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typpo

3,905 karma · joined February 25, 2011

https://www.ianww.com

email: hn at ianww.com

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typpo··on Codex Security
No need to hack it, we'll add proper support for this.
typpo··on Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model
>> Terra has competitive performance to GPT‑5.5 [while being 2x cheaper]…

> To me that means “it’s an inferior product but marketing dictates we try and hide that.”

I interpret this to mean you're about to get today's mainline performance at a fraction of the price.

typpo··on Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6
Lately my company has been doing a lot of complex accounting and reporting in spreadsheets. Overall was surprised by how well both GPT and Claude handled some of these extremely tedious tasks. Not uncommon to have an hours-long task compressed to minutes.

My anecdotal experience is GPT 5.2 Pro is decently ahead of Claude Opus 4.5 in this category when it gets to the tricky stuff, both in presentation and accuracy. The long reasoning seems to help a lot. But, apparently the benchmarks do not agree.

Edit - noticed OpenAI specifically focuses on finance use cases in their gpt-5.3-codex blog as well https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/

typpo··on Visualizing 100k Years of Earth in WebGL
Nice work! This is like a much better version of Ancient Earth[0], which I made ~10 years ago using GPlates[1]. I like your approach of rendering the map itself from data, which makes it continuous, rather than just wrapping map textures around a globe.

[0] https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#240

[1] https://www.gplates.org/

typpo··on Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
This is so fun and creative. Congrats on launching!
typpo··on Open source AI is the path forward
Thanks to Meta for their work on safety, particularly Llama Guard. Llama Guard 3 adds defamation, elections, and code interpreter abuse as detection categories.

Having run many red teams recently as I build out promptfoo's red teaming featureset [0], I've noticed the Llama models punch above their weight in terms of accuracy when it comes to safety. People hate excessive guardrails and Llama seems to thread the needle.

Very bullish on open source.

[0] https://www.promptfoo.dev/docs/red-team/

typpo··on Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]
If anyone is interested in evaling Gemma locally, this can be done pretty easily using ollama[0] and promptfoo[1] with the following config:

  prompts:
    - 'Answer this coding problem in Python: {{ask}}'

  providers:
    - ollama:chat:gemma2:9b
    - ollama:chat:llama3:8b

  tests:
    - vars:
        ask: function to find the nth fibonacci number
    - vars:
        ask: calculate pi to the nth digit
    - # ...
One small thing I've always appreciated about Gemma is that it doesn't include a "Sure, I can help you" preamble. It just gets right into the code, and follows it with an explanation. The training seems to emphasize response structure and ease of comprehension.

Also, best to run evals that don't rely on rote memorization of public code... so please substitute with your personal tests :)

[0] https://ollama.com/library/gemma2

[1] https://github.com/promptfoo/promptfoo

typpo··on Show HN: I built a backend so simple that it fits in a YAML file
Care to explain why you think so?
typpo··on Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
The problem in this case is not that it was trained on bad data. The AI summaries are just that - summaries - and there are bad results that it faithfully summarizes.

This is an attempt to reduce hallucinations coming full circle. A simple summarization model was meant to reduce hallucination risk, but now it's not discerning enough to exclude untruthful results from the summary.

typpo··on Veo
The amount of negativity in these comments is astounding. Congrats to the teams at Google on what they have built, and hoping for more competition and progress in this space.
typpo··on Ollama v0.1.33 with Llama 3, Phi 3, and Qwen 110B
Paul's benchmarks are excellent and they're the first thing I look for to get a sense of a new model performance :)

For those looking to create their own benchmarks, promptfoo[0] is one way to do this locally:

  prompts:
    - "Write this in Python 3: {{ask}}"
  
  providers:
    - ollama:chat:llama3:8b
    - ollama:chat:phi3
    - ollama:chat:qwen:7b
    
  tests:
    - vars:
        ask: a function to determine if a number is prime
    - vars:
        ask: a function to split a restaurant bill given individual contributions and shared items
Jumping in because I'm a big believer in (1) local LLMs, and (2) evals specific to individual use cases.

[0] https://github.com/typpo/promptfoo

typpo··on Show HN: I made a website that converts YT videos into step-by-step guides
Great idea and congrats on shipping the project!

