Hacker News: compumetrika

New comment by compumetrika in "OpenAI's new open-source model is basically Phi-5"

compumetrika — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 06:19:38 +0000

Get a Strix Point or Strix Halo with 128GB DDR5 RAM and you can run gpt-oss 120B at 10-20+ TPS.

New comment by compumetrika in "Judge ends man's 11-year quest to dig up landfill and recover $765M in Bitcoin"

compumetrika — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 01:48:15 +0000

Hmmm maybe I should re-read A Fire Upon the Deep.

New comment by compumetrika in "Ask HN: Am I the only one here who can't stand HN's AI obsession?"

compumetrika — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 13:32:09 +0000

Currently on the front page there are ~2/30 posts on the front page.

AI hype is everywhere. On HN there is genuinely much higher quality conversation about AI than many other places.

So, no, the question in the title doesn't resonate with me. I don't think there is an obsession, and for the AI discussion happens, I'm happy with the quality of it.

New comment by compumetrika in "Tabby: Self-hosted AI coding assistant"

compumetrika — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 13:18:40 +0000

LLMs use pseudo-random numbers. You can set the seed and get exactly the same output with the same model and input.

New comment by compumetrika in "Be Aware of the Makefile Effect"

compumetrika — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 03:14:30 +0000

Great quote, commenting just to 'bookmark' it.

New comment by compumetrika in "Phi 4 available on Ollama"

compumetrika — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 03:09:46 +0000

Ollama can pull directly from HF, you just provide the URL and add to the end :Q8_0 (or whatever) to specify your desired quant. Bonus: use the short form url of `hf` instead of `huggingface` to shorten the model name a little in the ollama list table.

Edit: so for example of you want the unsloth "debugged" version of Phi4, you would run:

`$ollama pull hf.co/unsloth/phi-4-GGUF:Q8_0`

(check on the right side of the hf.co/unsloth/phi-4-GGUF page for the available quants)

New comment by compumetrika in "[dead]"

compumetrika — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 15:44:52 +0000

Not all details are posted yet, but an interesting development.

New comment by compumetrika in "The Google Willow Thing"

compumetrika — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 11:57:46 +0000

I haven't tried this yet myself, but have you tried plugging it into GPT or Claude or Perplexity and asking Qs? I've made some progress on thongs this way, much faster than I would have the usual way. Apply the usual precautions about hallucinations etc (and maybe do the "ask multiple AIs the same thing" thing). We don't yet have a perfect tutor in these machines, but on balance I've gained from talking to them about deep topics.

New comment by compumetrika in "Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies"

compumetrika — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 14:26:44 +0000

The economist Emily Oster wrote an excellent series of books about pregnancy anf early kid years, where she dives into details about various studies, whether they are causal, etc. It's one of the best practiacl explainations of reading research I've encountered targeted at non-academics, really well done. She has a chapter on peanut exposure allergies and i think inrecall that these early-exposure results are in fact from causal research vs just correlational research (basically there are at least two types of papers out thwre -- correlational and causal. As you might guess causal is harder to get for many reasons). Great books; she may also have published some chapters on her substack (substack came after the book I think).

I realize as I write this that you are probably saying that for your own experience you can't disentangle correlational from causation, to which I would say -- correct!

New comment by compumetrika in "Why are religious teens happier than their secular peers?"

compumetrika — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 21:43:59 +0000

I've directly experienced this in my own life. Moved during the pandemic to be near family, and coincidentally that is a much more religious and conservative community. Many people I am around daily are much more unplugged from online discussion and much more directly involved in face to face lives. There is a subset who are more "online" and tend to be more stressed/anxious.

New comment by compumetrika in "The Puzzle of How Large-Scale Order Emerges in Complex Systems"

compumetrika — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 03:46:39 +0000

Many great recommendations in the comments here about on emergent order in complex systems -- does anyone have recommendations for reading about how such systems de-organize?

New comment by compumetrika in "Topological Problems in Voting"

compumetrika — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 04:17:45 +0000

Is there a proof or demostration somehwere about maximizing the consent of the governed?

Arrows theorem always has implied to me that the next step should be quantifuing some welfare measure for voters and then exploring which system maximized that welfare measure. "Consent of the governed" sounds like a welfare measure so I an intrigued.

New comment by compumetrika in "A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments"

compumetrika — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 03:33:33 +0000

> "Westworld was a warning, not an instruction manual!"

New comment by compumetrika in "My Clients, the Liars"

compumetrika — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 13:42:51 +0000

By happenstance I just ran across this by the same author somewhere: https://ymeskhout.substack.com/p/death-of-a-client

New comment by compumetrika in "Claude 3 model family"

compumetrika — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 01:22:48 +0000

Do you have a custom "intro prompt?"

I have one that describes a lot of statistical work I want GPT to help me with.

I got this result the first try:

> Sally has 2 sisters. Since each brother has 2 sisters, and Sally is one of them, there must be one other sister making it two sisters in total. >

New comment by compumetrika in "Captain's log: the irreducible weirdness of prompting AIs"

compumetrika — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 13:33:43 +0000

I've often found EM's things on LLM usage to be quite helpful, and it seems he's gathered a lot of things on prompting in one place here.

Captain's log: the irreducible weirdness of prompting AIs

compumetrika — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 13:33:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/captains-log-the-irreducible-weirdness

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39590264

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by compumetrika in "I keep making things out of checkboxes (2021)"

compumetrika — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 12:35:31 +0000

I'm a little surprised no one has pointed out yet that this is incredibly close to cellular automata, which Wolfram has show can get you Turing completeness among other things.[1]

Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" almost certainly has tons of fun things for the author to play around with if so inclined.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Simple...

New comment by compumetrika in "The virtuous mean between time drunkenness and work martyrdom"

compumetrika — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 12:37:24 +0000

I think the data are that we are working a bit less than we used to, it's rather that the norms and mental categories have shifted. For example 40hr work week is now a sort of norm, vs "sunrise to sunset."

The average workday is also much safer and less physically painful than it used to be.

There are two things I have in mind, and if I have time later I'll see if I can find them and update the post -- one chart of total working hours per worker, and one article, about how much added safety has or hasn't slowed down productivity growth (which inevitably has a lot of data in it about workplace injury and death over time).

Children also work much less than they used to.

I think that Keynes wasn't completely wrong in his prediction (...and maybe if AI really kicks off he will be more vindicated, just missed on the timing)

New comment by compumetrika in "Bayesian Analysis with Python"

compumetrika — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 16:26:03 +0000

I worked through large chunks of the book a long time ago (perhaps an earlier version). I agree with the other responder-- if you've had zero stats it may be more difficult, but the author does an excellent job of discretizing almost everything, which means that integrals and derivatives are replaced with adding and subtracting. For this book I think the most advanced math you need is multiplication and division. It's a clever trick that relies on the fact that computers are really good at multiplying 10,000 things by 10,000 other things and adding them up (which is what discretization implies here).

Before computers that was much harder to do so you needed clever math tricks to "do it all at once," which gets you to all the analytical methods -- calculus, etc. Still all very useful! Just hard to teach to a broad audience. Downey really leans into the technical advantage to computers provide and thus can cover a lot of material before getting into complicated math.