Hacker News Reader

muxamilianon How long before we stop reading the code?

Yes but in my experience, LLMs are prone to cheating and implementing "shortcuts" that look functional but are in fact not really if you look closely. At the moment, you still need a human in the loop to make sure the LLM actually did what it promised and didn't cheat.

muxamilianon Automated AI-Based Pigeon Defense System

1. Camera captures video 2. Neural network recognizes pigeon 3. Watergun turns toward pigeon 4. Spray pigeon with watergun

Components:

* Electric battery-driven water gun (disassembled, orange) * USB camera * Orange Pi 5 * 2 servo motors (SG90 or MG90S) * Resistors and a transistor for turning on the watergun (e.g. IRLZ44N) It uses an open vocabulary object detection neural network (yolo_world_v2l), so any target can be programmed, not just pigeons. Runs on the Rockchip 3588's Neural Processing Unit.

muxamilianon Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

They get this number by simply adding up all CPUs' processing speed. There is no NPU or similar: https://medium.com/@zlodeibaal/orange-pi-rv2-ai-board-scam-7...

muxamilianon Is Gemini 2.5 good at bounding boxes?

I'm rather puzzled by how bad the COCO ground truth is. This is the benchmark dataset for object detection? Wow. I would say Gemini's output is better than the ground truth in most of the example images.

muxamilianon Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference

In-memory computing (analog or digital). Still doing SIMD matrix multiplication but using more efficient hardware: https://arxiv.org/html/2401.14428v1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-020-0655-z

muxamilianon Europe bets once again on RISC-V for supercomputing

Why? Genuinely curious

muxamilianon Coral USB Accelerator with Google's Edge TPU

It seems more than dead and only supports small neural networks. Viable alternatives are Hailo and Axelera (https://www.axelera.ai), which is a newer.

muxamilianon YOLOv5 on FPGA with Hailo-8 and 4 Pi Cameras

Maybe not 10 but in principle it’s possible: https://www.lannerinc.com/products/edge-ai-appliance/deep-le...

muxamilianon YOLOv5 on FPGA with Hailo-8 and 4 Pi Cameras

Google Coral seems abandoned by Google. Not official but last news on their page from May 2022

muxamilianon YOLOv5 on FPGA with Hailo-8 and 4 Pi Cameras

It’s a competitor to Google Coral (seems abandoned) and NVIDIA Jetson. I’ve been using it for more than a year and the hardware seems to be one of the best on the market. The software (how to actually do inference on the chip) is subpar though.

muxamilianon YOLOv5 on FPGA with Hailo-8 and 4 Pi Cameras

From what I know it doesn’t have memory but streams everything to the chip. So there’s no limit regarding the size of the the neural network (unlike Google Coral)

muxamilianon Only smart LLMs can understand good essays

I analyzed several LLMs and how well they "understand" university essays: For all LLMs, bad essays are hard to understand. But to smart LLMs, good essays make sense. This could be a way to measure an LLM's reasoning ability.

muxamilianon Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S) Internet Service: RFC 9330

While it's a step in the right direction, there's a problem if there's at least one 'malicious' actor, who ignores the congestion feedback and just wants a larger share of bandwidth. Then all other actors will retreat and the unfair actors get what they want. Unfortunately it is hard to know for a good actor if the other actors are playing nicely or not. Only if a good actor knows that there's fair queuing, they can trust L4S to treat them fairly.

