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oli5679

Re:Show HN: How Random Are You? on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:06AM (#50082269)
A simple way to score 50%ish is to take a sequence of text and press the left button if even length, right button if odd.

This is what I also use for rock, paper scissors (mod 3). You can also use second hand of a watch for random samples, e.g splitting 0-30 vs. 31-60.

Re:The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures on Sunday September 27, 2026 @03:01PM (#49869756)
You need a set of Evals, which catch enough of the mistakes your llm makes following your baseline prompt, so you have an equal or lower error rate than humans.

This can be determined by offline benchmarks if you build a system that takes small sequences of actions, and requires live ab test for long sequences of actions.

The more your human ops team work from documented standard operating procedure, rather than tacit knowledge, the less you need Evals except to capture edge cases

Re:The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures on Sunday September 27, 2026 @02:12PM (#49869245)
I build ai systems for ops automation and don’t understand the author’s pessimism.

I agree with that Evals are a scarce commodity rn. A business needs to define what good looks like. This is a laborious, and sometimes politically controversial, process.

Given good Evals, frontier llms are a magical tool that can automate tasks and do them more accurately than human ops teams.

Exactly which llm to use depends on the mixture of speed, cost and quality of the output.

Jev makes a claim to expand some regions of the Pareto frontier. I look forward to testing if this is true.

There are many areas of work we can’t automate rn. We cannot create good Evals either because time horizons are too long, or it’s too difficult to create good Evals.

That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with building good ai engineering systems in areas where it works magically.

I wonder if you could pursue an antitrust cases in eu against Claude code refusing to use fable to work on some deep learning problems and downgrading to an inferior model.

Would this ever be viewed as an abuse of dominant market position, aiming to disadvantage potential entrants.

Re:A Theory of Why Prompt Injection Works on Monday June 22, 2026 @01:57PM (#48633573)
Would llms be more robust to this prompt injection if the tags used in fine tuning are sanitised from user input?

E.g. map <think> -> THINK <user> -> USER <tool> -> TOOL

If they learn something specific in the chat finetuning stage, this might show LLM its user input text not these tag references.

Re:How to Code Claude Code in 200 Lines of Code on Thursday January 08, 2026 @04:22PM (#46546673)
https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-vibe

This is a really nice open source coding agent implementation. The use of async is interesting.

Re:Weight-sparse transformers have interpretable circuits [pdf] on Saturday November 22, 2025 @08:53AM (#46014814)
This ties directly into the superposition theory.

It is believed dense models cram many features into shared weights, making circuits hard to interpret.

Sparsity reduces that pressure by giving features more isolated space, so individual neurons are more likely to represent a single, interpretable concept.

Re:The Case for the Return of Fine-Tuning on Sunday October 19, 2025 @07:01AM (#45633395)
The OpenAI fine-tuning api is pretty good - you need to label an evaluation benchmark anyway to systematically iterate on prompts and context, and it’s often creates good results if you give it a 50-100 examples, either beating frontier models or allowing a far cheaper and faster model to catch up.

It requires no local gpus, just creating a json and posting to OpenAI

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/model-optimization

Re:One-man spam campaign ravages EU 'Chat Control' bill on Wednesday October 08, 2025 @03:40PM (#45519805)
One interesting anecdote about this bill was that the European Commission allegedly funded digital advertisements promoting it, targeting specific political demographics, which is something that could possibly be prohibited by their own regulations.

https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-complaint-against-eu-commissio...

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/transpare...

Re:Are We Decentralized Yet? on Sunday August 31, 2025 @10:55AM (#45083627)
HHI is a pretty interesting metric. It’s calculated by taking each firm’s market share, squaring it, and summing across all firms.

This gives the probability that two randomly chosen customers belong to the same firm.

In one micro models of oligopoly, Cournot competition, it lines up directly with the markup firms can sustain.

Outside of theory, it’s an intuitive way to average together the market power of all firms, with increases in market share for bigger players being weighted more heavily.

Re:Knuth on ChatGPT (2023) on Saturday August 09, 2025 @03:35PM (#44849427)
Here is gpt 5 thinking posting all 20 questions verbatim. Appreciate I might get better results one question at a time.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6897a21b-25c0-8011-a10a-85850870da...

Pretty interesting - some contamination, some better answers, and it failed to write a sentence with all 5-letter-words. I’d have expected it to pass this one!

Simple example: “Every night, dreams swirl swiftly.

It’s really easy to be cynical.

There is a big upside potential for high growth companies taking advantage of technology trends.

Today, Google’s revenue is £263.66 Billion. This is nearly 300x the revenue Google generated in 2003 ($961.9 million). The company went public on August 19, 2004, at $85 per share, valuing the company at $23 billion. After the IPO, Google reported $1.47 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2003, with a profit of $105.6 million.

this is pretty ridiculous

A. below is a list of OpenAI initial hires from Google. It's implausible to me that there wasn't quite significant transfer of Google IP

B. google published extensively, including the famous 'attention is all you need' paper, but open-ai despite its name, has not explained the breakthroughs that enabled O1. It has also switched from a charity to a for-profit company.

C. Now this company, with a group of smart, unknown machine learning engineers, presumably paid fractions of what OpenAI are published, has created a model far cheaper, and openly published the weights, many methodological insights, which will be used by OpenAI.

1. Ilya Sutskever – One of OpenAI’s co-founders and its former Chief Scientist. He previously worked at Google Brain, where he contributed to the development of deep learning models, including TensorFlow. 2. Jakub Pachocki – Formerly OpenAI’s Director of Research, he played a major role in the development of GPT-4. He had a background in AI research that overlapped with Google’s fields of interest. 3. John Schulman – Co-founder of OpenAI, he worked on reinforcement learning and helped develop Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), a method used in training AI models. While not a direct Google hire, his work aligned with DeepMind’s research areas. 4. Jeffrey Wu – One of the key researchers involved in fine-tuning OpenAI’s models. He worked on reinforcement learning techniques similar to those developed at DeepMind. 5. Girish Sastry – Previously involved in OpenAI’s safety and alignment work, he had research experience that overlapped with Google’s AI safety initiatives.

I think this project is awesome and am quite disappointed with some cynical commentary from large American labs.

Researcher at Meta or OpenAI spending hundreds of millions on compute, and being paid millions themselves, whilst not publishing any of their learnings openly, here a bunch of very smart, young Chinese researchers have had some great ideas, proved they work, and published details that allow everyone else to replicate.

    "No “inscrutable wizards” here—just fresh graduates from top universities,    PhD candidates (even fourth- or fifth-year interns), and young talents with a few years of experience."

    "If someone has an idea, they can tap into our training clusters anytime without approval. Additionally, since we don’t have rigid hierarchical structures or departmental barriers, people can collaborate freely as long as there’s mutual interest."
Re:Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2025) on Thursday January 02, 2025 @12:42PM (#42576602)
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