I'm curious if you noticed certain models worked better for summarizing and converting to steps. For example, in my projects I've found that Gemini outperforms "better" models like GPT for similar use cases, which I guess makes sense given Google's interest in summarization.

typpo··on Meta Llama 3
Public benchmarks are broadly indicative, but devs really should run custom benchmarks on their own use cases.

Replicate created a Llama 3 API [0] very quickly. This can be used to run simple benchmarks with promptfoo [1] comparing Llama 3 vs Mixtral, GPT, Claude, and others:

  prompts:
    - 'Answer this programming question concisely: {{ask}}'

  providers:
    - replicate:meta/meta-llama-3-8b-instruct
    - replicate:meta/meta-llama-3-70b-instruct
    - replicate:mistralai/mixtral-8x7b-instruct-v0.1
    - openai:chat:gpt-4-turbo
    - anthropic:messages:claude-3-opus-20240229

  tests:
    - vars:
        ask: Return the nth element of the Fibonacci sequence
    - vars:
        ask: Write pong in HTML
    # ...
Still testing things but Llama 3 8b is looking pretty good for my set of random programming qs at least.

Edit: ollama now supports Llama 3 8b, making it easy to run this eval locally.

  providers:
    - ollama:chat:llama3
[0] https://replicate.com/blog/run-llama-3-with-an-api

[1] https://github.com/typpo/promptfoo

typpo··on Google CodeGemma: Open Code Models Based on Gemma [pdf]
If anyone wants to eval this locally versus codellama, it's pretty easy with Ollama[0] and Promptfoo[1]:

  prompts:
    - "Solve in Python: {{ask}}"

  providers:
    - ollama:chat:codellama:7b
    - ollama:chat:codegemma:instruct

  tests:
    - vars:
        ask: function to return the nth number in fibonacci sequence
    - vars:
        ask: convert roman numeral to number
    # ...
YMMV based on your coding tasks, but I notice gemma is much less verbose by default.

[0] https://github.com/ollama/ollama

[1] https://github.com/promptfoo/promptfoo

typpo··on Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?
I'm working on https://quickchart.io/, a web API for generating chart images. I've expanded it to a WYSIWYG chart editor at https://quickchart.io/chart-maker/, which lets you create an endpoint that you can use to generate variations of custom charts. This is useful for creating charts quickly, or using them in places that don't support dynamic charting (email, SMS, various app plugins, etc).

I messed around with some AI features, mostly just for fun and to see if they could help users onboard. But the core product is decidedly not AI.

typpo··on Launch HN: Talc AI (YC S23) – Test Sets for AI
Congrats on the launch!

I've been interested in automatic testset generation because I find that the chore of writing tests is one of the reasons people shy away from evals. Recently landed eval testset generation for promptfoo (https://github.com/typpo/promptfoo), but it is non-RAG so more simplistic than your implementation.

Was also eyeballing this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03038, which outlines a method for generating asserts from prompt version history that may also be useful for these eval tools.

typpo··on The Quadrantid meteor shower 2024 peaks tonight alongside a bright moon
I posted this visualization of mine in a recent thread on the Quadrantids, but sharing again because people seemed to enjoy it: https://www.meteorshowers.org/view/Quadrantids

It uses meteor data from NASA CAMS [1] to reconstruct the meteoroid cloud that creates the Quadrantids. When Earth passes through the cloud every year, we see a meteor shower.

Each particle in this visualization represents an actual meteor that burned up in the Earth's atmosphere. CAMS reconstructs the orbit of the meteor based on its entry trajectory by triangulating multiple recordings. CAMS is very cool!

[1] http://cams.seti.org/

typpo··on 2024 Quadrantid meteor shower to peak January 3-4
Using recorded meteor data from NASA CAMS, I built this visualization of the meteor cloud that creates the Quadrantids: https://www.meteorshowers.org/view/Quadrantids

The Quadrantids are interesting because their source is not obvious, but the most likely one (as noted in the article) is an asteroid with a relatively unusual orbit that is likely an extinct comet.

typpo··on A collection of LLM evaluation tools
Evals are important for LLM app development. I've noticed dozens of tools in this space, including 11 (!) YC companies, so I put them together on a page.
typpo··on Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
Years ago, I built Asterank, an open-source database of asteroids. It landed me a job at Planetary Resources, an "asteroid mining" company: https://www.asterank.com/
typpo··on My $500M Mars rover mistake
> you may literally see your life's work go up in flames.

