HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

smokel

3,875 karma · joined December 20, 2011

Coder by day, artist by night.
submissionscomments
smokel··on The unreasonable difficulty of time series forecasting
This article focuses mostly on point forecasting. There are many other things that are interesting to forecast.

Consider for example the use case of forecasting the average speed on a road segment with a maximum speed of 70mph. Forecasting whether that will be 69.8 or 70.3 is not very relevant. What is relevant is forecasting when the speed drops below a traffic jam threshold. But the exact timing of that might be impossible to forecast due to the inherently chaotic behavior of traffic. Forecasting the probability of a traffic jam occurring may be more interesting to practitioners.

smokel··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
I'm looking at GoPro packaging here that says "Made in Thailand".
smokel··on GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization
Lean is the Mizar here. For those who have no clue what this is about, Mizar [1] was an early automated theorem prover. Can't wait for HN to add AI features to explain concepts in the sideline, and autovoting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar_system

smokel··on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
> I’d buy these. Say $100 for a frontier class model. Maybe more.

Sure you would. Running frontier class models on current hardware costs in the order of tens of thousands of dollars. It is more likely that these custom ASICs will be priced competitively with that, and not with Super Mario Bros.

Oh, and energy consumption will be in the same order.

smokel··on Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source
There's an interesting easter egg in semantic.cpp, line 77:

  if (CheckWord(words, "OXio")) {
Apparently, if your text contains the word "OXio", it triggers the following riddle: What's round on the ends and hi in the middle?
smokel··on Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK
Some things do indeed improve, but some other things require a massive effort that no hobbyist or small company can make happen.

This is most obvious in places where a lot of coordination is required, for example in supporting proper color correction throughout all applications, or decent support for advanced printer functions.

There are many incremental changes, but we often get stuck in local minima for years.

Still, I personally like that one can (relatively) easily watch what happens under the hood. It's not entirely clear to me why Windows and MacOS must remain closed source.

smokel··on Can We Understand How Large Language Models Reason?
It's probably helpful in this discussion to make a difference between two definitions of reasoning:

1. phenomenal reasoning, requiring consciousness and subjective experience

2. functional reasoning, transforming premises into conclusions using logic

I think you are attacking this using definition 1, whereas the article is obviously aiming at a different type of reasoning, and trying to formalize what is actually going on. It seems to be a genuine effort.

smokel··on Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?
There are very few sites such as Hacker News around. Looking for one that is similar in quality, but with a slightly different focus is going to be disappointing.

Perhaps it helps to consider why you'd exactly want this? You may be better off not visiting any such site, and instead focus on real human-in-the-loop activities with a group of local hackers.

smokel··on 30papers.com – Ilya's 30 essential ML papers, in a beginner friendly format

  for x in 1611.02731 1511.06391 1811.06965 1512.03385 1511.07122 1704.01212 1409.2329 1512.02595 1706.01427 1410.5401 1806.01822 1706.03762 1409.0473 1506.03134 2001.08361 1405.6903 1603.05027 math/0406077; do curl -fL https://arxiv.org/pdf/$x -o ${x##*/}.pdf; done
  for u in https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/colt93.pdf https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2012/file/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436e924a68c45b-Paper.pdf https://www.vetta.org/documents/Machine_Super_Intelligence.pdf https://www.lirmm.fr/~ashen/kolmbook-eng-scan.pdf https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762 https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/ https://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/annotated-transformer/ https://cs231n.github.io/; do curl -fLO "$u"; done
smokel··on Claude Design System Prompt
The GitHub page clearly states that it is reverse engineered.

Even if you rewrite an article in your own words, you cannot claim copyright for that. At least, not to my knowledge.

smokel··on Claude Design System Prompt
You cannot claim authorship of something that you were not even allowed to take in the first place. How would you then allow rights to somebody else?

Seems pretty obvious to me.

smokel··on Claude Design System Prompt
It does make a difference. If this text was generated by the LLM, then by those same terms you are allowed to publish the data. But given that it is reverse engineered, you are not allowed to do so.

Note that even in the normal case, there are restrictions. You'd have to validate that the generated output is not copyrighted. Which in this case may not be trivial.

smokel··on Artful Cats: Feline-Inspired Art and Artifacts
Can't have a discussion on art and cats without mentioning Louis Wain [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain

smokel··on Claude Design System Prompt
If this is regular output of the LLM, I'm not sure, but given that the author proclaims that this is reverse engineered, then they are not allowed to redistribute it under their own license terms. The terms of service are also pretty clear on this not being allowed, which makes it extra hard to defend (section 3.3):

> You may not access or use, or help another person to access or use, our Services in the following ways:

...

