rryan
Re:Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech says hello
on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @09:12PM (#49824947)
HN is not your therapist, but possibly your decision making is driven by branding instead of judging technology on its merits? Easy mistake to make ;)
Re:Teaching my kid to code with a modern MUD
on Tuesday August 18, 2026 @11:51AM (#49347548)
CircleMUD was my first intro to C and network programming. I was at a computer camp for 8-10 year olds that taught BASIC. One of the counsellors was doing their undergrad at caltech and pulled the students who were bored by BASIC into a separate group to learn C by editing CircleMUD.
Hacking up a pre-existing MUD was the perfect mix of immediacy / interactivity and fun to hook me. So thankful to that guy, wherever he is. He probably changed the course of my life.
Re:Retire the Abstractions
on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @12:19AM (#49267774)
Heh, not really
Re:Retire the Abstractions
on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @12:16AM (#49267764)
Disagree. The abstractions they are talking about aren't like, the y-combinator. They're talking about boring software engineering abstractions.
Re:Retire the Abstractions
on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @09:57PM (#49267006)
I know nothing about the PhD candidate and professor who co-authored this, but I don't think this statement makes sense in general.
Typically CS labs at universities contain people who have not spent a significant amount of time exposed to large industry codebases and the corresponding complexity. I think the post would have more credibility coming from e.g. the platforms team at a tech company with a monorepo.
Re:Retire the Abstractions
on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @09:49PM (#49266941)
agents are unlike humans in many ways but they have their own limitations. it's magical thinking to believe that they are able to cope with zero software abstractions, especially as a codebase increases in size and complexity
and today's agents increase codebase size and complexity much faster than humans do via traditional software engineering methods, so this is likely to hit a wall faster than if human software teams were to do this experiment.
Re:The next chapter of our AI momentum
on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @05:21PM (#49189183)
No longer the case
ehh, no? definitely not.
Re:Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR
on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @03:45PM (#47680425)
As a human emdash enjoyer, I'm pretty damn grumpy that everyone assumes I'm a chatbot now. :P
Re:Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR
on Tuesday April 07, 2026 @12:51PM (#47678144)
I think the super long timelines in automotive make it really hard to succeed. Really impressed with what ClearMotion accomplished given that
Re:The Bitter Lesson is coming for Tokenization
on Wednesday June 25, 2025 @01:38AM (#44373939)
Don't make me tap the sign: There is no such thing as "bytes". There are only encodings. UTF-8 is the encoding most people are using when they talk about modeling "raw bytes" of text. UTF-8 is just a shitty (biased) human-designed tokenizer of the unicode codepoints.
Re:Transformers Without Normalization
on Saturday March 15, 2025 @02:50AM (#43370556)
RMSNorm is pretty insigificant in terms of the overall compute in a transformer though -- usually the reduction work can be fused with earlier or later operations.
Re:Can Gemini 1.5 read all the Harry Potter books at once?
on Saturday April 13, 2024 @12:30AM (#40020505)
ML 101: Do not evaluate on the training data.
Yes of course it can, because they fit in the context window. But this is an awful test of the model's capabilities because it was certainly trained on these books and websites talking about the books and the HP universe.
Re:(Next Rich)
on Friday August 04, 2023 @11:03AM (#37000991)
Thanks for everything, Rich. You inspired me repeatedly.
Re:Foundation models are going multimodal
on Thursday July 27, 2023 @04:43PM (#36899871)
Re:Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore
on Thursday June 08, 2023 @01:07AM (#36237476)
Yea uh, don't know what was going on there but there are roles with direct reports that aren't in mountain view (unless you mean, like in 2004). NYC has 1000s of googlers.
Re:AudioGPT: Understanding and Generating Speech, Music, Sound, and Ta...
on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @02:32AM (#35710192)
This is ... not what I expected. It's basically wiring up pre-trained models to ChatGPT via a router and "modality transformations" (a.k.a speech-to-text and text-to-speech).
