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lamroger

Re:Stephen Wolfram's Wife Has Died on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @09:59PM (#49177715)
Beautiful tribute. May we all be seen so clearly with whatever time we have on this plane.
Re:Autoresearch on an old research idea on Monday March 23, 2026 @03:15PM (#47493882)
Awesome breakdown! It really feels like a hyper-hyper parameter search + bug fixer.

I started looking at Kaggle again and autoresearch seems to converge to many of the solution vibes there.

Wild ensembles, squeezing a bit of loss out. More engineering than research IMO

Show HN: Shepherd – Generating Synthetic Data with Claude and MCP

https://github.com/waffie-ai/shepherd

A proof of concept stitching together Claude, MCP, and faker to generate synthetic LLM fine tuning data.The idea came from Apple Foundation Model's adaptor training example. They provide a toy dataset with data on short script generation. Wanted to see how one might stitch together Claude and MCP with tools to generate data.A little finic-y but if you really were to try to generate hundreds or...

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: How is the tech scene in LA? on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @03:11AM (#44507104)
oh that reminds me of defense tech down near redondo - andril spacex. very cool sector if you’re okay with weapons
Re:Ask HN: How is the tech scene in LA? on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @01:59AM (#44506736)
I do think the early stage vcs like upfront, a16z, hustle fund are trying to foster more growt and i appreciate them

i wonder what other people think

Re:Ask HN: How is the tech scene in LA? on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @01:56AM (#44506723)
I stay mostly on the westside but id say more density of shops but at the same time less busy? if i had to guess, things were really going well before covid. then add delivery app and now a bunch of coco delivery robots really slowed down foot traffic.

things still go viral - pop ups are very popular with the young crowd. owalla was giving out water bottles and the line was around the block and i didnt see the end of the line

The tech scene is not doing so well imo. people say gaming is cyclical but idk tbh. AI adoption in graphic design and coding is really going to squeeze an already stressed gaming labor pool. entertainment industry is much the same.

i cant name one young rising startup that was hot like snapchat. so that was disappointing when i was job hunting.

traffic is still bad. smog is less bad.

Re:Ask HN: How is the tech scene in LA? on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @10:08AM (#44500150)
Been in LA for 2 years now and went to college in LA 10 years ago so have some data points to compare.

Startups in LA are interesting. Back in the day, there was a lot of Ad Tech / advent of big data. This is when Snapchat and Hulu were coming up. I’d go on Angellist and see who was hiring and who’d be down to meet.

Now, especially post covid, I feel sparks of excitement. I missed the crypto hype in LA so that was probably wild and weird. a16z opened an office in Santa Monica and do their speedrun accelerator. Focused on games and media it seems.

upfront hosted some cool cowork and mingle events too.

Two meetups I regularly go to is AI Tinkerers and MLOps. Generally it’s the same small crowd. I went to a Ruby meetup which was cool too.

Less of a young startup crowd. Maybe people got older and rich and retired early.

Re:What do people use for on-call these days? on Saturday May 17, 2025 @01:33PM (#44015753)
they're all around the same price now so not much cost savings shopping around
Re:Ask HN: Who wants freshly roasted coffee? on Sunday April 27, 2025 @10:19PM (#43816924)
Hey! Appreciate the links and sorry for the late reply. Thought this just got grabbed by the spam filter when I wasn't seeing it.

I have a small writeup here: https://lamroger.com/blog/2024-03-10-coffee-roasting-tech/ and the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shMMuNuH3cE

But short answer is I finetuned a model with the help of Roboflow, grabbed the pixel values in the bounding box and avg'ed the values.

Ask HN: Who wants freshly roasted coffee?

Hey y'all - I consider myself a tinkerer and in the vein of doing things that don't scale, I want to send you coffee that I roast.I have a couple bags of green beans to choose from.If you want to print a picture or your art on a label, send me an image!If you prefer a roast level, let me know too.* Colombia, Finca La Riviera Sudan Rume * Colombia, Finca La Rivera Gesha * Colombia, Finca Milan...

( Read More... | 2 comments | on HN )
Awesome! Coffee + LLM-assisted programming. I had a similar experience coding an iOS app without experience with objective c using chatgpt. Great learning tool
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)? on Sunday August 25, 2024 @07:56PM (#41352636)
Tellers get first dibs
Re:Ask HN: AI hackday at work – what shall I work on? on Sunday June 30, 2024 @05:50PM (#40840674)
backoffice automation
Re:Ask HN: React, Vue or Angular? on Wednesday June 19, 2024 @01:56PM (#40730721)
React also gives access to React Native if you're ever interested in mobile
Modern ads. you dont decide if you get influenced
I'm on an Intel MBP still - not coding as much but still working great
UI and UX will be higher value
Re:Apple TV+ Cornered the Market on "Prestige Dad TV" on Monday March 18, 2024 @03:20PM (#39748745)
Same world, different time period / technology
Re:Gemma doesn't suck anymore – 8 bug fixes on Monday March 11, 2024 @05:16PM (#39673327)
real recognizing real
Re:PlanetScale performs layoff and prioritizes profitability on Wednesday March 06, 2024 @02:49PM (#39620456)
Tough choices. o7 to the laid off.

Going full enterprise by shutting down hobby plans while laying off primarily sales and marketing.

Re:How I build and run behavioral interviews on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @02:43PM (#39528743)
I've had a few of these interviews. Some do it well by showing genuine interest and maybe they have expertise in the area and it's fun chatting about the project. Other's see it more like cross examination or make it adversarial. I personally get nervous and tense up when I feel attacked. Maybe it's a good way to opt myself out of working in those environments.
Re:Ask HN: How do you learn and research every day? on Monday February 26, 2024 @09:59PM (#39519641)
The big icon with the streak and it turning red toward the end of the day really helps. Recognizing that some days you won't want to learn but just getting through it is ok. It's a really slow process if you're not deliberate but slow is better than none IMO.
Re:Ask HN: How do you learn and research every day? on Monday February 26, 2024 @09:57PM (#39519629)
I'm unemployed.

Joking aside, I worry when I start working again too. I think recognizing that struggling is learning and aiming to get into the rhythm/habit of struggling even when you're tired - even a little bit - compounds. I'm also toying with the idea of cohort-based learning

Re:New York medical school eliminates tuition after $1B gift on Monday February 26, 2024 @09:53PM (#39519603)
To add on, it was a huge consideration for the applicants that I know of
Re:AI hiring tools may be filtering out the best job applicants on Saturday February 17, 2024 @03:08PM (#39413023)
I love the eval parallel...
Does it increase conversions? Yes? Ship it.

But i do agree with you

Cohere for AI has a discord if you want to get involved btw

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