Hacker News: ImageXav

S&P 500 Indices Consultation on Treatment of MegaCap Companies – Results [pdf]

ImageXav — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:17:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announcements/20260604-1483731/1483731_spdji-us-indices-megacaps-results-20260604.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48409535

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by ImageXav in "Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking"

ImageXav — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:28:35 +0000

Agreed. Which is also odd, if you think about it. Surely with the amount of compute Anthropic and others have available, they could test each of the solutions in the SO data they surely have and rank them based on efficiency/elegance/other criteria and remove poor solutions from their training data.

How do you reduce LLM spam in PR reviews?

ImageXav — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:11:43 +0000

Title. I finally got annoyed enough at work with a colleague who posted an 11 point list they clearly hadn't read or reviewed as a comment on my PR that my reply started with 'Thanks Claude...'. No doubt in my mind that I spent far longer on my curt rebuttal than they did on the review. I'd like to hear from folks whose organisation uses LLMs for coding effectively and what kind of best practices they have put in place to avoid these situations.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48193561

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ImageXav in "New iron nanomaterial wipes out cancer cells without harming healthy tissue"

ImageXav — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:09:19 +0000

It may feel that way due to the iterative nature of medical improvements, but over the past few decades there has been a consistent reduction in cancer mortality rates across most types of cancer [0]. Treatments really are getting better and more targeted. Immunotherapy has made huge breakthroughs. Combination treatments allow for significantly improved lifespans and better quality of life during treatments. There are a few cancers that remain hard to treat, but I have a lot of confidence that in the coming decades we will make strides in attacking them. That being said, I'm very sorry to hear about the pain you and your family must be going through. I've had a few close loved ones undergo cancer treatment and it was tough.

[0] https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac...

New comment by ImageXav in "A tough labor market for white-collar workers has turned recruiting upside down"

ImageXav — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 10:58:03 +0000

This seems like such an easy way to create perverse incentives and profit off people who are already down on their luck. Imagine being told that the only way to get considered is to pay a fee. Then later on you get told to pay the gold fee for priority. Oh you're still not getting hired? Go for our platinum package that will definitely make the difference! Not enough money? No worries, we'll take 30% of your salary for the first few years. Or maybe we'll just give you some a fixed debt at a high interest rate. Aren't you glad you used us?

New comment by ImageXav in "The Smol Training Playbook: The Secrets to Building World-Class LLMs"

ImageXav — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 12:05:25 +0000

Agreed. One at a time testing (OAT) has been outdated for almost a century at this point. Factorial and fractional factorial experiments have been around for that long and give detailed insights into the effect of not just single changes but the interaction between changes, which means you can superpower your learnings as many variables in DL do in fact interact.

Or, more modern Bayesian methods if you're more interested in getting the best results for a given hyperparameter sweep.

However, that is not to detract from the excellent effort made here and the great science being investigated. Write ups like this offer so much gold to the community.

New comment by ImageXav in "How Europe crushes innovation"

ImageXav — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 12:46:43 +0000

I guess that's the crux of it. From an individual perspective it makes sense to stay in a stable environment, especially if a family is involved. However, I think from a societal perspective it is desirable to have people who gamble on creating new products which can raise the bar in their given industries.

Also, just because the start up fails doesn't mean it was a waste of time. If you manage to provide employment for even just 3 or 4 people for a few years, help them and yourself develop, that is a valuable success.

New comment by ImageXav in "How Europe crushes innovation"

ImageXav — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 18:24:13 +0000

I would add an aspect that is not covered here but is often ignored: the strong labour protection laws result in a mentality where if you get a good job you are much less likely to want to take risks e.g. start your own business. There was a post on the HENRY (high earner, not rich yet) UK subreddit the other day from someone who had a wealth of experience and had the opportunity to join a start up as a CTO. It honestly sounded like a great chance to initiate change. All of the comments were telling the poster that they had it good, that 99% of start ups fail, that the hours would be gruelling. I feel as though the conversation would have been quite different in a US subreddit.

A term they like to use is 'crabs in a bucket'.

New comment by ImageXav in "Everything is correlated (2014–23)"

ImageXav — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 21:55:43 +0000

This is an interesting point. I've been trying to think about something similar recently but don't have much of an idea how to proceed. I'm gathering periodic time series data and am wondering how to factor in the frequency of my sampling for the statistical tests. I'm not sure how to assess the difference between 50Hz and 100Hz on the outcome, given that my periods are significantly longer. Would you have an idea of how to proceed? The person I'm working with currently just bins everything in hour long buckets and uses the mean for comparison between time series but this seems flawed to me.