Incidentally, this happened to Lewicki a few years later when Planetary Resources' first satellite blew up on an Antares rocket: https://www.geekwire.com/2014/rocket-carrying-planetary-reso...

typpo··on Cosmological galaxy formation simulation software
I like seeing how familiar structures appear at cosmological scale. Long ago I created a webgl visualization of the Millennium Run, an early large-scale cosmological simulation: https://www.asterank.com/galaxies/

It was a nice way to learn about three.js/webgl and how to make many particles performant. There are probably better visualizations out there nowadays.

typpo··on Bard can now connect to your Google Apps and services
"Extensions" and integration into the rest of the Google ecosystem could be how Bard wins at the end of the day. There are many tasks where I'd prefer an integration with my email/docs over a slightly smarter LLM. Unlike ChatGPT plugins, Google has the luxury of finetuning its model for each of their integrations.

The new feature for enriching outputs with citations from Google Search is also pretty cool.

typpo··on Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions
The library supports the model-graded factuality prompt used by OpenAI in their own evals. So, you can do automatic grading if you wish (using GPT 4 by default, or your preferred LLM).

Example here: https://promptfoo.dev/docs/guides/factuality-eval

typpo··on Asking 60 LLMs a set of 20 questions
In case anyone's interested in running their own benchmark across many LLMs, I've built a generic harness for this at https://github.com/promptfoo/promptfoo.

I encourage people considering LLM applications to test the models on their _own data and examples_ rather than extrapolating general benchmarks.

This library supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Llama and Codellama, any model on Replicate, and any model on Ollama, etc. out of the box. As an example, I wrote up an example benchmark comparing GPT model censorship with Llama models here: https://promptfoo.dev/docs/guides/llama2-uncensored-benchmar.... Hope this helps someone.

typpo··on Show HN: NotYetNews – AI-Generated News from the Future
Nice to see a fun, creative project like this. The LLM tie-in makes sense because it keeps headlines fresh & relevant to today's news. Thanks for sharing!

If anyone else wants a peek behind the curtain, here is the GPT-4 call: https://github.com/johnpolacek/notyetnews/blob/main/cron/ope...

typpo··on GPT-4 is getting worse over time, not better
As far as I can tell, you are the only person in this thread who actually skimmed the paper. Thank you for pointing this out!

The API clearly delineates the March and June versions. The paper authors ran tests on different API versions. The fact that these versions are different is clear & transparent. Anyone can use the March version of GPT by calling the API.

gpt-4-0314: very slow, smart

gpt-4-0613: fast, less smart

typpo··on Ask HN: How are you improving your use of LLMs in production?
I'm responsible for multiple LLM apps with hundreds of thousands of DAU total. I have built and am using promptfoo to iterate: https://github.com/promptfoo/promptfoo

My workflow is based on testing: start by defining a set of representative test cases and using them to guide prompting. I tend to prefer programmatic test cases over LLM-based evals, but LLM evals seem popular these days. Then, I create a hypothesis, run an eval, and if the results show improvement I share them with the team. In some of my projects, this is integrated with CI.

The next step is closing the feedback loop and gathering real-world examples for your evals. This can be difficult to do if you respect the privacy of your users, which is why I prefer a local, open-source CLI. You'll have to set up the appropriate opt-ins etc. to gather this data, if at all.

typpo··on GPT-Prompt-Engineer
Thanks for mentioning promptfoo. For anyone else who might prefer deterministic, programmatic evaluation of LLM outputs, I've been building this for evaluating prompts and models: https://github.com/typpo/promptfoo

Example asserts include basic string checks, regex, is-json, cosine similarity, etc. (and LLM self-eval is an option if you'd like).

typpo··on Hard stuff when building products with LLMs
For sure. I'm dealing with fuzzier stuff, more in the sense of "don't refer to yourself as a chatbot", "this input should trigger X tool", and things of that nature.
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