Hacker News: gharman

New comment by gharman in "What even is an OS now?"

gharman — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:24:32 +0000

Yes! Paraphrasing my childhood:

“Mom, I’m bored will you buy this a new computer game?” “Lol no! Go outside.” “Well crap. I guess I’ll have to write my own game.”

New comment by gharman in "Anthropic boss Dario Amodei calls for AI development to slow down"

gharman — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 19:17:33 +0000

> My new suspicion is now that they didn’t got drastically smarter, but they got trained on the user input on the previous generations.

Yes - that’s one of the ways in which they got smarter. More data more better.

I presume also lessons learned re training procedures, algorithmic advances, but data is a primary lever.

New comment by gharman in "Knowing Steam players are hoarders explains why you give Valve that 30%"

gharman — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 17:50:46 +0000

Any (non?)digital media? I would be surprised not to see this exact dynamic on BJJ Fanatics. So easy to pick up instructionals with the constant stream of sales and discounts. Not so easy to spend the hours it takes to watch and digest one of those.

New comment by gharman in "Libraries and Well-Being: A Case Study from The New York Public Library"

gharman — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 02:45:58 +0000

Commercial libraries = private library where you pay a membership fee? I’ve not really heard of that here outside of arguably university libraries and similar.

But SF public library has a couple dozen branches or more?

New comment by gharman in "Dining Critic Tries Nutraloaf (2010)"

gharman — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 22:23:28 +0000

> (as an aside: bland food won't work well on someone who lost their sense of smell from long covid, and prison populations were heavily affected)

The consistent texture of the Nutraloaf may “help” here. My spouse lost her sense of smell (for other reasons than Covid) years ago and now relies heavily on textures for food enjoyment.

New comment by gharman in "Ask HN: What is the best stack to find a job currently?"

gharman — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 19:33:26 +0000

IDK when I hire, the first list (as might be directly relevant to the job) is checking a box, but the second list is what catches my attention.

New comment by gharman in "What does it mean when an LLM “hallucinates” & why do LLMs hallucinate?"

gharman — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 16:55:47 +0000

Agreed there is a semantic argument here. I don’t think anyone is anthropomorphizing LLMs. I’ve had to adopt “objective” with one customer instead of “task” (my preferred default term) because their industry overloads “task” with something else. Now that said, as you point out, the real objective is next token prediction not “help the user with a truth bomb.” and it just happens to have emergent accidental usefulness (I think a natural bias from the training data).

They (chatgpt et al) do move closer to “clear and coherent” by adding extra layers such as a beam search on LLM outputs. Good to remember that ChatGPT et al are products, not bare metal LLMs.

New comment by gharman in "Compuserve"

gharman — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 03:21:39 +0000

My elderly father still uses this as his primary gateway to the internet and email. For all intents and purposes, this is the internet to him.

New comment by gharman in "ScholarTurbo: Use ChatGPT to chat with PDFs (supports GPT-4)"

gharman — Thu, 18 May 2023 00:35:57 +0000

Looks like Scholar Turbo has GPT-4 and Chatpdf is still on the waitlist. But yeah, these chat-with-your-doc webapps are popping up out of the woodwork.

New comment by gharman in "Ask HN: Resources to Grow Breadth and Depth as a Software Engineer?"

gharman — Wed, 10 May 2023 16:45:26 +0000

My long-horizon strategy has been the kinds of roles I take on. A product-focused role lets you go deep into a narrow problem area, whereas a customer-facing consulting/services role forces you to go wide, learning a new area every time. Over the years I’ve used time in the latter to select what to go deep into.

New comment by gharman in "Table Transformer: a model for extracting tables from unstructured documents"

gharman — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 23:05:41 +0000

Indeed! I built a system just last year with - count em - three parsers to deal with PDF table extraction, including one built on TableTransformer. And then when GPT4 came out I just copy pasted a PDF into it as-is and darned if it didn’t do at least as good a job.

Now I can’t do this in earnest because of document privacy issues but I’ve diving down the rabbit hole of how small can we go and still get decent results. Spoiler: gpt2 is too small. :-)

New comment by gharman in "I’m ready to trade in my electric car"

gharman — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 18:57:54 +0000

> it’s 30+ minute charge time. As great as electric is, an extra hour in the car on a road-trip with 3 kids is a tough sell.

I dissent! Just did a 2-day (each way) road trip with young children and those charging breaks are pretty great and well-spaced for letting them run around and blow off steam. It’s not such a bad idea for the adults either…

New comment by gharman in "Augmented Reality Welding System"

gharman — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 04:24:05 +0000

IDK I’d say high school. I took a semester welding class at community college and we only spent 3 sessions on MIG (what this appears to be) before moving on to other processes. Most of the learning was around dealing with PPC, listening for the sizzle, identifying a good bead and common mistakes. This seems expensive for a one-class tool, especially since they still need the regular welders to complete the training.

New comment by gharman in "Ask HN: Why has functional programming become so popular oustide academia?"

gharman — Sun, 05 Mar 2023 08:42:04 +0000

You can choose to program functionally in Java or Python! I do this enough that seeing object oriented Python irritates me. I see this as more of a stylistic choice than forcing new languages.

New comment by gharman in "U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon"

gharman — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:14:08 +0000

Cost differential is an interesting thing to consider if this were done at scale. That single missile cost ~$500K (plus flight time for the F22 isn't cheap). How much would each balloon be, especially if some were decoys without any real payload?

That said, drones vs ships seems like a starker cost differential than this.

New comment by gharman in "Amazon Closing AmazonSmile"

gharman — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 18:50:24 +0000

Funny thing is I’d bet the small amount trickling in to the long tail charities is more impactful to them than a larger amount to the big mega-charities.

I run one of those long tails and Amazon Smile was just right to cover running costs for hosting, bank fees, etc.

New comment by gharman in "Ask HN: Any great books about technical writing?"

gharman — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 06:18:21 +0000

Make It Clear by Patrick Henry Winston has a permanent place on my bookshelf. He breaks communication down into a structured system and applies it to a variety of forms including (beyond standard prose documents) things like decks, pitches, and lectures.

New comment by gharman in "Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating With Over a 3.7 (A-) GPA"

gharman — Fri, 27 May 2022 19:09:04 +0000

I'll raise my hand as a data point. MIT, about 20 years out. It still seems to carry significant weight. I don't even work in the field I studied, so it's definitely not about any particular material I may have learned there. My conjecture is that association with the MIT brand implies that I must be a sharp cookie and someone worth paying attention to.

New comment by gharman in "Supermassive Black Hole Eruption Near Earth Spanning 16 Times Full Moon"

gharman — Mon, 27 Dec 2021 18:50:30 +0000

Not in the Kessel Sector.

New comment by gharman in "Minus"

gharman — Mon, 06 Sep 2021 23:52:12 +0000

That’s a feature! That 90yo probably has rather more worth sharing than the 18yo.