Hacker News: danbrooks

New comment by danbrooks in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)"

danbrooks — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:06:29 +0000

Just gave it a look. Turns out to be a paid service after a bunch of clicks.

New comment by danbrooks in "Mamdani Bans AI in NYC Schools"

danbrooks — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:02:00 +0000

Seems like a well designed policy. Currently for one year and up to the middle school level.

New comment by danbrooks in "OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM"

danbrooks — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:49:21 +0000

Most LLMs can do a pretty good job of this out of the box.

If you have a coding agent available, ask it to try transcribing a few of the PDFs.

New comment by danbrooks in "I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch"

danbrooks — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:25:53 +0000

I had the same inspiration!

I spent a days reviewing the lecture notes for CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch - and then trained a nanoGPT-esque model in PyTorch.

I'd recommend trying it for those who are curious. Computational bottlenecks become much more intuitive when you've looked at the overall process.

New comment by danbrooks in "Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”"

danbrooks — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:40:56 +0000

Typically, companies file these patents to protect themselves against patent trolls.

New comment by danbrooks in "Claude-real-video － any LLM can watch a video"

danbrooks — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 01:00:17 +0000

I’d imagine they could. I’d try Gemini 3.5 flash with high fps.

New comment by danbrooks in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

danbrooks — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 03:50:43 +0000

Super high scores for the community!

I got 83/100 suggesting 60,000.

My SAT reading was 760/800.

New comment by danbrooks in "MTG Bench: Testing how well LLMs can play Magic"

danbrooks — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:21:50 +0000

Very cool. I’ve been daydreaming about whether LLMs can be used to reason through gaming decisions.

New comment by danbrooks in "CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch"

danbrooks — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:20:43 +0000

I'd be interested in joining a discord server.

Would be great to have a community to discuss the material - even if folks can't commit to the full course.

New comment by danbrooks in "Justice Department announces a $1.7B fund to compensate Trump allies"

danbrooks — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:35:18 +0000

Theoretically, the fund is non-partisan. I'd be curious to see what happens if some folks claim to be politically targeted by the current DOJ.

New comment by danbrooks in "Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5"

danbrooks — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:28:43 +0000

Check which model you're using.

The fast version of composer is the default now (which costs ~x3 as much).

New comment by danbrooks in "Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid"

danbrooks — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:25:18 +0000

This aligns with my understanding.

Before 2018-2019, the opt-in process for data sharing was hidden on a website somewhere. Around that time, the form became part of the vehicle purchasing process.

New comment by danbrooks in "Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book"

danbrooks — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:07:56 +0000

The instructions likely mean that the bishop itself is black, not the square that it is on.

New comment by danbrooks in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

danbrooks — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:07:13 +0000

This was really fun. I like that holding down space bar gives ~20 clicks per second, which helps speeds things up.

New comment by danbrooks in "Visualize Any Hugging Face Model"

danbrooks — Wed, 06 May 2026 20:30:31 +0000

Most hugging face models are implemented in PyTorch, with an architecture specified as a series of layers. This looks like a nice visualization of that.

New comment by danbrooks in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

danbrooks — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:18:25 +0000

I tried the VS Code + Copilot sidebar approach a few months ago. It was definitely rough around the edges compared to Cursor/Claude. In our corporate environment, we weren't even able to use frontier models.

New comment by danbrooks in "What Is Copilot Exactly?"

danbrooks — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:09:58 +0000

Amazing ending. I have been told "no one should be using copilot" - and I agree!

New comment by danbrooks in "AI for American-produced cement and concrete"

danbrooks — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:03:27 +0000

It's not a joke - but it sure feels suspicious :D

New comment by danbrooks in "President's new science council: 9 billionaires and 1 scientist"

danbrooks — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:34:01 +0000

This feels like regulatory capture by the tech industry. Academic research needs representation as well.

New comment by danbrooks in "Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search"

danbrooks — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:13:57 +0000

I work in content/video intelligence. Gemini is great for this type of use case out of the box.