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AI & Machine Learning

The most popular blog posts about ai & machine learning on Hacker News. 3,091 posts.

Any year
1503

Google's AI doesn't understand restaurant menus

In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining the chef's vision for organic cuisine - instead, they'll have little scraps of data on the HTML page like: Copied JSON to 📋⧉ JSON"hasMenuItem":{ "@type":"MenuItem", "name":"Dodo In A Bun"…

1505

An Introduction to Deep Learning for Language Modeling

Language models assign probability values to sequences of words. Those three words that appear right above your keyboard on your phone that try to predict the next word you’ll type are one of the uses of language modeling. In the case shown below, the language model is predicting that “from”, “on” and “it” have a high…

1515

The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

Today I was setting up Hermes to see how it does with web research. I chose DeepSeek V4 because I know it is cheap, but seeing it’s pricing next to Anthropic and OpenAI ‘frontier’ models is crazy. Nearly a 50x price increase based on tokens alone, let alone how much pondering any of their models might fall into (using…

1516

People are just as bad as my LLMs

Last year I created a fun little experiment where I asked a bunch of LLMs to rank 97 hackernews users using their comment history based on whether they would be good candidates for the role of “software engineer at google”. (yes yes, seems silly I know, you can read part 1 and part 2 but […]

1518

The Decoherence Trap

Of all the forms of tech debt, decoherence is the worst. It compounds exponentially with a system's rate of change, and AI is now producing it faster than ever, leading us deeper and deeper into the abyss...

1519

AI and Trust

I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers and everyone else who…

1520

Rethinking CLI interfaces for AI

We need to augment our command line tools and design APIs so they can be better used by LLM Agents. The designs are inadequate for LLMs as they are now – especially if you're constrained by the tiny context windows available with local models.

1523

What Kagglers Are Using for Text Classification

With the problem of Image Classification is more or less solved by Deep learning, Text Classification is the next new developing theme in deep learning. For those who don’t know, Text classification is a common task in natural language processing, which transforms a sequence of text of indefinite length into a…

1530

Augmenting Long-term Memory

One day in the mid-1920s, a Moscow newspaper reporter named Solomon Shereshevsky entered the laboratory of the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky's boss at the newspaper had noticed that Shereshevsky never needed to take any notes, but somehow still remembered all he was told, and had suggested he get his…