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AI & Machine Learning

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

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1983

AI, Tools and Transformation

It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder - now everyone can just ask the model to make the software they need, and apps as we know them are dead. I think that misunderstands how most people think and where software actually comes from, and more importantly, it isn’t

1986

How to Begin a Novel

Last year for National Novel Writing Month I trained a neural net called torch-rnn on 10,096 unique ways to begin a novel. It came up with some intriguing possibilities, my personal favorite being “I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.” But many of its sentences used made-up words, or had such weird…

1991

LLMs can't do probability

I've seen a couple of recent posts where the writer mentioned asking LLMs to do something with a certain probability or a certain percentage of the time. There is a particular example that stuck in my mind which I've since lost the link to (If you're the author, please get in touch so I can link through to you): The…

1992

If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine. But as you can see around 7/7 on that…

1995

I've been loving Claude Code on the web

It’s very much a “v1” product. You type a prompt to start a new thread, it launches a little container for your agent to work in, and you can keep talking to it. It produces a branch, which you can open a PR for (that’s the only way to see a diff of the changes Claude Code made, for now). Or if you want to keep…

2003

Entropy of a Large Language Model output

Large language models like ChatGPT & Claude have become ubiquitous in today’s world. I visited a friend for the New years eve and was impressed by how ChatGPT was being extensively used within the family. The friend’s little kid is going to grow up in a world, where turning to large language models (LLM) for quick…

2010

The Essential Tools of Scientific Machine Learning

Scientific machine learning is a burgeoning discipline which blends scientific computing and machine learning. Traditionally, scientific computing focuses on large-scale mechanistic models, usually differential equations, that are derived from scientific laws that simplified and explained phenomena. On the other hand…