads
This looks lovely! Good work.

On my wishlist are some fuzzier categories:

  1. Tech trends (rust, docker, postgres...)
  2. Role trends ("ml engineer", "full-stack developer" ...)
jcuenod··on Show HN: We made glhf.chat – run almost any open-source LLM, including 405B
Seems like setting max_tokens crashes your endpoint.
jcuenod··on Firefox bug gets fixed after 25 years
It warms the cockles of my heart to see this kind of thing. Happened to me recently with a 24 year old firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62151
jcuenod··on Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet
This deserves its own Show HN!
Page 1 of 8Next →