HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

supermdguy

1,445 karma · joined February 20, 2017

Github: https://github.com/supermdguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-dangerfield/

Authentication Stuff: hnchat.com:0m9YzMwf4kdLeEnrHt2n 547e7b5026bc47ac8302bf3d213909be [ my public key: https://keybase.io/supermdguy; my proof: https://keybase.io/supermdguy/sigs/fHS654nzPCSpfpoOPNrHUJrgc2jOy21zNsnFwyeLDfs ]

submissionscomments
supermdguy··on Everything as code: How we manage our company in one monorepo
Typescript, using Zod with Express for parameter validation.
supermdguy··on The compiler is your best friend
> A common pattern would be to separate pure business logic from data fetching/writing. So instead of intertwining database calls with computation, you split into three separate phases: fetch, compute, store (a tiny ETL). First fetch all the data you need from a database, then you pass it to a (pure) function that produces some output, then pass the output of the pure function to a store procedure.

Does anyone have any good resources on how to get better at doing "functional core imperative shell" style design? I've heard a lot about it, contrived examples make it seem like something I'd want, but I often find it's much more difficult in real-world cases.

Random example from my codebase: I have a function that periodically sends out reminders for usage-based billing customers. It pulls customer metadata, checks the customer type, and then based on that it computes their latest usage charges, and then based on that it may trigger automatic balance top-ups or subscription overage emails (again, depending on the customer type). The code feels very messy and procedural, with business logic mixed with side effects, but I'm not sure where a natural separation point would be -- there's no way to "fetch all the data" up front.

supermdguy··on Everything as code: How we manage our company in one monorepo
How do you guys share types between your frontend and backend? I've looked into tRPC, but don't like having to use their RPC system.
supermdguy··on Ultimate-Linux: Userspace for Linux in Pure JavaScript
Reading the code, I was surprised to see that cd was implemented by calling out to the os library. I assumed that was something the shell or at least userspace handled. At what level does the concept of a “current directory” exist?
supermdguy··on Structured outputs create false confidence
If your output schema doesn’t capture all correct outputs, that’s a problem with your schema, not the LLM. A human using a data entry tool would run into the wrong issue. Letting the LLM output whatever it wants just makes it so you have to deal with ambiguities manually, instead of teaching the LLM what to do.

I usually start by adding an error type that will be overused by the LLM, and use that to gain visibility into the types of ambiguities that come up in real-world data. Then over time you can build a more correct schema and better prompts that help the LLM deal with ambiguities the way you want it to.

Also, a lot of the chain of thought issues are solved by using a reasoning model (which allows chain of thought that isn’t included in the output) or by using an agentic loop with a tool call to return output.

supermdguy··on Show HN: Lexical - How I learned 3 languages in 3 years
Really like the philosophy, and the UI looks clean. You mentioned grammar briefly, but I’m curious if you think that’s also a component that could be learned through the app? One thing that’s nice about Duolingo (despite its flaws) is that it progressively introduces new grammar concepts and uses them in the lessons. Would be cool to have something similar here.
supermdguy··on Supervised fine tuning on curated data is reinforcement learning
That corresponds to a 10/15, which is actually really good (median is around 6)

https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/AMC_historica...

supermdguy··on AlphaGo Moment for Model Architecture Discovery
Interesting work. Not super familiar with neural architecture search, but how do they ensure they’re not overfitting to the test set? Seems like they’re evaluating each model on the test set, and using that to direct future evolution. I get that human teams will often do the same, but wouldn’t the overfitting issues be magnified a lot by doing thousands of iterations of this?
supermdguy··on OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%
Just guessing, but the new Opus was probably RL tuned to work better with Claude Code's tool calls
supermdguy··on Show HN: Patio – Rent tools, learn DIY, reduce waste
How does your tool library work? Who organizes it? Sounds really interesting.
supermdguy··on Claude's system prompt is over 24k tokens with tools
Most providers will just end the chat if it reaches the max context window.
supermdguy··on From RSS to My Kindle
clippings.io has a browser extension that scrapes all your highlights from Amazon's website and lets you download them in various formats.
supermdguy··on DeepMind AI outdoes human mathematicians on unsolved problem
Code is available! They have a few different discovered solutions.

https://github.com/google-deepmind/funsearch

supermdguy··on Show HN: Hands-Free Anki AI Assistant
I love using Anki to stay organized with what I'm learning, but hate starting at a screen for a long time. So I made a system that reads the cards out loud and automatically grades them, using Anki for the card storage/scheduling.

Tech Stack:

Text-To-Speech: ElevenLabs/OpenAI

Speech-To-Text: Faster-Whisper (I used the tiny.en model, about 0.5s latency on my M1 mac)

Language Model: ChatGPT (I used gpt-3.5-turbo-1106)

Others: PyWebView, Silero VAD

supermdguy··on Compare how GPT-2, 3, 3.5 and 4 answer the same questions
The direct prompt comparison isn't quite fair due to the instruction tuning on GPT-3.5 and 4. It'd be interesting to see examples with prompts that would work better for the raw language models.
supermdguy··on HuggingFace Training Cluster as a Service
GPU memory bandwidth is a limiting factor for how fast training can happen, so it’s much more efficient to train models on locally connected high memory GPUs.

Also gradient updates from all nodes would need to get combined at least every few training steps, and it would take a while to sync all gradient updates across the network.

supermdguy··on FaceFusion: Next generation face swapper and enhancer
There's a great short story by Ted Chiang that explores a similar idea: https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-.... It's interesting to think about how much attractiveness plays into the way the world works.
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
I used diff2html, it's really nice!

https://github.com/rtfpessoa/diff2html-cli

supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
Yep, here’s an example of what a report looks like: https://tosnotify.com/reports/example
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
I tried it for the example, but it wasn't very good at differentiating between the old and new changes. I'm definitely going to try to see if I can get some good outputs though.
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
I like this! Focusing on enterprise probably makes more sense since terms matter more for compliance.
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
I honestly don't think I've ever read one of the ToS updates either. Do you think there'd be a way for them to be more relevant?
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
Thanks for the support! I sent you a dm
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
Those are both good ideas! Someone else suggested using account lists in password managers. In general it would be a lot more practical if it could feed from a list of accounts you have.
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
It works for any online document! Right now it just generates a diff of any URL: https://tosnotify.com/reports/example. In the future it'd be cool if it could auto-detect TOS/Privacy Policy links for a given domain.
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
I've been thinking through how this could work more practically, and this definitely makes the most sense. I might try to find an easy way to export just a list of sites that I have accounts on and then watch those for TOS changes.
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
I've been thinking about adding some LLM summarization, it would definitely take some work to verify that it to output corrects interpretations though.
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
I could definitely add in webhook support, feel free to shoot me an email: support@tosnotify.com
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
That's a good point, and in general actual application behavior matters more than what the TOS says. I do think there are unsolved problems with TOS/privacy policies in general though, so I'm interested in exploring ways for users to gain more control over how companies use their data.
supermdguy··on Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service
Haha thanks! Why law specifically?
← PreviousPage 3 of 11Next →