henryjcee
Three unrelated thoughts about working with LLMs
Ask HN: The Proof or Bluff paper. Can "AI" do math?
Over the past 12 months I've seen lots of comments all over the place (here, X, legacy media, blogs etc.) making the case for "AI" performance on the IMO (Math Olympiad) being evidence for continued rapid increases in LLM performance. I've heard my friends who work in AI safety quote these results pretty often whenever they encounter scepticism about the coming AI singularity.It seems to me...
The fact that we're no closer to doing this than we were when chatgpt launched suggests that it's really hard. If anything I think it's _the_ hard bit vs. building something that generates plausible text.
Solving this for the general case is imo a completely different problem to being able to generate plausible text in the general case.
I see the benefits (I've have seen some absolute Java ee monstrosities that would be impossible to build in Go) but why am I getting paged at 3am because someone forgot to set a field on a struct. Similarly all the codegen to workaround the lack of inheritance - who cares how fast the compiler is if you've got to do 30s of codegen on top.
Having said that I cannot understand where the idea that "the [Go] libraries and ecosystem are so much better" comes from. The average quality of both the JDK libs and the popular 3p libs (Jackson, Jooq, even ...Spring) are one of the things I miss most about writing for the JVM and I'm yet to come across another ecosystem that comes close.
Show HN: A Jupyter notebook for digging into UK house price data
https://github.com/henryjcee/uk_house_prices
Good afternoon everyone. The UK property market holds a mythic place in British culture (tl;dr since the early 90s it's been the primary driver of wealth creation for the median Brit) but the financial picture has changed a lot in the past 10 years and I wanted to put some numbers to the myth.I wanted to open source this notebook as I think the data in here is useful, it's in a format that...
Thanks, H
Ask HN: Hiring tech roles Nigeria, any suggestions?
Hi everyone,I'm the CTO of an early-stage saas company in the UK and we're starting operations in Nigeria. We are totally focused on building out the team there with a dedicated hiring function (the first thing we learned about doing business in Nigeria is that whatever you're doing, you _have_ to know someone to get it done right) but we'd like to get moving fast and start hiring some Nigerian...
All feedback useful, henry.course at gmail or get me on Github. Happy hacking.
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Ask HN: Consuming one-shot webhooks reliably
Over the years I've worked on a few systems that need to consume one-shot webhooks.For whatever reason, retries aren't available/practical and even then I've seen (and er, also written) bugs where the webhook was consumed incorrectly but we returned a 204 anyway; so even if retries were available we would never have seen one.I've seen a few products for sending webhooks (e.g. Diahook,...
We tried quite a few processes to reduce it and they'd all work for a few weeks but inevitably we'd revert back to old behaviour pretty fast.
On your point about it being a procrastination tool, I'd love it if my team members took a minute to stop work and converse with the others if they're working on the same bit of code! Aside from time saved fixing a potential conflict it's probably indicative that a particular bit of the system needs to be refactored. Anything that can help guide the decision to refactor is probably a force for good but we'll see. H
Thanks, H
Thanks again for the feedback! H
I've spent the last few weeks building an MVP for my first ever publicly available project and I think it's time to get it out there.
tl;dr: If you're using Github and merge conflicts are slowing your team or project down, MM can stop them before they happen. It'll keep an eye on who's working on what and let you know if there's a potential clash brewing. Free forever for open source projects and hopefully some more useful features in the pipeline!
Any and all feedback welcome and thanks for reading.
Henry