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ehsanu1

1,377 karma · joined April 26, 2011

ehsanul@ehsanul.com

I'm actually ehsanul (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ehsanul) here on HN, but I switched Google accounts.

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ehsanu1··on Show HN: Pyversity – Fast Result Diversification for Retrieval and RAG
This seems like a good template to generate synthetic data, with positive/negative examples, allowing an embedding model to be aligned more semantically to underlying concepts.

Anyways, I'd hope reranking models do better, have you tried those?

ehsanu1··on Pyrefly: Python type checker and language server in Rust
Do you assign different responsibilities to different LSP servers when there multiple I suppose?
ehsanu1··on Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025
Using Research->Plan->Implement flow is orthogonal, though I notice parts of those do exist as skills too. But you sometimes need to do other things too, e.g. debugging in the course of implementing or specific techniquws to improve brainstorming/researching.

Some of these skills are probably better as programmed workflows that the LLM is forced to go through to improve reliability/consistency, that's what I've found in my own agents, rather than using English to guide the LLM and trusting it to follow the prescribed set of steps needed. Some mix of LLMs (choosing skills, executing the fuzzy parts of them) and just plain code (orchestration of skills) seems like the best bet to me and what I'm pursuing.

ehsanu1··on 1 Trillion Web Pages Archived
Seeing some stats would be fun. I wonder what the amount of data is here. And the distribution would be interesting too, especially since some pages are archived at multiple points in time, and pages have been getting heavier these days.
ehsanu1··on Show HN: ChartDB Agent – Cursor for DB schema design
I see no conflict between AGPL and SaaS: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/12988
ehsanu1··on Qwen3-Next
Are these actually different models vs just different names from the open weights releases?
ehsanu1··on Launch HN: Lucidic (YC W25) – Debug, test, and evaluate AI agents in production
I'm reading: the difference is that this is an agent as a judge rather than an LLM as a judge, paired with more structured judging parameters. Is that right? Is the agent just a loop over each criterium, or is it also reflecting somehow on its judging or similar?
ehsanu1··on Tree Borrows
I believe that's exactly the point: it's too easy to violate constraints like not allowing multiple mutable references. Unsafe is meant for cases where the validity of the code is difficult to prove with rust's lifetime analysis, but can be abused to do much more than that.
ehsanu1··on Tracking Copilot vs. Codex vs. Cursor vs. Devin PR Performance
It's hard to attribute PR merge rate with higher tool quality here. Another likely reason is level of complexity of task. Just looking at the first PR I saw from the github search for codex PRs, it was this one-line change that any tool, even years ago, could have easily accomplished: https://github.com/maruyamamasaya/yasukaribike/pull/20/files
ehsanu1··on Show HN: Memex is a Claude Code alternative built on Rust+Tauri for vibe coding
Where I work, our legal department requires making use of LLMs only through our own contractual relationships with model providers. Given that, BYOK is table stakes for me at least.

Litellm is what we use internally, so we can support any LLM backend with any open source tool, and create virtual keys for each developer to monitor and manage usage limits etc.

ehsanu1··on MCP Run Python
gVisor
ehsanu1··on The Humans Building AI Scientists
There seems to be a couple of field-specific journals of negative results for similar purposes. It seems like there should be value in citing negative results to inform current research. Perhaps if there were more journals dedicated to this, or a single one not limited to specific fields, there would still be some incentive to publish there, if the effort required was low enough (another area where AI might be applied: writing it up).
ehsanu1··on GPT-4.5
It's the other way around on their new SWE-Lancer benchmark, which is pretty interesting: GPT-4.5 scores 32.6%, while o3-mini scores 10.8%.
ehsanu1··on Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
IMO just a rolling message history works for only the simplest of AI tools. Useful agents will tend towards much more complex state that extends into specific verticals/domains.
ehsanu1··on Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
Essentially, you don't need to think about time and space. You just write more or less normal looking code, using the Temporal SDK. Except it actually can resume from arbitrarily long pauses, waiting as long as it needs to for some signal, without any special effort beyond using the SDK. You also automatically get great observability into all running workflows, seeing inputs and outputs at each step, etc.

The cost of this is that you have to be careful in creating new versions of the workflow that are backwards compatible, and it's hard to understand backcompat requirements and easy to mess up. And, there's also additional infra you need, to run the Temporal server. Temporal Cloud isn't cheap at scale but does reduce that burden.

ehsanu1··on Launch HN: Human Layer (YC F24) – Human-in-the-Loop API for AI Systems
Temporal makes this easy and works great for such use cases. It's what I'm using for my own AI agents.
ehsanu1··on RabbitMQ 4.0
What does Jetstream lack wrt queues/persistence?
ehsanu1··on g1: Using Llama-3.1 70B on Groq to create o1-like reasoning chains
That was my initial position too, but I think there is a search efficiency story here as well. CoT comes in many flavors and improves when tailored to the problem domain. If the LLM can instead figure out the right strategy to use to problem solve for a given problem, this may improve performance per compute vs discovering this at inference time.

Tailoring prompts is likely still the best way to maximize performance when you can, but in broader domains you'd work around this through strategies like asking the LLM to combine predefined reasoning modules, or creating multiple reasoning chains and merging/comparing them, explicit MCTS etc. I think those strategies will still be useful for a good while, but pieces of that search process, especially directing the search more efficiently, move to the LLMs over time as they get trained with this kind of data.

ehsanu1··on Ask HN: What is your ChatGPT customization prompt?
It's due to how the RLHF and instruction tuning was done. IIRC, even the builtin system prompt works this way in ChatGPT.
ehsanu1··on Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation in Transformer Language Models
How much extra state and computation is it per token exactly? Can we account for the improvement in just those terms?
ehsanu1··on Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation in Transformer Language Models
I've only read the abstract, but also find this strange. I wonder if this is just tapping into the computational chains that are already available when tokens are further away, due to the positional encodings being trained that way. If so, that makes the reasoning/modeling powers of LLMs even more impressive and inscrutable.
ehsanu1··on Vector Databases: A Technical Primer [pdf]
I've used usearch successfully for a small project: https://github.com/unum-cloud/usearch/
ehsanu1··on Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
What kind of best case are you imagining? I don't quite understand why the very best case would be dystopian.
ehsanu1··on Large language models lack deep insights or a theory of mind
Has the title of the paper changed from what it was initially? It says "Have we built machines that think like people?" now, whereas the HN title is "Large language models lack deep insights or a theory of mind".
ehsanu1··on Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI
If it works, and it's a one-off script, why do I care?
ehsanu1··on Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI
I've had it fail to get a basic regex right, but simultaneously, found it able to model my custom problem using the z3 constraint solcing framework, which I'd have struggled to do myself. Regular expressions are probably harder for it to get right easily, at least not without prompting it to first think through step by step ehat each piece of a regex should be or something.
ehsanu1··on Should you use Jest as a testing library? (2022)
That seems tied to Vite though?
ehsanu1··on Cookie Clicker saved my PhD
Play is every child's way to learn about the world after all, and it works amazingly well.
ehsanu1··on Open LLAMA 13B released, trained on 1T tokens
Source? I do see this note in the link:

> Please note that it is advised to avoid using the Hugging Face fast tokenizer for now, as we’ve observed that the auto-converted fast tokenizer sometimes gives incorrect tokenizations.

If you are correct, maybe it'll work for languages not reliant on whitespace, paired with a code formatter, but we're definitely coming to expect more from these models these days.

ehsanu1··on Native JSON Output from GPT-4
Sounds like you want something like tree of thoughts: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601
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