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What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
Lessons I learned while building my own coding agent from scratch.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 422 posts.
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Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers (2013)
Bayesian Methods for Hackers : An intro to Bayesian methods + probabilistic programming with a computation/understanding-first, mathematics-second point of view.
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Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology
Recently, there’s been a great deal of excitement and interest in deep neural networks because they’ve achieved breakthrough results in areas such as computer vision. 1
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The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction
Part 2: "Our Immortality or Our Extinction". When Artificial Intelligence gets superintelligent, it's either going to be a dream or a nightmare for us.
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AI generated security reports about curl
I have held back on writing anything about AI or how we (not) use AI for development in the curl factory. Now I can't hold back anymore. Let me show you the most significant effect of AI on curl as of today - with examples. Bug Bounty Having a bug bounty means that we offer … Continue reading The I in LLM stands for…
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"Attention", "Transformers", in Neural Network "Large Language Models"
I find this literature irritating and opaque. This is at least somewhat because I do not yet understand it well, and there's too much of it. But clearly I need to wrap my head around it, before I become technically obsolete. My scare quotes in the title of these notes thus derive in part from jealousy and fear. But…
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Mona Lisa in 50 polygons, using a genetic algorithm (2008)
This weekend I decided to play around a bit with genetic programming and put evolution to the test, the test of fine art 🙂
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Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT
Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of this new ChatGPT assistant made by OpenAI. Did you know, that you can run a whole virtual machine inside of ChatGPT?
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Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
78% of developers claim AI makes them more productive. 14% say it's a 10x improvement. So where's the flood of new software? Turns out those productivity claims are bullshit.
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Understanding LSTM Networks (2015)
Humans don’t start their thinking from scratch every second. As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don’t throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Your thoughts have persistence.
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How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look at predictions…
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A Recipe for Training Neural Networks
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability: Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of growth that will
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We must pace the frontier
I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life. I’ve written often about these incredible benefits: I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and…
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Non-determinism in GPT-4 is caused by Sparse MoE
It’s well-known at this point that GPT-4/GPT-3.5-turbo is non-deterministic, even at temperature=0.0. This is an odd behavior if you’re used to dense decoder-only models, where temp=0 should imply greedy sampling which should imply full determinism, because the logits for the next token should be a pure function of…
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OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
Soundtrack: In Flames - Colony To further support my independent journalism, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $7 a month or $70 a year. If you’re subscribed to the free newsletter and logged in, you should see at the bottom right hand corner of your screen a little
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Machine intelligence, part 1
This is going to be a two-part post—one on why machine intelligence is something we should be afraid of, and one on what we should do about it. If you’re already afraid of machine intelligence,...
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The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
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An AI agent published a hit piece on me
Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
50
Please don't mention AI again
The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.
51
ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram plugin gives computationally accurate answers to ChatGPT queries using Wolfram's data knowledgebase and language. Custom visualizations are given as well. Stephen Wolfram explains how it works.
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AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.
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I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
I'm calm. I'm calm. I promise.
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Transformers from Scratch (2021)
I procrastinated a deep dive into transformers for a few years. Finally the discomfort of not knowing what makes them tick grew too great for me. Here is that dive.
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Show HN: How I topped the HuggingFace open LLM leaderboard on two gaming GPUs
ML, Biotech, Hardware, and Coordination Problems. Sometimes I write about hard problems and how to solve them.
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Transformers from Scratch
Repository for personal website
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Deep reinforcement learning doesn't work yet
June 24, 2018 note: If you want to cite an example from the post, please cite the paper which that example came from. If you want to cite the post as a whole, you can use the following BibTeX:
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The state of Computer Vision and AI: we are really, really far (2012)
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?
Update: An updated version of this blogpost was published as a (peer-reviewed) Letter to the Editor at Bioinformatics, sans the “sociology” commentary. I just came back from CASP13, the…