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rdli

1,152 karma · joined May 21, 2015

@rdli@mastodon.social @rdli.bsky.social

https://www.thelis.org

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rdli··on DeepMind's WeatherNext model achieves breakthrough forecasting cyclones
I couldn't find a client of any sort for WeatherNext, so I had Claude write a simple one: https://github.com/richarddli/weatherodds.
rdli··on Claude Tag
One thing that wasn't obvious in the post: it's usage (token) based pricing, not including in your existing Claude subscriptions.
rdli··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)
Cybersecurity/AI seed startup | Founding AI Engineer | Bay Area | Full-time

We're seed-staged, 3 people, building an AI for cybersecurity, looking for a founding AI engineer who wants to learn/apply SOTA techniques for AI. Ideal background is experience building production agentic AI systems (by this I mean something like Simon's definition: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/18/agents/ definition) who also likes to think about WHAT to build and not just how.

We are a Golang/Python shop (although I'm not sure that matters so much any more).

Email jobs@polarsky.ai with subject HN.

rdli··on Notion AI: Unpatched data exfiltration
I get that but just not entirely obvious how you do that for the Notion AI.
rdli··on Notion AI: Unpatched data exfiltration
Securing LLMs is just structurally different. The attack space is "the entirety of the human written language" which is effectively infinite. Wrapping your head around this is something we're only now starting to appreciate.

In general, treating LLM outputs (no matter where) as untrusted, and ensuring classic cybersecurity guardrails (sandboxing, data permissioning, logging) is the current SOTA on mitigation. It'll be interesting to see how approaches evolve as we figure out more.

rdli··on Skills Officially Comes to Codex
Nothing super-fancy. We have a common GitHub repo in our org for skills, and everyone checks out the repo into their preferred setup locally.

(To clarify, I meant that some engineers mostly use CC while others mostly use Codex, as opposed to engineers using both at the same time.)

rdli··on Skills Officially Comes to Codex
This is great. At my startup, we have a mix of Codex/CC users so having a common set of skills we can all use for building is exciting.

It’s also interesting to see how instead of a plan mode like CC, Codex is implementing planning as a skill.

rdli··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)
Polar Sky | Bay Area | Full-time | Founding AI Engineer

Generative AI is rewriting how organizations use data, and breaking traditional security models in the process. We’re a team of cybersecurity, AI, and systems experts building the foundation for secure, trustworthy AI in the enterprise.

We're looking for a Founding AI Engineer who loves building with AI -- crafting context pipelines, integrating and evaluating LLMs into production systems, and delivering AI-native product experiences. You'll work on all parts of Polar Sky, from the data and eval systems to the reasoning, retrieval, and orchestration systems.

Apply online here: https://ats.rippling.com/polar-sky/jobs/a04ed5b7-6202-45e6-b....

rdli··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2025)
Polar Sky | Founding AI Lead | Bay Area/Seattle | Hybrid/Onsite | Full-time

We're a well-funded, pre-seed cybersecurity startup focused on data security. I'm looking for a founding AI lead with experience in fine-tuning LLMs (expertise around RL + reasoning models a big plus). This person would own the full AI stack from data to training to eval to test-time compute.

Who's a good fit:

* If you've always thought about starting a company, but for whatever reason (funding, life, idea), this is a great opportunity to be part of the founding team. We're 2 people right now.

* You enjoy understanding customer problems and their use cases, and then figuring out the best solution (sometimes technical, sometimes not) to their problems.

* You want to help figure out what a company looks like in this AI era.

* You enjoy teaching and sharing knowledge.

Questions, interest, just email jobs@polarsky.ai.

rdli··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025)
Polar Sky | Founding AI Lead | Bay Area/Seattle | Hybrid/Onsite | Full-time

We're a well-funded, pre-seed cybersecurity startup focused on data security. I'm looking for a founding AI lead with experience in fine-tuning LLMs (expertise around RL + reasoning models a big plus). This person would own the full AI stack from data to training to eval to test-time compute.

Who's a good fit:

* If you've always thought about starting a company, but for whatever reason (funding, life, idea), this is a great opportunity to be part of the founding team. We're 2 people right now.

* You enjoy understanding customer problems and their use cases, and then figuring out the best solution (sometimes technical, sometimes not) to their problems.

* You want to help figure out what a company looks like in this AI era.

* You enjoy teaching and sharing knowledge.

Questions, interest, just email jobs@polarsky.ai.

rdli··on OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive
Seems that OpenAI is acquiring Io for $6.4B in an all-equity deal.
rdli··on llm-d, Kubernetes native distributed inference
I would think that that the NVidia Dynamo SDK (pipelines) is a big difference as well (https://github.com/ai-dynamo/dynamo/tree/main/deploy/sdk/doc...), or am I missing something?
rdli··on llm-d, Kubernetes native distributed inference
In this analogy, Dynamo is most definitely not like Django. It includes inference aware routing, KV caching, etc. -- all the stuff you would need to run a modern SOTA inference stack.
rdli··on llm-d, Kubernetes native distributed inference
This is really interesting. For SOTA inference systems, I've seen two general approaches:

* The "stack-centric" approach such as vLLM production stack, AIBrix, etc. These set up an entire inference stack for you including KV cache, routing, etc.

* The "pipeline-centric" approach such as NVidia Dynamo, Ray, BentoML. These give you more of an SDK so you can define inference pipelines that you can then deploy on your specific hardware.

