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crsn

Re:Agents need control flow, not more prompts on Thursday May 07, 2026 @06:14PM (#48055843)
Our team at Agentforce recently open-sourced our solution to this and we've gotten very valuable feedback -- would love to hear from more of you about it: https://github.com/salesforce/agentscript
Re:Agents need control flow, not more prompts on Thursday May 07, 2026 @06:12PM (#48055823)
Ditto Ethan's point -- and hundreds of customers tell us it works very well. We'd value more feedback from this community, not just the Salesforce/Agentforce customer base!
The headline misses the most impressive part: ChatGPT one-shotted the problem. No turns, no retries, no mid-thinking steering from the user. One-shotting a problem like this would have been nearly unthinkable in 2025.
Re:Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video] on Friday June 20, 2025 @12:29AM (#44324762)
This (sort of) is already a paradigm: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_programming
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) on Sunday May 25, 2025 @06:45PM (#44091941)
I’m building software to augment human cognition.

In particular:

To help solve forecasting & planning problems too hard to hold in your head, I’m converting natural-language formulations of constrained optimization problems into (back)solvable mathematical programs, whose candidate solutions are “scenarios” in a multi-dimensional “scenario landscape” that can be pivoted, filtered, or otherwise interrogated by an LLM equipped with analytical tools:

- 5 minute demo: https://youtu.be/-QdqiLp_9nY

- Details: https://spindle.ai

Eager to connect with anyone interested in similarly neurosymbolic “tools for thought”: [email protected] | +1 (303) 808-5874

Very f’ing cool (esp. optimistic about repo-level codebase completion) – but just like many other results that DeepSeek reports, their preprint leaves me with more questions than they’ve given answers, unless I’ve misunderstood multiple pieces of it (which of course is possible):

—They report a 9.0× speedup in forward pass and 6.0× in backward pass… Why the heck would the backward pass be so much slower? Is it their gating mechanisms needing extra computation in backward passes? Gradient accumulation or KV-cache updates bottlenecking the speedup? FlashAttention (or at least FlashAttention-2) gives a near-equal forward-backward efficiency… They claim it’s tuned for FA2-style blockwise layouts, so which of their (competing) claims is wrong?

—Does NSA actually learn useful sparsity, or just get lucky with pretraining? How much of the performance gain comes from pretrained sparsity patterns vs. sparsity inherent to the attention? Even though they themselves say “applying sparsity post-hoc forces models to deviate from their pretrained optimization trajectory… As demonstrated by Chen et al. (2024), [sic] top 20% attention can only cover 70% of the total attention scores, rendering structures like retrieval heads in pretrained models vulnerable to pruning during inference” — yet their ablation isn’t strong enough to tell. A stronger ablation would include (1) a Full Attention → NSA transition test to measure whether NSA can be applied post-hoc without degradation, (2) a visualization of learned sparsity patterns over training epochs, and (3) a test where sparsity constraints are randomly assigned to see if NSA actually finds useful structures or just adapts to imposed ones.

—Training transformers with sparse attention is historically unstable — early MoEs like Switch-Transformer (which use expert gating-like mechanisms just like this one) were famous specifically for their collapse issues. How does NSA prevent mode collapse in early training — or really, how do we know it’s not just going to collapse different (i.e. more common) initialization schemes? If their technique doesn’t have an explicit mechanism for counteracting sparse expert underutilization, then it’s just as vulnerable to collapse as (e.g.) Switch-Transformer — but worse, since sparsity here isn’t just a gating function, it’s the core of the entire attention mechanism…

Re:'Equals' Has More Than One Meaning in Math on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @02:20AM (#40725385)
I’ve been working on a glossary of “Notions of Equality & Sameness” every few months for the last ~8 years (and looking for collaborators: [email protected]) - surprised not to have had this one in my list already!
Re:Solver Performance: 1989 vs. 2024 on Monday January 08, 2024 @03:09PM (#38917404)
I'm working actively on this area – anyone interested in helping should please get in touch! [email protected]
Re:GPTBot – OpenAI’s Web Crawler on Monday August 07, 2023 @04:36PM (#37040609)
Anyone else find it interesting/odd that their UA string reports a WebKit (Safari?) environment rather than Blink/Chrome?
Feature request: Index arbitrary content/history across browsers and allow it to be re-opened (my main use case for your pseudo-competitor Rewind.ai).
Re:Linear types, distributed compute, spreadsheets, and Lisp on Sunday January 08, 2023 @02:34PM (#34302282)
@daly I’m working on something relevant here and would love to discuss; email me: [email protected]
What about Dromo? https://www.dromo.io
Your website pitches this product SO well. Kudos.
Re:Kicad 6: new feature review for open source EDA tool on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @10:02PM (#29021479)
As a data scientist/machine learning engineer, I read "EDA" as "Exploratory Data Analysis" [0] and was amused (if let down) when I clicked through.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploratory_data_analysis

Re:News Entropy on Sunday June 13, 2021 @02:53AM (#27490385)
Luckily, that’s not my application area if these ideas right now. :) But it might indeed fail for some of the same structural regularities!
Re:News Entropy on Saturday June 12, 2021 @12:52PM (#27485696)
I’m working on a commercial side project along these lines — if anyone is interested in helping or collaborating, shoot me an email!
Re:Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder? on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @07:09PM (#25653132)
I'm not looking for a cofounder, but I love helping people who are: carsonkahn.com/who
Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2020) on Monday November 02, 2020 @07:14PM (#24974966)
Location: San Francisco

Remote: OK

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: ML-focused generalist CTO / Sr PM/ product leader

Résumé/CV: carsonkahn.com/who

Email: [email protected]

Re:Show HN: NLP-based tool for technology research on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @02:08AM (#22875053)
I’d like to chat more about this (including perhaps hiring you for a related project). Mind emailing me? [email protected]
Just realized you may not have access to texting. Email me instead if you need to. We’re going to make this all work out for you.

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