HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

nmca

1,672 karma · joined November 24, 2016

research engineer
submissionscomments
nmca··on SNL Weekend Update: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on A.I.'S Threat to Humanity [video]
You are wrong. The confusion arises because Coxon said “within the decade” with no associated probability and Hubinger said “within the next decade” at 10%.
nmca··on Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
It would be glorious if there was a split version!
nmca··on There is no comfortable reading position
I put a 5 dollar phone-holder-ring on the back of my kindle, problem solved.
nmca··on Autism's confusing cousins
In a maximally earnest way — to what degree should we be sure these language harms are real on net? Are there data as opposed to anecdata? (Of course many phenomena are real without data; we can just be more confident in cases with data)
nmca··on Weighting an average to minimize variance
This is also a nice way to combine the ratings of a number of noisy annotators with variable annotations noise.
nmca··on Meta Superintelligence Labs' first paper is about RAG
This is not work by any of the high profile new hires, in case folks are confused.
nmca··on Why We Think
Lillian’s blog is extremely good in general & if it’s new to you I suggest checking out the other posts also. I particularly enjoyed the one on human data.
nmca··on Code formatting comes to uv experimentally
right, but you definitely shouldn’t be using any other formatter than ruff and this helps with that
nmca··on Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally?
It’s the same principle as:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g60763-d477541...

nmca··on Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally?
Isn’t the answer to the question just classic economies of scale?

You can’t run GPT4 for yourself because the fixed costs are high. But the variable costs are low, so OAI can serve a shit ton.

Or equivalently the smallest available unit of “serving a gpt4” is more gpt4 than one person needs.

I think all the inference optimisation answers are plain wrong for the actual question asked?

nmca··on 200k Flemish drivers can turn traffic lights green
You can dream of better yet! If the spec was required to be open source for the government project, then you could have commercial choices and some less feature rich open source version.
nmca··on Tom Lehrer has died
I feel the AI safety community has not made enough of Lehrer’s masterpiece on the topic:

https://youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs?si=DYsY5Juco-kJ5eWD

nmca··on Quantitative AI progress needs accurate and transparent evaluation
Indeed, it’s like saying a jet plane can fly!
nmca··on OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
It takes Tim Gowers more than hour and a half to go through q4! (Sure, he could go faster without video. But Tim Gowers! An hour and a half!!)
nmca··on OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
It’s interesting that this is a competition elite enough that several posters on a programming website don’t seem to understand what it is.

My very rough napkin math suggests that against the US reference class, imo gold is literally a one in a million talent (very roughly 20 people who make camp could get gold out of very roughly twenty million relevant high schoolers).

nmca··on OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025
There wasn’t in the CoT for these problems.
nmca··on Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs
Great follow-up work from OpenAI on this:

https://openai.com/index/emergent-misalignment/

nmca··on Async Queue – One of my favorite programming interview questions
Why is the method called sendOnce? It’s send with a capacity limiter / semaphore right, so what about it is Once?
nmca··on Typr – TUI typing test with a word selection algorithm inspired by keybr
This is great! I have daydreamed about how to do a more complex algo: instead of character speed and frequency you could do bi-character speed/frequency/error rate and probably improve over keybr further.
nmca··on The Hollow Men of Hims
“bad” seems fine?
nmca··on The Hollow Men of Hims
This article is quite bad: haughty in tone and confused in content.

If you are interested in learning something about a key part subject matter (compounding loopholes and their impact on drug prices), this article is much better:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-compounding-loophole

nmca··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
How do you purport to know this?
nmca··on Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway
I get motion sick more easily than most, and a Waymo is much much smoother than a typical uber driver. I am happy to pay a fairly large time&momey premium for this.
nmca··on The Illusion of Thinking: Strengths and limitations of reasoning models [pdf]
I saw your comment and counted — in May I took a Waymo thirty times.
nmca··on Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
One could train a language model to predict task difficulty (and other parameters) here, which would be great for the initialisation of new cards
nmca··on A Research Preview of Codex
with a bad ai it is pointless, with a good ai it is powerful.

codex-1 has been quite good in my experience

nmca··on A Research Preview of Codex
It is a cost benefit trade off, as with all things. Benefits look pretty good.
nmca··on Lock-Free Rust: How to Build a Rollercoaster While It's on Fire
Did you get help from ChatGPT ooi? The humour sounds a bit like modern ChatGPT style but it’s uncanny valley.
nmca··on Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong?
I think your threat model is bad — the isolation of accounts offers little and most people have effectively only the security of their email provider anyway.

That said, buying several keys would be a natural and happy path solution for the paranoid. Make sure to get three for each account (same as primary) as either you need a backup or the extra key offers no extra security.

nmca··on Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong?
I know this was sarcasm, but bank card is not appropriate because you should have one hardware key for all services produced by an independent provider.
Page 1 of 19Next →