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extasia

politics really is the mind-killer
Re:Ask HN: Advice for feeling like a failure in PhD? on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @02:17PM (#46049561)
For what it’s worth, my second year of PhD was relatively miserable compared to my first and third.

ignore the prestige games, knuckle down and do the best work you can do- it’s more impressive if you succeed at a lower rank institution anyways, imo. And if you want that signalling power you can always plan to go for a postdoc.

Wishing you the best of luck, it can be a lonely path.

Re:Ask HN: Do you roll your own agent or use a framework? on Tuesday October 07, 2025 @04:38PM (#45508527)
I wrote my own agent state machine in pretty much pure async Python (no libs). Running successfully in prod with very few issues.

I use the OpenAI messages spec, and have the messages be an append only list, to make it easy to reason about.

Don’t bother compacting histories imo. worse case just summarise and spin up a new agent with the context.

good luck!

KANGZ
That sucks- I’m sorry you had that experience!

I was considering signing up today, based on this I won’t.

I have had a great experience with gemini-cli, which may interest you: it only requires a google account to setup and you get a decent chunk of gemini 2.5 pro usage for free!

the professor vs PhD mode made me chuckle in your UI.

looking forwards to seeing your agent’s critique of my paper!

Re: on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @08:28PM (#42860382)
A reflection on what I unexpectedly gained when I lost my beloved headphones.

Keen to hear if anybody else has had similar experiences of this phenomenon!

Re:What makes a person seem wise? on Wednesday October 23, 2024 @01:39PM (#41927389)
Wisdom is taking your own advice.

Words that I’ve found easier to accept the value of than to extoll. Trying is the first step to failing I guess;)

Re:Ask HN: What's the "best" book you've ever read? on Monday October 07, 2024 @06:35PM (#41771835)
@dang This person is a bot, read other comments of theirs please.
Re:How does cosine similarity work? on Friday September 06, 2024 @08:47PM (#41470775)
That’s not mathematically accurate though, is it? We haven’t reduced the dimension of the vector by one.

Pray tell, which dimension do we lose when we normalize, say a 2D vector?

Re:How does cosine similarity work? on Friday September 06, 2024 @07:42PM (#41470517)
Magnitude is not a dimension, it’s information about each value that is lost when you normalize it. To prove this normalize any vector and then try to de-normalize it again.
Re:How does cosine similarity work? on Friday September 06, 2024 @07:39PM (#41470503)
Interesting, I hadn’t heard of two tower modes before!

Yes, I guess it’s curious that the information lost doesn’t seem very significant (this also matches my experience!)

Re:How does cosine similarity work? on Friday September 06, 2024 @06:46PM (#41470240)
This is not quite right; you are actually losing information about each of the dimensions and your mental model of reducing the dimensionality by one is misleading.

Consider [1,0] and [x,x] Normalised we get [1,0] and [sqrt(.5),sqrt(.5)] — clearly something has changed because the first vector is now larger in dimension zero than the second, despite starting off as an arbitrary value, x, which could have been smaller than 1. As such we have lost information about x’s magnitude which we cannot recover from just the normalized vector.

Ask HN: Good LLM tool-use examples?

Hia, I'm working on a query-builder tool for searching medical databases that translates a clinician's natural-language query into an existing IR which maps onto SQL. This entails some retrieval aspects which I'm planning to implement using function calling (aka tool use).Please share examples of LLM tool use / function calling; any tips or learnings in this area would also be much...

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Count Binface on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @07:29AM (#40787139)
> Binface announced a series of satirical policies for the 2019 general election, including:

Bringing back Ceefax, the teletext service.[9] He had previously promised to bring back the service in 2017 as Lord Buckethead.[12]

Returning 20,001 police officers to the street, a reference to the Conservative pledge of 20,000 more police officers.[13]

Nationalising model railways.[14]

Holding a referendum on holding a second referendum on the United Kingdom's membership in the European Union.[14]

Allowing any Czechs on the Irish border to remain.[14]

Nationalising Adele, the English singer.[15]

Abolishing the House of Lords.[15] He had previously pledged the same in 2017 as Lord Buckethead.[16]

Giving free broadband to everyone.[15]

Stopping the sale of arms to repressive regimes.[15]

Making Piers Morgan zero emissions by 2030.[15]