It seems like LLM-d is the former. Is that right? What prompted you to go down that direction, instead of the direction of Dynamo?

rdli··on Train Your Own O1 Preview Model Within $450
The blog post was a little unclear, so my summary was:

- They used QwQ to generate training data (with some cleanup using GPT-4o-mini)

- The training data was then used to FT Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct (non-reasoning model)

- Result was that Sky-T1 performs slightly worse than QwQ but much better than Qwen2.5 on reasoning tasks

There are a few dismissive comments here but I actually think this is pretty interesting as it shows how you can FT a foundation model to do better at reasoning.

rdli··on Lessons from building a small-scale AI application
I took a brief look (~5 minutes). My $0.02 is that it's not clear what problem you're trying to solve. I get what some of the features do (e.g., templated prompts) but it would be v helpful to have an example of how you actually use magentic, versus the non-magentic way. It feels like a lot of syntactic sugar, if I'm being honest (not a bad thing, but something you might want to be clear about, if that's the case.)
rdli··on Lessons from building a small-scale AI application
(author here) I didn't put this in my post, but one of my favorite moments was when I read some of the LlamaIndex source code which pointed to the GitHub commit where they copied the code verbatim from LangChain. (LangChain is MIT-licensed, so it's OK, but I still thought it was funny!)
rdli··on Red Hat Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Neural Magic
Not a bad move by Red Hat. Red Hat lost the battle of the cloud to Azure, AWS, and Google, but AI is still a nascent space. vLLM's deployment model fits neatly into Red Hat's traditional on-premise / support-centric business model.
rdli··on Using Llamafiles for embeddings in local RAG applications
I'm running ollama, but it's still slow (it's actually quite fast on my M2). My working theory is that with standard cloud VMs, memory <-> CPU bandwidth is an issue. I'm looking into vLLM.

And as to sidestepping inference, I can totally do that. But I think it's so much better to be able to ask the LLM a question, run a vector similarity search to pull relevant content, and then have the LLM summarize this all in a way that answers my question.

rdli··on Using Llamafiles for embeddings in local RAG applications
Thanks! I should have been clearer -- embeddings are pretty fast (relatively) -- it's inference that's slow (I'm at 5 tokens/second on AKS).
rdli··on Using Llamafiles for embeddings in local RAG applications
I'm working on something like this! It's simple in concept, but there are lots of fiddly bits. A big one is performance (at least, without spending $$$$$ on GPUs.) I haven't found that much in terms of how to tune/deploy LLMs on commodity cloud hardware, which is what I'm trying this out on.
rdli··on Show HN: Hacker Search – A semantic search engine for Hacker News
This is cool! I've been trying out bits & pieces of the RAG ecosystem, too, exploring this space.

Here's a question for this crowd: Do we see domain/personalized RAG as the future of search? In other words, instead of Google, you go to your own personal LLM, which has indexed all of the content you care about (whether it's everything from HN, or an extra informative blog post, or ...)? I personally think this would be great. I would still use Google for general-purpose search, but a lot of my search needs are trying to remember that really interesting article someone posted to HN a year ago that is germane to what I'm doing now.

rdli··on Time Series Forecasting vs Regression: An informal guide
(Author here)

One of the things that confused me is that regression models can be predictive, just like time series forecasting — they just do so in a different way. I tried to make this clear in the article (or maybe I’m not understanding what you’re saying).

In a regression model, you’re predicting target variables from feature variables. In a time series, you’re predicting the same variable from its past behavior. This is a subtle but crucial difference.

(And then you can do time series with covariates, which combines the two.)

rdli··on Time Series Forecasting vs Regression: An informal guide
(Author here). Or a lot of trial & error :).
rdli··on Setting up a secondary Pi-Hole on my home network
My kids have school-issued devices, and there is a ton of tracking on them.

I set up my Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. I have some brief notes here on my setup: https://www.thelis.org/blog/pi-hole. It works well.

rdli··on Reducing BigQuery Costs
Are you using slots (https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/slots)? If you aren't, I'd highly recommend you switch. My guess is that it would make your costs much more predictable (it did for us).

Note that this is not the default! :-)

rdli··on Reducing BigQuery Costs
I agree that some GCP services are better than others.

I’ve never used Pub/Sub or Cloud Run, but have been quite happy with BigQuery and GKE.

rdli··on Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?
I think the #1 thing when you become part of an exec team is that you should be optimizing for the _business_, and not your function. The working assumption is that you will keep your function executing and delivering, but what is really hard is helping to figure out what the right decisions are for the business. Should we invest more in product or sales? What if there’s a huge top of funnel problem — what can we do about it? Your job is to bring that technology perspective to the discussion.

I’ve been an exec, founder, CEO, and board member at various stages of successful (IPO) /unsuccessful companies (acqui-hire) companies. And the common thread at every stage is that the most successful companies had management teams that worked well together to optimize for the business.

So instead of spending your energy on reading / learning more about tech, I’d recommend you spend your energy learning more about business (I’d probably start by asking the CEO & the rest of the mgmt team for advice on what to learn.)

rdli··on Ask HN: SaaS Founders, What 3 advice would you give your younger selves?
At $1M ARR, I think a CFO is overkill (and hideously expensive). In my experience:

- $0 - $1M-ish, hire a part-time bookkeeper

- $1M - $5M-ish, get a director of finance / controller, who can manage AR/AP, audit, ASC 606, basic financial modeling, and your key rev benchmarks.

- $5M+ is when I'd consider hiring a CFO, but it really depends on your growth rate. You can probably get to $10M+ with a good dir of finance if you get them to hire a good FP&A person.

rdli··on Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure
A common strategy is interpolation. The challenge is that forecasting itself is a form of interpolation. So you're forecasting based on forecasted data.
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