Best workflow for quick ideation with LLMs from phone

ImageXav — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 07:50:39 +0000

As per the title. I tend to travel a lot and don't often have comfortable access to my laptop. I would like to run quick, small research ideas quickly. My workflow would be:

- Ask an LLM to put together a PoC - Get the code and send it to my home PC or some cloud offering - Run and get results

Has anyone here put together a pipeline like this? I would be curious to hear thoughts on processes people have set up.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44970222

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ImageXav in "An engineer's perspective on hiring"

ImageXav — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 05:31:39 +0000

I've had the complete opposite experience, and feel the complete opposite way. What is there to learn from failing a leetcode? It feels like luck of the draw - I didn't study that specific problem type and so failed. Also, there is an up front cost of several months to cover and study a wide array of leetcode problems.

With a take home I can demonstrate how I would perform at work. I can sit on it, think things over in my head, come up with an attack plan and execute it. I can demonstrate how I think about problems and my own value more clearly. Using a take home as a test is indicative to me that a company cares a bit more about its hiring pipeline and is being careful not to put candidates under arbitrary pressures.

New comment by ImageXav in "Benchmarking GPT-5 on 400 real-world code reviews"

ImageXav — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 06:32:00 +0000

Yes, especially as models are known to have a preference towards outputs of models in the same family. I suspect this leaderboard would change dramatically with different models as the judge.

New comment by ImageXav in "Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507"

ImageXav — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 17:52:11 +0000

Thanks for sharing that. Interesting that the leaderboard is dominated by Anthropic, Google and DeepSeek. Openai doesn't even register.

New comment by ImageXav in "Mistralai/Voxtral-Mini-3B-2507 · Hugging Face"

ImageXav — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 20:10:44 +0000

How did you achieve that? I was looking into it and $0.006/min is quoted everywhere.

New comment by ImageXav in "Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time"

ImageXav — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 21:15:53 +0000

I feel as though it also represents the fact that contributors are less invested in the project. There was a small study done a few years back hypothesizing that the number of swear words related somewhat to code quality [0] due to emotional involvement of the codebase authors. I can imagine this to be somewhat true. I would love to see this study redone now that LLMs are widespread on pre chatgpt repos (as I suspect that repos created using LLMs are going to be very sanitised).

[0] https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf

New comment by ImageXav in "N-Params vs. Single Param"

ImageXav — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 13:39:30 +0000

Even better, python has named tuples [0]. So if you have a tuple that you are sure will always have the same inputs you can declare it:

``` Point = namedtuple('Point', 'x y') pt1 = Point(1.0, 5.0) ```

And then call the X or Y coordinates either by index: pt1[0], pt1[1], or coordinate name: pt1.x, pt1.y.

This can be a really handy way to help people understand your code as what you are calling becomes a lot more explicit.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2970608/what-are-named-t...

New comment by ImageXav in "AI systems with 'unacceptable risk' are now banned in the EU"

ImageXav — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 09:12:04 +0000

Not necessarily. Interpretability of a system used to make decisions is more important in some contexts than others. For example, a black box AI used to make judiciary decisions would completely remove transparency from a system that requires careful oversight. It seems to me that the intent of the legislation is to avoid such cases from popping up, so that people can contest decisions made that would have a material impact on them, and that organisations can provide traceable reasoning.

New comment by ImageXav in "An overview of gradient descent optimization algorithms (2016)"

ImageXav — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 17:58:06 +0000

Something that stuck out to me in the updated blog [0] is that Demon Adam performed much better than even AdamW, with very interesting learning curves. I'm wondering now why it didn't become the standard. Anyone here have insights into this?

[0] https://johnchenresearch.github.io/demon/

New comment by ImageXav in "Show HN: Real-Time YOLO Object Detection in Elixir: Fast, Simple, Extensible"

ImageXav — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 21:18:41 +0000

I've found that YOLOv7 [0] tends to perform better across the board than anything ultralytics has produced, without the horrendous licensing.

[0] https://github.com/WongKinYiu/yolov7

New comment by ImageXav in "Towards Nyquist Learners"

ImageXav — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 21:00:29 +0000

I think it is you who have misunderstood the Nyquist-Shannon theorem. Aliasing and noise are real concerns. Tim Wescott explains it very well [0] (Figures 3, 10 and 11). If your signal is below one half the sample rate but the noise isn't, you'll lose information about the signal. If your signal phase is shifted wrt. the sampling, you'll lose information. If your sampling period isn't representative, you'll lose information. These are not implementation details.

[0] https://www.wescottdesign.com/articles/Sampling/sampling.pdf