Renaming London Bridge to "Phoebe Waller-Bridge".[15]

Introducing a minimum voting age of 16 and a maximum of 80.[15]

Sending £1 trillion a week to the NHS.[14]

Proroguing Jacob Rees-Mogg.[14]

Banishing Katie Hopkins to the Phantom Zone.[14]

Moving the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a "more sensible position".[14]

Facebook released a general purpose Segment Anything Model (SAM) recently and it's been well received in industry afaict. Might be a good place to start
I think it should be MOD or MoD in the title not Mod, as it's an acronym (Ministry of Defence)
Re:Large Language Models Are Poor Medical Coders on Monday May 06, 2024 @01:40PM (#40277218)
They're poor at recollecting the exact descriptions of the ~150,000 ICD codes, which is why these other approaches [1,2] give the known information (codes) in some way to the model and let it do the task of _assigning_ them to discharge notes, which is the hard part of the task!.

(Disclaimer: I am an author of one of these papers)

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.13735

2. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06552

Thanks for clarifying, that's definitely a more well thought through perspective than I gave you credit for before.

I guess I would avoid updating my beliefs too strongly when a measurement I generally find quite useful (in this case gdp per capita) does not perfectly map onto a more nuanced view of the world! As you say, it's only a single data point.

I strongly dislike arguments like this. Because you can apply them to basically any metric and I find that they are generally used to cheaply discredit a potentially interesting fact about the world without actually providing an argument that the metric in question is not a useful one to consider.

In all other contexts would you also say gdp per capita is a metric not worth considering? If not then I humbly question the value of your statement.

(edited)

Re:Performance Analysis of Python's Dict() and {} on Monday January 22, 2024 @06:12PM (#39096902)
I've also had this thought, but found that inspecting the type shows its by default a dictionary, and that it only is interpreted as a set if you treat it as such (eg add comma-seperated elements when instantiating)

assert type({}) == type(dict())) assert type({1,2,3} == type(set())

Re:Chronic inflammation may be a "disease of affluence" on Monday January 22, 2024 @04:41PM (#39095870)
Do you believe that meat consumption is the prime causal factor?
Why is this scientific pollution? Seems like a valid research question to me.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj6958

>Because human same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) is heritable and leads to fewer offspring, how SSB-associated alleles have persisted and whether they will remain in human populations are of interest. Using the UK Biobank, we address these questions separately for bisexual behavior (BSB) and exclusive SSB (eSSB) after confirming their genetic distinction. We discover that male BSB is genetically positively correlated with the number of offspring. This unexpected phenomenon is attributable to the horizontal pleiotropy of male risk-taking behavior–associated alleles because male risk-taking behavior is genetically positively correlated with both BSB and the number of offspring and because genetically controlling male risk-taking behavior abolishes the genetic correlation between male BSB and the number of offspring. By contrast, eSSB is genetically negatively correlated with the number of offspring. Our results suggest that male BSB–associated alleles are likely reproductively advantageous, which may explain their past persistence and predict their future maintenance, and that eSSB-associated alleles are likely reproductively advantageous, which may explain their past persistence and predict their future maintenance, and that eSSB-associated alleles are likely being selected against at present.

Re:Ask HN: What's your self-care routine? on Sunday December 24, 2023 @11:25AM (#38754493)
Journaling.

Giving myself the ability to take notes on how I'm feeling has helped me discover the negative patterns and reason about them with more clarity.

Ive made a ritual of it, I go to my local cafe and write. Maybe I write a few lines or several pages, I try not to be dogmatic about it. I think this lowers the activation energy: I don't expect to write anything revolutionary but rather to simply express my current state.

I guess you can think of it as a separation of logic and state! You're writing down your emotional state and then reflecting on it. Somehow when it's written down it's much easier to reason about, similar to how people give better advice to their friends than to themselves.

Not a senior engineer, but my instinct is that you need to train people s.t you are confident delegating at least parts of your current role to them.

What's stopping you from handpicking a (willing) senior and having them shadow you / learn to do parts of the planning?

Two people can love one another and it can still not work out.
Re:Ask HN: 2023 New Year's resolutions check-up on Tuesday December 12, 2023 @05:12PM (#38619404)
My goal was to improve my trait conscientiousness, mostly organisation etc.

Ive done this to some success, moving from low single digits percentile to somewhere near the population mean.

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