Hacker News: ImageXav

New comment by ImageXav in "GPT 5.6 Sol is the best "vision" model OpenAI ever released"

ImageXav — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:23:27 +0000

Gemini tops their vision evals [0] by a mile, with 4/5 top spots going to variants of it. Qwen is the only other contender, likely due to how good it is for object detection, where it crushes the competition [1].

[0] https://playground.roboflow.com/evals

[1] https://playground.roboflow.com/evals/object-detection

New comment by ImageXav in "GPT 5.6 Sol is the best "vision" model OpenAI ever released"

ImageXav — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:36:55 +0000

Me too. This is an interesting comparison but in my experience Qwen and Gemini have typically been the top contenders for image related tasks. For that reason it would be great to have the comparison here, as I'm not surprised by Gemini's dominance over the other models.

Measuring Autonomous AI Research

ImageXav — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:58:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/measuring-autonomous-research

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330109

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ImageXav in "Explorative modeling: Train on the best of K guesses"

ImageXav — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:36:12 +0000

This feels extremely close in nature to being a generalisation of discrete distribution networks.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.00036 Project page: https://discrete-distribution-networks.github.io/

Given that these were published at ICML 2025, at which the author was a top reviewer as per their own website https://alexiglad.github.io/, I wonder how influenced they were to pursue this avenue of the back of it. They do have a related works section in appendix E, but it somehow seems to miss this. Which is odd, as the paper made a splash at the time at the conference and even made it close to the top of hacker news due to the novelty.

Of course, DDNs are a fundamentally new architecture, whereas this is more a generaliseable training strategy, but there is a very similar core.

Quoting Sam Altman

ImageXav — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:10:50 +0000

Article URL: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/sam-altman/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48994248

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by ImageXav in "Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence"

ImageXav — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:46:03 +0000

I've been avidly using Fable since it was re-released and while it has been excellent at building the apps I want, the reasoning has been completely opaque.

Kim, however, has exposed the whole reasoning trace, or enough of it to matter. I'd almost forgotten how nice it is to see this. I've been able to see all of the weird twist and turns it takes and it is joyful. But also, far, far more informative and means I can debug ideas far more thoroughly. Also, at a first glance it seems to have gotten quite far on a niche hobby horse of mine that no LLM has been able to crack. I'll be testing this more for sure.

New comment by ImageXav in "Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model"

ImageXav — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:21:34 +0000

Ok, this is really cool. The fact that the robot can use pointing to decide where to go is a great design decision, and robotics really is the next frontier. Definitely cheering on Mistral here!

New comment by ImageXav in "We're extending access to Fable 5 on all paid plans through July 12"

ImageXav — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 08:15:12 +0000

I think it depends on your workflow. I've had a great experience with the trial. I work in research, and have set up something similar to Kaparthy's auto research. I, with Fable, have managed to get an image generation model down from 80M parameters to 10M and keep the quality of the generated images on par (similar FID). And, importantly, every change was modular, explained by Fable, reviewed by myself, and understood and documented. If not understood, I read relevant docs until I did it didn't accept it as part of the plan. So it ended up being a simple composition of existing ideas which I had previously encountered, but stacked much more rapidly than I could have.

The structure of the code is easily readable as I enforce concenventions followed by good libraries. And I can easily plug in new datasets. It's pretty good frankly.

New comment by ImageXav in "Is The Economist Always Wrong?"

ImageXav — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 07:32:24 +0000

I read the Economist for over a decade growing up. It was a great way to learn about the world, who was in power where, and the challenges facing economies at the time. I found their exposition to be pretty good given the fact they were restricted to a few pages for important events. However, their proposed solutions were always the same. More market freedom, etc.

I did feel with the change in editorial direction a while back that they lost some of their edge. I've since mostly just stuck to the Financial Times. It feels less worldly, but the content of the articles feels better.

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.