Hacker News: Daniel_Van_Zant

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 17:55:05 +0000

Honestly having an AI agent that interviews a interviewees agent sounds like a great "first filter" for certain tech jobs if you do it right. As in "here are the api specs, build an agent that can receive questions and reply with information based on your Resume." Would be vibe-codeable by anyone with skills in an hour. I remember seeing a company a while back that switched to only accepting Resumes through a weirdly formatted API and they said it cut down on irrelevant spam for software jobs immensely.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:49:00 +0000

As someone that enjoys carpentry, I don't think I would be entirely upset about this way of taking the question haha.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:15:29 +0000

I have dealt with this issue as well before. If folks need something more in depth I will use a LLM + some massaging of my own to create a supporting document. Here is an example of a very disorganized conversation and the supporting document I made with it: https://www.danielvanzant.com/p/what-does-the-structure-of-l... It has clear definitions of the key terms. Timestamps for the important moments, and links to external resources to learn more about any of the topics.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 13:41:44 +0000

I agree with the author, but I would also say there is something above goals and constraints. Values. A set of things that, when comparing multiple options, make the choice clear. An example of some values I frequently use is "What will give me the most enjoyment the furthest into the future? "What will result in the world being a better place?" "What will make me become someone who resembles Jesus more?" They are different from constraints as they don't knock out any options by default. Instead, they make triaging when there are many different things I could be doing much easier, and circumvent my messy intuition which is based on hormones, hunger, weather, etc.

I think values, goals, and constraints are all valuable, but it's a hierarchy. We should create constraints that help us become more aligned with our values. We should create shorter-term goals that make it easy to stay within our constraints.

To support both my point and the authors, here is Benjamin Franklin's "Thirteen Virtues," which seem to be a mix of constraints and values (zero goals): https://fs.blog/the-thirteen-virtues/

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 12:01:17 +0000

I fight to record any presentations I do as often as possible. When I am asked for the slides I send the full recording instead as the way to manage this exact issue.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "The FFT Strikes Back: An Efficient Alternative to Self-Attention"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 16:41:40 +0000

I'm glad someone else had the same thought. I have been wondering what their "secret sauce" is for a while given how their model doesn't degrade for long-context nearly as much as other LLMs that are otherwise competitive. It could also just be that they used longer-context training data than anyone else though.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online (2019)"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 17:03:20 +0000

Is there any effort to organize scientific literature like this? I know journals often generate tags for papers but those can often be quite poor and restricted to the field The journal is in. I would happily join a volunteer effort to create tags and do some tag-wrangling for scientific literature in my research area.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "DeepSearcher: A local open-source Deep Research"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 16:53:34 +0000

Have been searching for a deep research tool that I can hook up to both my personal notes (in Obsidian) and the web and this looks like this has those capabilities. Now the only piece left is to figure out a way to export the deep research outputs back into my Obsidian somehow.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 16:40:45 +0000

I see Cohere, is there any support for in-line citations like you can get with their first party API?

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 22:36:26 +0000

Being able to control how many tokens are spent on thinking is a game-changer. I've been building fairly complex, efficient, systems with many LLMs. Despite the advantages, reasoning models have been a no-go due to how variable the cost is, and how hard that makes it to calculate a final per-query cost for the customer. Being able to say "I know this model can always solve this problem in this many thinking tokens" and thus limiting the cost for that component is huge.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Introduction to Stochastic Calculus"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 22:25:47 +0000

Thanks for the explanation this was very helpful. You've given me a whole new list of stuff to Google. The quasipotential/comittor functions especially seem quite interesting although I'm having a bit of trouble finding good resources on them.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "FFmpeg School of Assembly Language"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 22:12:55 +0000

This out of everything, convvinced me. The more I get the "full picture" the more I appreciate what a wondrous thing computers are. I've learned all the way down to Forth/C and from the bottom up to programming FPGAs with Verilog so Assembly may be just what I need to finally close that last gap.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "FFmpeg School of Assembly Language"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 22:04:13 +0000

This looks to be very cool will check it out. Wild to see it on a Mario Kart Wii Site, but I guess modders/hackers are one of the groups of people who still need to work with assembly frequently.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Introduction to Stochastic Calculus"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 16:06:50 +0000

Is stochastic calculus something that requires a computer to stimulate many possible unfolding of events, or is there a more elegant mathematical way to solve for some of the important final outputs and probability distributions if you know the distribution of dW? This is an awesome article. I've seen stochastic calculus before but this is the first time I really felt like I started to grok it.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "FFmpeg School of Assembly Language"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 19:11:15 +0000

I'm curious from anyone who has done it. Is there any "pleasure" to be had in learning or implementing assembly (like there is for LISP or RISC-V) or is it something you learn and implement because you want to do something else (like learning COBOL if you need to work with certain kinds of systems). It has always piqued my interest but I don't have a good reason in my day-to-day job to get into it. Wondering if it is worth committing some time to for the fun of it.

The scale vs. intelligence trade-off in RAG

Daniel_Van_Zant — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 02:51:22 +0000

Article URL: https://substack.com/home/post/p-155978287

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42860949

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 12:35:09 +0000

I think there is a large pool of near minimum-wage white collar workers who wouldn't care about that difference when it comes to executing on their jobs. These are the folks who are already using VBScript, AutoHotKey, Excel wizardry, etc. to automate large parts of their job regardless of any risks and will continue to use these new tools for similar purposes.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 12:21:21 +0000

I agree that at the business contract level, it's more about sales and regulations than tech. But in my experience working close to minimum wage white-collar jobs, about 1 in 4 of my coworkers had automated most of their job with some unholy combination of VBScript, Excel wizardry, AutoHotKey, Selenium, and just a bit of basic Python sprinkled in; IT, security, and privacy concerns notwithstanding. Some were even dedicated enough to pay small amounts out-of-pocket for certain tools.

I'd bet that until we get the risks whittled down enough for larger organizations to adopt this on a wide scale, the biggest user group for AI automation tools will be at the level of individual workers who are eager to streamline their own tasks and aren't paid enough to care about those same risks.

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 04:02:26 +0000

What made you decide to build for the NES specifically at opposed to building for a fantasy console with similar restrictions but more usability like the Pico-8?

New comment by Daniel_Van_Zant in "Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?"

Daniel_Van_Zant — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 03:59:40 +0000

Yeah! I am a computational neuroscientist and I was trying to understand this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01678 so I had added the paper to my personal Gnosi and was asking questions about it. I had added this paper https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34512508/ to my Gnosi a few months prior after reading through it and completely forgotten about it. As I was asking questions Gnosi started making connections to this earlier paper and helping me understand the new paper in the context of this older paper I had already read and understood, as well as giving me some ideas on using thermodynamic neural networks as a toy model for how Parkinson's can be created by poor management of entropy.

Understanding something new more easily and making new connections and coming up with new ideas is exactly why I have worked hard on maintaining a zettlkasten for the past 6 years, but Gnosi allowed me to make the same kinds of connections much more frictionlessly.

We have similar success stories from our alpha users which include folks interested in anthropology, complex systems, UAP studies, physics, philosophy understanding new tech for startups, etc.