HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

abalaji

677 karma · joined January 21, 2016

www.twitter.com/adithya_balaji adithyabalaji.com www.github.com/adithyabsk

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/abalaji; my proof: https://keybase.io/abalaji/sigs/6ZE68eBh5A9HTuUYP59JitdDb5igrMVBOi7gKFulYmw ]

submissionscomments
abalaji··on Claude Opus 5
Opus is better than Sonnet -- an Opus is longer than a Sonnet
abalaji··on Don't just paste the AI at me
hmm, would be funny if this was AI generated (as per pangram, SoTA AI detection model)

https://www.pangram.com/history/93691929-63c0-4c18-a620-e0b7...

abalaji··on Google changes its search box
I don't trust facts from humans. When I am searching for something, I usually want to find direct sensor readings. As soon as a number is involved, I do my best to not even look at the human output.

Even though the result is often coherent and confidently synthesizes information from multiple experiences, it can also hallucinate, suffer from recency bias, or accidentally merge memories from different decades. AFAICT, without access to the underlying telemetry, human responses are for entertainment purposes only.

abalaji··on EFF is leaving X
Honestly, tbh it just looks like a skill issue when looking through their feed:

https://x.com/EFF

Making content platform "native" and garner attention is hard work and while their first party content might be great, it isn't great "X" content which is part of the problem. There are many examples of legacy organizations optimizing for the platform and garner a lot of attention:

https://x.com/JohnCarreyrou/status/2041737922458599477?s=20

Also, people want to hear from individuals or a distinct voice, not an organization:

https://x.com/FFmpeg

abalaji··on Stop picking my Go version for me
this is great and should be in the blog post
abalaji··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
adithyabalaji.com
abalaji··on `std::flip`
this blog post will be a great barometer of commenters who read the post vs those who don't
abalaji··on University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test
57. I got a ton of shape rotation problems. Figured out a strategy for those:

Focus on the 3 pronged shape. It is unique in all 4 orientations. You can use this to filter out bad rotations. Then use adjacencies to filer out the rest.

abalaji··on Obsidian Bases
This seems useful for folks who use Obsidian as a personal CRM. I got some queries with data view that I'm going to see if this can replace:

https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/

I often want to answer questions like:

- When was the last time I chatted with this person - What did we talk about - Who haven't I spoken to in a while

abalaji··on Tao on “blue team” vs. “red team” LLMs
I think this flips at the frontier which may be what Tao is commenting on.
abalaji··on Show HN: AirBending – Hand gesture based macOS app MIDI controller
Seems like the same software could be used as a soundtrack for Tai Chi exercises. Would be pretty neat.
abalaji··on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app
Honestly, this might have gone over better with messaging such as. "We added Ads to WhatsApp, here's what we're doing keep the user first"

There is a cult understanding that Instagram ads are highly relevant and quite useful at times and WhatsApp ads have the same possibility. But the messaging is quite poor.

abalaji··on The Gentle Singularity
> the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far.

Does anyone know if there are well established scaling laws for reasoning models similar to chinchilla scaling. (i.e. is the above claim valid?)

abalaji··on Help ChatGPT discover your products
faustian bargain: you trade scrape ability for your website for one click buy of your product.
abalaji··on Claim for a missing tooth
Gotta start 'em young on dealing with government bureaucracy.
abalaji··on Openhaystack: Build 'AirTags' – track Bluetooth devices via Apple's network
Looking through the code, it looks like this uses your personal Apple Mail entitlements to pull the locations that get collected by devices on the FindMy network:

https://github.com/seemoo-lab/openhaystack/blob/8d214aa5eb68...

I wonder if this were also possible by making an Apple developer account.

abalaji··on Understanding gRPC, OpenAPI and REST and when to use them in API design (2020)
Hence, the qualification of stable API. You can mark fields as unused and fields as optional (recently):

https://stackoverflow.com/a/62566052

When your API changes that dramatically, you should use a new message definition on the client and server and deprecate the old RPC.

abalaji··on Understanding gRPC, OpenAPI and REST and when to use them in API design (2020)
Everyone is hating on gRPC in this thread, but I thought I'd chime in as to where it shines. Because of the generated message definition stubs (which require additional tooling), clients almost never send malformed requests and the servers send a well understood response.

This makes stable APIs so much easier to integrate with.

abalaji··on Tesla Cybertruck Becomes Extensively Corroded After Exposed to Magnet
Never thought I'd see the day where HN needed a community note.
abalaji··on Django: Fix a view using a debugger with breakpoint()
another option from the sibling comment is to use `remote-pdb` which you can then telnet into from outside the container after exposing the port
abalaji··on Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
An easy way to make all LLMs somewhat good at chess is to make a Chess Eval that you publish and get traction with. Suddenly you will find that all newer frontier models are half decent at chess.
abalaji··on We fine-tuned Llama 405B on AMD GPUs
@dang: could we get url to include the username since this isn't about Obsidian itself, but rather a user generated blog?
abalaji··on Do quests, not goals
Sounds similar to the theme system that CGP Grey and Mike advocate for in the Cortex podcast.

https://www.themesystem.com/

abalaji··on What Is ChatGPT Doing and Why Does It Work? (2023)
My guess is that this is a post training (rlhf) artifact on world model prompts. There were likely many “logical inconsistency” prompts which humans coerced to the above response.
abalaji··on An infinite canvas for code exploration
This seems great, I would use something like this day to day if it were a vscode plugin. Often times two side by side panes are not enough to get the intertwined context of a large program that spans both code / subprocess / api boundaries. Currently, I solve this problem by keeping a set of tab groups for different "workflows" that I need to edit frequently
abalaji··on Network visualization of 50k blogs and links
ah, you’re right!
abalaji··on Network visualization of 50k blogs and links
This is neat, found my blog in there. Don't think I linked to NatGeo at any point, though.

adithyabalaji.com

abalaji··on Self-control signals and affords power
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
abalaji··on Study: Carbon offsets aren’t doing their job, overstate impact
What we need are measured carbon credits that are past-looking... i.e. this device or plant captured x tons of carbon
abalaji··on Radiation Spikes at Chernobyl
3.6 - not great, not terrible
Page 1 of 6Next →