3. To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law. [1]

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms

smokel··on Claude Design System Prompt
> Open source, MIT licensed.

I don't think that is how copyright licensing works.

smokel··on CursorBench 3.1
Most interesting things in software engineering are (laughably) subjective.

Just check out any conversation on dynamic vs static typing, talk to a Rust zealot, or ask a backend engineer if microservices were a mistake.

It's unfortunate, and it makes it hard to have proper discussions on these subjects. It would be worthwhile to figure out how we can have more constructive arguments.

smokel··on Pystd, similar-ish functionality with a fraction of the compile time
It is a Python thing, in the sense that it is Python-inspired:

> design-wise copy the Python standard library's APIs whenever possible [1]

[1] https://github.com/jpakkane/pystd

smokel··on Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model
This may have been the case one year ago, but with contemporary models such as Opus, I run into this less often.
smokel··on Big AI labs are hiring philosophers
I don't buy the article's title "Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers". They probably just hire one or two, and hundreds of software engineers.

I always found it somewhat annoying that a philosophy study would present itself by stating that graduated philosophers have great job opportunities, implying that studying philosophy would not be a bad choice. It just attracts really smart people, and these tend to find a job more easily. This article seems to make the same kind of mistake.

Also, for all we know these imagined herds of philosophers at AI firms are just labelling pictures of dogs.

smokel··on OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom
> solve our hardest math problems

We're not quite there yet :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...

smokel··on VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO
Being able to drive a car properly also depends on having the right exploration-exploitation balance. A three-year-old is likely to explore too much in a situation where mistakes can be dangerous.

This requires not only knowledge, but also the control systems that develop with the prefrontal cortex. LLMs don't do much control yet.

smokel··on Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28
18446744073709551616 possible values and you can't spare 1 for null? :)

TIL that Rust has NonZeroU64 which you can combine with Optional to get the required behaviour with only 64 bits per entry. [1]

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/num/type.NonZeroU64.html

smokel··on GLM 5.2 Is Out
If humans did actual reasoning, then why is this particular discussion failing so hard?
smokel··on AI is code and can't be prompted into being smarter
I don't think that is what the parent said, but I'm afraid my comment was too snarky (apologies), and the audience in this thread is not eager to be changed in their beliefs. Thanks for taking the time to reply though.

LLMs are fed a lot of data, and there are many patterns in there, including reasoning and some logic. Adding a little domain specific data will not immediately learn that domain, but it will also not be limited to only that data in its reasoning.

smokel··on AI is code and can't be prompted into being smarter
What would happen if you also feed it a book or two on logic, and some books on mathematics and physics?
smokel··on GLM 5.2 Is Out
> The path to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) must never be enclosed by high walls. We have always believed that AGI should be the cornerstone for all of humanity to collaboratively explore the boundaries of intelligence and solve complex challenges, rather than a privilege monopolized by a few rules and subject to revocation at any moment.

This is not obvious to me. If everyone gets access to AGI, but only a few people have the means to do really bad things with it, then what is the difference? Might as well make clear from the start that AGI is a powerful tool (read: weapon), and not a solution (e.g. world peace).

smokel··on Launch HN: General Instinct (YC P26) – Frontier models on edge devices
For those too lazy to watch someone talk on video for ages to make a point:

The link is to a famous YouTuber called PewDiePie and he uses a local LLM to parse his email, to save time with that. They have an autoreply system and get notified about urgent matters.

smokel··on Retro-Tech Parenting
Most kids that grew up during the timeline you described had no interest in computer architecture. The small minority that did care is probably the same size now.

The other 99% who were into yoyo-ing back then are now into TikTok, that's all.

smokel··on Dumbphone 2
Do you swap SIM cards all the time? This seems to be the biggest blocking issue for me.

I tried switching phones once a week, which was heavenly. Might try that again, it requires some discipline.

smokel··on U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device
Thanks for pointing that out. I scanned the paper and found that in their main experiments, they use a shared GPU resource and do not copy LLMs to target machines. Apparently they did other experiments in the ablation study where they did copy LLMs.

So it's even worse than I expected. The intended worm can spread through my thermostat, and when it reaches a GPU host, it can spread even harder. Fun times ahead.

← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →