HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

iandanforth

11,490 karma · joined December 18, 2009

ml/ai/rl - neuroscience - robots - growprammer

@iandanforth

Source available - https://www.openhumans.org/member/iandanforth/

meet.hn/city/us-Pittsburgh

submissionscomments
iandanforth··on Suno v4.5
I recommend clicking around on genres for languages you don't speak. The songs sound great as long as you don't know what they are saying. Lyrics are still a very weak point for AI music, still, infinite enjoyment as long as you're ignorant of the flaws!
iandanforth··on I tried Windows gaming on a Mac
This should be titled, "I Tried Windows Gaming on a Mac and With a Lot of Effort It's Passable!"
iandanforth··on Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard
For some perspective we have not yet scaled robot training. The amount of data that Pi is using to train their impressively capable robots is in the range of thousands of hours of data. In contrast language models are trained over trillions of tokens comprising the entirety of human knowledge. So if you're saying things like "this still seems hard" just remember we have yet to hit this with the data hammer. Simulation is proving a great way to augment / bootstrap robot dexterity but it still pales in comparison to data in the real world. So, as the author points out, we may get capability scaling like Waymo where one company painstakingly collects real data over a decade, but we may also see the rapid progress in simulators and simulator speed overtake for practical household / industrial tasks. My bet is on the latter.
iandanforth··on Lossless LLM compression for efficient GPU inference via dynamic-length float
For those who don't bother to click through profiles, Jeff really knows what he's talking about. Much of Meta/FAIR + community benefits from his code.
iandanforth··on You might not need WebSockets
Sandwich code review is what HN is for.
iandanforth··on White House may seek binding control over Columbia through consent decree
Soon.
iandanforth··on No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation
Have you tried? It works well for other books, e.g. here's a scene from "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" which is conveniently in the public domain.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67f5d652-f7f4-8013-b2f2-3c997ea513...

iandanforth··on No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation
Fwiw pixlr is a good pairing with GPT 4o for just this. Generate with 4o then use pixlr AI tools to edit bits. Especially for removals pixlr (and I'm sure others) are much much faster and quite reliable.
iandanforth··on Show HN: I built a word game. My mom thinks it's great. What do you think?
First clue of "Professional Sports Teams" and I noped right out. Sportsball is a pretty big red flag that the content presented is not for me.
iandanforth··on Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions
Good, I'm strongly against supernatural beliefs and any trend towards greater secular thought is a welcome one.
iandanforth··on Arc-AGI-2 and ARC Prize 2025
I'd very much like to see VLAs get in the game with ARC. When I solve these puzzles I'm imagining myself move blocks around. Much of the time I'm treating these as physics simulations with custom physics per puzzle. VLAs are particularly well suited to the kind of training and planning which might unlock solutions here.
iandanforth··on GPT 4.5 level for 1% of the price
So, fairly accurate if you're Chinese?
iandanforth··on Liu Jiakun Receives the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Regardless of material, these examples are hideous.
iandanforth··on Verifiable science on modified PCR machine
Summon Elisabeth Bik! (I want to know what she thinks)
iandanforth··on Made a scroll bar buddy that walks down the page when you scroll
Can he turn around when you scroll back up?
iandanforth··on Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice
Doesn't work?

`Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: 'microphone' (value of 'name' member of PermissionDescriptor) is not a valid value for enumeration PermissionName.`

iandanforth··on Show HN: Paste a Zillow URL and get a property analysis
WARNING: Pasting in a Zillow link will immediately try to log you in via an oath provider.

This is a seriously sketchy UX pattern, I advise avoiding this website.

iandanforth··on The Deep Research problem
I'll share my recipe for using these products on the off chance it helps someone.

1. Only do searches that result in easily verifiable results from non-AI sources.

2. Always perform the search in multiple products (Gemini 1.5 Deep Research, Gemini 2.0 Pro, ChatGPT o3-mini-high, Claude 3.7 w/ extended thinking, Perplexity)

With these two rules I have found the current round of LLMs useful for "researchy" queries. Collecting the results across tools and then throwing out the 65-75% slop results in genuinely useful information that would have taken me much longer to find.

Now the above could be seen as a harsh critique of these tools, as in the kiddie pool is great as long as you're wearing full hazmat gear, but I still derive regular and increasing value from them.

iandanforth··on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code
> Hacker News: You'll write a comment so perfectly balanced between technical insight and dry humor that it breaks the upvote system, forcing dang to implement a new 'slow clap' feature just for you.

fist pump

iandanforth··on 'Impossible-to-hack' security turns out to be no security
While there's a large audience for Jerry Springer style content, verbal abuse and stooping to the level of someone you're criticizing are not required. I don't read HN for name calling or childish taunting. It is always dispiriting to read, and even more so to read people defending. Humans, as you note, have base instincts, but giving into them and catering to them should be left to X and other sites devoted to pandering.
iandanforth··on 'Impossible-to-hack' security turns out to be no security
The tone of the article is unprofessional to say the least. You could remove the argumentative tone, vitriol, and insults and have a more impactful article that reflected well on the author while appropriately warning people against this company. Please, don't choose team troll.
iandanforth··on Partnering with the Shawnee Tribe for Civilization VII
That press release is written in the most servile fashion. Delete "carefully", "respectfully", "authentically", etc you get the exact same content except it doesn't sound boot-licking. I'm all for getting a culture right, but the proof is in the product, not in easy to type adjectives that describe how you should always act without expecting praise for it.
iandanforth··on But good sir, what is electricity?
For introductory articles like this I also find it helpful to know that the whole positive / negative thing is arbitrary. In fact the assignment of "negative" to electrons arise due to a mistaken interpretation by Benjamin Franklin of one of his experiments. So if you're wondering why gaining the primary mobile charge carrier makes things more negative blame Ben Franklin!
iandanforth··on A vending machine, on the internet
Your machine has jammed, doesn't work in Firefox (macos). The words dropdown doesn't populate, nor does the style dropdown. I see a JSON.parse uncaught SyntaxError.
iandanforth··on Experiment: Can 3D improve AI video consistency?
Got an error (literally just said "Error") trying to sign up for the waitlist, FF mobile on Android.
iandanforth··on A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate
Since this seems to be a love fest let me offer a contrarian view. I use conda for environment management and pip for package management. This neatly separates the concerns into two tools that are good at what they do. I'm afraid that uv is another round of "Let's fix everything" just to create another soon to be dead set of patterns. I find nothing innovative or pleasing in its design, nor do I feel that it is particularly intuitive or usable.

You don't have to love uv, and there are plenty of reasons not to.

iandanforth··on United States Power Outage Map
This is a very interesting business. Simple and appealing to a general user but apparently worth $1k/m for business users who want access to consolidated data via API.

I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't have a need!

iandanforth··on Perplexity Deep Research
Perhaps you can enlighten us as to why this isn't a good use case for an LLM during a deep research workflow.
iandanforth··on Phind 2: AI search with visual answers and multi-step reasoning
Your product launch video deserves more than an "um" filled single take.
iandanforth··on YouTube's New Hue
We see your American Psycho reference and are pleased.
← PreviousPage 5 of 34Next →