Hacker News: hellohello2

New comment by hellohello2 in "Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces (2025)"

hellohello2 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:33:33 +0000

Clickbait doesn't have to be false, it has to be shocking. Being false is one way of being shocking. "Stop doing X!" -- really now?

New comment by hellohello2 in "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM"

hellohello2 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:13:35 +0000

I agree to some extent about the jargon (Claude has a bigger vocabulary that me, if it knows a useful word I don't I'm fine with learning it), but often times the way information is laid out across sentences just doesn't make any reasonable sense. At least its consistent in the ways its atrocious, sure, but like...

New comment by hellohello2 in "Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces (2025)"

hellohello2 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:45:55 +0000

Sure, and the parent comment's position is that they dislike it. Its purpose is to advocate against clickbait titles becoming normalized in the scientific community.

New comment by hellohello2 in "A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome"

hellohello2 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:50:57 +0000

Yes I can, no problem. First figure out how consciousness works and tell me, then I'll be able to explain if the software is ethical or not. Its simple really.

New comment by hellohello2 in "Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption"

hellohello2 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:03:08 +0000

Haven't seen him no ;)

New comment by hellohello2 in "Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption"

hellohello2 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:28:38 +0000

Yes, I think it really depends on the task. Clearly we won't be willing to spend 1000x on tokens for our everyday needs. But what about for the police monitoring conversations? I'd very much like my chats to stay encrypted, but there have been laws pushing against this. Technology like this provides a real solution i.e. you can scan chats for keywords without actually reading them, and get a warrant if you find something.

New comment by hellohello2 in "Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption"

hellohello2 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:13:36 +0000

The top comment mentions a ~10^3 overhead. Am I crazy (or already old?) for thinking this is not a very large constant?

New comment by hellohello2 in "Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption"

hellohello2 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:56:13 +0000

Have all the skeptics in this thread somehow forgot about Moore's law?

New comment by hellohello2 in "Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions"

hellohello2 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:15:22 +0000

One trick is to simply as for a fast answer when talking to a high effort model, when working interactively. Sounds stupid but I do this all the time and it works. Just tell it you are working interactively now and need ultrafast answers with no thinking.

I would be really curious to know as well, why effort is linked to cache as its quite inconveniant. Is it possible the token used to indicate effort is only passed once at the start, not per thinking trace, or quite simply that different efforts have different model weights?

New comment by hellohello2 in "Compression is prediction"

hellohello2 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:49:37 +0000

Yeah I agree, I was just saying I really doubt the author of that blog post was trying to take credit for the ideas they present.

New comment by hellohello2 in "Compression is prediction"

hellohello2 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:27:40 +0000

You're reading this the wrong way I think, citations aren't given because its obviously a pedagogical article about well established stuff. Much like you wouldn't give citations in a blog post explaining calculus.

New comment by hellohello2 in "Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments"

hellohello2 — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:31:11 +0000

"The oral system scales poorly. One examiner can only hear so many students in a day."

I'm not joking: you could have an AI quiz the students and test their understanding. That way the tests go deeper into testing the understanding by following through on the answers, and are standardized and fair for everyone. I don't think we are there yet at all but I actually think its not insane for the future. I expect downvotes though/I don't think our generation would agree with this.

What's old is new :)

New comment by hellohello2 in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

hellohello2 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:40:51 +0000

Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.

New comment by hellohello2 in "Discovery Loop"

hellohello2 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:05:44 +0000

Yes I am, which is why I said that, its much easier to automate over the chaos with a coding agent than with a script. They are still far from doing anything productive on their own but its easy to imagine designing a search space and "letting them go", especially since coding agents are approaching the point of being able to reproduce papers reliably.

New comment by hellohello2 in "Discovery Loop"

hellohello2 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 01:51:20 +0000

Yes but science is well-structures and practically designed about repeatability so its a lot easier to automate than "softer" disciplines.

New comment by hellohello2 in "Octane – React’s programming model, compiled"

hellohello2 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:38:00 +0000

Looks interesting. But does anyone really like the useState useContext etc. React model? Might as well make a better one if you are going to be compiling no?

New comment by hellohello2 in "I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals"

hellohello2 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:30:37 +0000

No that's not what I meant, I meant exactly what I said above.

New comment by hellohello2 in "2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026"

hellohello2 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:35:11 +0000

Thanks a lot for sharing! I'll try the discussion to unpack context, that sounds interesting. I end up having such discussions in separate chats anyways to understand what's happening so it makes sense to do it upfront.

New comment by hellohello2 in "I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals"

hellohello2 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:53:07 +0000

I think you are correct, its so hard to judge the quality of research that we have been using publication record/count as a proxy. Ultimately, having papers being easy to write is good, provided we find a better way of judging quality.

New comment by hellohello2 in "I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals"

hellohello2 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:49:25 +0000

My 2 cents: AI has improved writing considerably for non-native english speakers (in particular China). Writing feels more standardized/boring but easier to read overall. I hit fewer papers that are a pain to read. The most problematic aspect I see are semi-bogus claims i.e. sentences that aren't false, but don't quite feel right either. YMMV.