This can be solved by complementing L4S with fair queuing (e.g. fq_codel) and by making sure that congestion control can detect the presence of fair queuing (https://github.com/muxamilian/fair-queuing-aware-congestion-...).

muxamilianon A PCIe Coral TPU Finally Works on Raspberry Pi 5

The software is actively maintained yes. The price is between 100 to 200$.

muxamilianon A PCIe Coral TPU Finally Works on Raspberry Pi 5

The Hailo (https://hailo.ai) is the biggest competitor at the moment. It is a lot more powerful while not requiring much more power. It does, however, have some problems with Pyhon's GIL and documentation is not always perfect. Other than that it's like the Coral but much better.

muxamilianon TCP-brutal: Congestion control algorithm that increase speed on packet lost

Fair queuing shouldn't be necessary in the core. If every base station/WiFi router/client device support fair queuing that should be enough.

muxamilianon TCP-brutal: Congestion control algorithm that increase speed on packet lost

> Unlike BBR, Brutal operates on a fixed rate model and does not reduce its speed in response to packet loss or RTT changes. [...] It's particularly effective at seizing bandwidth in congested, best-effort delivery networks, hence its name.

So if there's one TCP flow using Brutal, all other traffic gets pushed out. Fair queuing can prevent this. If one can be sure that there's fair queuing, one can do much smoother congestion control: https://github.com/muxamilian/fair-queuing-aware-congestion-...

muxamilianon TCP-brutal: Congestion control algorithm that increase speed on packet lost

It sounds crazy but fortunately fair queuing is becoming more and more prevalent, making sure everyone plays nice. Every iPhone has it: https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/state_of_fq_codel/

muxamilianon Fair Queuing Aware Congestion Control

Fair queuing is becoming increasingly prevalent on the internet. This method continuously measures for fair queuing on a connection and uses delay-minimizing congestion control in case fair queuing is detected. Otherwise legacy congestion control is used.

muxamilianon Ask HN: Show me your half baked project

https://github.com/muxamilian/poor-mans-vr

A poor man's VR: Using the front camera and tensorflow.js, the smartphone becomes a “window” into the real world. Video and image content appear as if they were seen through this window. To do this, the viewer’s position is determined using a neural network. The viewed content is then moved according to the viewer’s position. This makes it seem like the content is physically behind the smartphone and is viewed through the smartphone’s screen. This effect is especially useful for content captured using an ultra-wide lens.

muxamilianon TCP's congestion control saved the internet

One nice side effect of fair queuing is that if endpoints knew that there's fair queuing on a path, they could use delay-minimizing congestion control since they don't have to be afraid of unfair competition.

https://github.com/muxamilian/fair-queuing-aware-congestion-...

muxamilianon Detect Fair Queuing on an internet connection

Some context: I know that my bottleneck link is my cable modem. Couldn't find documentation on whether it has fair queuing (like fq_codel). So I wrote this measurement tool.

It's not about net neutrality if you understood it that way.

muxamilianon Show HN: Readability-optimized Comic Sans alternative using Machine Learning

Italics are automatically generated using FontForge. I guess it uses some logic to just tilt them a little bit. It was not done by me.

muxamilianon Show HN: Readability-optimized Comic Sans alternative using Machine Learning

Robo99 (Robo99.ttf) is a readability-optimized font whose glyphs were generated using Machine Learning. The goals were to create a font that is

- as readable as possible

- as "normal" as possible

muxamilianon Linux surpasses the Mac among Steam gamers

Since there are so few games available for macOS, I signed up for GeForce NOW, and I don't look back. I have a feeling that native gaming might be slowly replaced by cloud gaming.

muxamilianon Ask HN: What is an A.I. chip and how does it work?

It has 8 MB of memory. It also supports live streaming the neural network to the chip, although that is slower than when it is cached in the memory.

muxamilianon Please do not require AVX support for your software

It’s not only about old CPUs. Intel Atom still doesn’t support AVX. Atoms are quite common on industrial controllers. For example, Tensorflow crashes with an obscure error on Atom CPUs. If you don’t support AVX at least output an error message.

muxamilianon EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

Yes, that's super annoying. However, it's easily fixable:

One can rub the black stuff off the pin using a regular rubber and it usually works again

muxamilianon I bought a CO2 monitor and it broke me

Have been using Netatmo for 4 years and can't complain.

muxamilianon Apple Lightning (2020)

One pin on the cable (male part) becomes oxidized (black) after time. One can rub the black stuff away using a regular rubber and it usually works again.