I expected it to be a GPT-style model that processes audio directly to perform a ton of speech and maybe speech-text tasks in a zero-shot manner.
Re:$6.96B was raised by private longevity companies in 2022
on Friday January 27, 2023 @10:40PM (#34554893)
Except when your doctor won't prescribe it you offlabel because you don't have a condition they were taught about in med school
Re:Ask HN: Google spam filter getting worse?
on Friday January 20, 2023 @12:41PM (#34456697)
In the past few months I've been getting much more fake order / payment spam.
Re:Neurons in a dish learn to play Pong
on Saturday October 15, 2022 @02:19PM (#33217222)
I agree that a Transformer is an example of a "reflexive" behavior because it learns to react in a context (via gradient descent rather than evolution as the learning algorithm). It's a conditional categorical distribution on steroids.
I also agree it's not much different than what's going on in this petri dish with pong.
But I don't think that's a profound statement.
What I'm saying is that calling what a Transformer does "language development" isn't accurate. A Transformer can't "develop" language in that sense, it can only learn "reflexive" behavior from the data distribution it's trained on (it could never have produced that data distribution itself without the data existing in the first place).
Re:Neurons in a dish learn to play Pong
on Saturday October 15, 2022 @01:52AM (#33212118)
There's a huge difference between fitting a probabilistic model to a data distribution then sampling from it (what GPT-3 is) and agents that invent language and use it to communicate.
Re:Show HN: Nevermind XOR – Deep Learning Has an Issue with Sin
on Monday August 22, 2022 @12:14AM (#32547270)
You're using a pointwise loss, which means you are treating each timepoint as conditionally independent. That's a deeply flawed assumption, probabilistically.
Try an autoregressive model of the joint probability distribution of the sine wave timepoints -- like WaveNet [1]. It will nail your sine wave -- just as it nails mixtures of sine waves (speech and music). :)
Re:Goodbye, Feedly
on Saturday July 02, 2022 @11:49AM (#31960026)
"I could go pro, but nah" -- I read this and closed the tab. What a whingefest from a free tier user.
The Reddit crawling problem is because Reddit rate limits their crawling so they have to prioritize the most popular feeds. What's the problem with linking your account, or making a dedicated feedly throwaway for crawling?
Been a pro user since the beginning because I want the service to stick around. It works just as well as it always has and I don't mind that they're adding new features even if they aren't for me.
Sheesh.
Re:Vanced Discontinuation
on Sunday March 20, 2022 @09:47PM (#30749107)
That makes no sense. Why is "YouTube Premium" capitalized?
Re:Vanced Discontinuation
on Sunday March 20, 2022 @09:45PM (#30749093)
> The main source of income for youtube isn't ads. YouTube revolves around the merchandise and YouTube Premium subscriptions.
> If you are talking about creators who are not earning money for using vanced, you should know they won't make millions out of those ads.
... right. Feel free to keep telling yourselves that.
Re:Light exposure during sleep impairs cardiometabolic function
on Wednesday March 16, 2022 @01:50AM (#30695748)
N=20
Re:NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android
on Thursday February 24, 2022 @03:06AM (#30452035)
* YouTube Kids with allowlist.
* App Timer of zero minutes on YouTube app.
Re:Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android
on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @03:11PM (#30445752)
Straw man argument. OP was suggesting you pay for YT premium, which does away with the ads completely. Removing your web adblocker is a non sequitur, and exposes your computer to malware / spyware in addition to ads.
Re:Google increases parental-leave policy to nearly 6 months
on Friday January 28, 2022 @12:38PM (#30117828)
Parents are treated equally. If you give birth you get an additional 6 weeks of medical recovery leave. If two parents (any gender) adopt a child then both receive an equal length baby bonding leave.
I've taken parental leave twice at Google and used the full amount. No ill effects, as far as I can tell. Everyone I work with and my management chain was fully supportive.