<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: johndough</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=johndough</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 07 Nov 2026 18:28:38 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=johndough" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have seen you advertise your website a few times. I like the idea of not having to trust the router, so I took some time out of my day to critique your website: <a href="https://files.catbox.moe/v68cf7.png" rel="nofollow">https://files.catbox.moe/v68cf7.png</a><p>My visit to your website went like this:<p>1. Visit models page<p>2. Try to find GLM-5.3-Flash (which is among the ~5 models that 90% of people currently care about)<p>3. Give up scrolling (which would have taken OVER 50 SCROLLS!!!) and use Ctrl + F<p>4. Try to find input/output/cached price<p>5. Scroll all the way up to find out which column is what<p>6. Notice that output price is cut off<p>7. Notice that the scroll bar is over 100 scrolls further down the page<p>8. Use Shift + Wheel to scroll horizontally (most visitors probably won't know this trick)<p>9. Notice that cached price is missing<p>10. Conclude that this is probably not a serious offering and bounce<p>There are probably more issues later on, but this is how far I got.<p>I would suggest you to:<p>- Deslopify all pages that a user may visit before conversion<p>- List important models first (see OpenRouter rankings)<p>- Move the most important information (model name/input/output/cached price) to the left<p>- Disaggregate the prices per provider (maybe subtables per model? not sure)<p>- Measure cache hit rate and compute effective price per provider (see OpenRouter)<p>(- Optional: Fix the broken link on your HN profile page. Currently, the only way to get from this comment to your website is a search engine.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:51:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482102</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482102</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482102</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Select * from Internet.blogposts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I guess you have to read OPs comment as the inner monologue of Reddit's CEO in 2023: "IPO is coming so better price out the third party apps we encouraged developers to build."<p>When Reddit raised its API prices in 2023 in order to make itself more attractive for an IPO, it effectively priced out third-party apps, such as the Apollo reader app. Discussion back then: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:23:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475896</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475896</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475896</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How do you recover from doom loops? Just send the same prompt again and pray that it works, or anything more sophisticated?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:50:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49450201</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49450201</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49450201</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Behaviorally fingerprinting Ox Alpha's provenance"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Another strong hint is that the uptime graph of GLM-5.3 by Z.ai is very similar to that of Ox Alpha:<p><a href="https://openrouter.ai/stealth/ox-alpha#uptime" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/stealth/ox-alpha#uptime</a><p><a href="https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3#uptime" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3#uptime</a><p>Screenshot of a recent blip: <a href="https://files.catbox.moe/haq90y.png" rel="nofollow">https://files.catbox.moe/haq90y.png</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:23:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440092</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440092</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440092</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Ox-Alpha Is GLM?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ox Alpha is almost certainly a model by Z.ai.<p><a href="https://files.catbox.moe/k52n6k.png" rel="nofollow">https://files.catbox.moe/k52n6k.png</a><p>The upper chart shows the availability of Ox Alpha and the lower chart shows the availability of GLM 5.3 by Z.ai. They had a blip at exactly the same time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:57:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49430444</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49430444</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49430444</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Ox-Alpha Is GLM?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><p><pre><code>    > 1 quadrillion tokens per day on Nous portal
</code></pre>
If you are referring to this number (<a href="https://xcancel.com/NousResearch/status/2090899914700054780" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/NousResearch/status/2090899914700054780</a>), they are either mistaken, or they mean that they can route 1 quadrillion tokens per day, but the provider behind Ox Alpha certainly can't provide that. Almost all of my requests have hit a rate limit so far.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:48:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49430378</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49430378</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49430378</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "OCR It – pull text out of un-copyable documents for your LLM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><p><pre><code>     Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans. 
</code></pre>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Aug 2026 10:24:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49417725</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49417725</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49417725</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For counting, there are specialized counting models, e.g. <a href="https://huggingface.co/spaces/MengqiLei/count-anything-demo" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/spaces/MengqiLei/count-anything-demo</a><p>I tried to parse hand-drawn ER diagrams in the past and did not have much success with any model, frontier or otherwise. If you have annotated data, I'd recommend finetuning a recent (dense) VLM, but don't expect 100% accuracy. <a href="https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/vision-fine-tuning">https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/vision-fine-tuning</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 22:10:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49394322</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49394322</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49394322</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The order is:<p><pre><code>    LLM issues tool call to read high res image ->
    harness sends high res image to server ->
    server downsizes it to 800x800 (blurry) ->
    LLM issues bash command (e.g. `convert`) to crop a small subimage (e.g. 600x600) from the high res image ->
    LLM issues tool call to read subimage ->
    harness sends subimage to server ->
    server does not resize the subimage because it is small already, so it is not blurry when finally ingested by the LLM</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:24:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391257</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391257</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391257</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>LLMs read images by splitting them up into e.g. 16x16 patches, which are then converted to embedding vectors and fed to the LLM, so from a technical point of view, feeding a big image as many 20x20 patches all at once is not too different from cropping subimages from the image, splitting those subimages into patches and feeding them to the LLM. Of course, the LLM has to be trained to understand that those images belong together, but it can be done.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:05:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390992</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390992</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390992</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes. When the LLM tries to read an image, it will be resized by DeepSeek's server to 800x800, which might be a bit blurry. The LLM will then crop a smaller image from the high resolution image (using e.g. the `convert` tool via bash) and will then read the small cropped image. This image will still be resized to 800x800 by DeepSeek's server, but since it is already small, there is no or little loss of quality.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:56:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390851</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390851</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390851</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It was explicitly said that they are pursuing multimodal support. A quote from the meeting transcript: <a href="https://github.com/demo-zexuan/liang-wenfeng-investor-meeting-2026-7-22/blob/master/%E6%A2%81%E6%96%87%E9%94%8B%E6%8A%95%E8%B5%84%E8%80%85%E4%BA%A4%E6%B5%81%E4%BC%9A-%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97%E7%A8%BF_1_18_translate_20260723201651.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/demo-zexuan/liang-wenfeng-investor-meetin...</a><p><pre><code>    Nevertheless, as a component, we will undoubtedly implement multimodal support — and we are already doing so. We plan to develop relevant models, ensuring that versions like V4 and subsequent iterations will natively support multimodal functionality.
</code></pre>
Earlier, the following was said, which might match more what you had in mind.<p><pre><code>    Achieving excellence in AI training does not require a global model or even multimodal approaches—by narrowing the scope of AI training and eliminating multimodality, certain tasks may remain unachievable without compromising the algorithm's validity.

    Multimodal approaches ultimately need to be implemented.
</code></pre>
It is difficult to tell who said what, since the speaker ids are missing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:10:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386894</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386894</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386894</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are models specifically for splitting an image into text regions, e.g. PP-DocLayoutV3 <a href="https://huggingface.co/PaddlePaddle/PP-DocLayoutV3" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/PaddlePaddle/PP-DocLayoutV3</a><p>I am using a stripped-down minimal version of it which I uploaded here, since I am not a fan of huge dependency trees: <a href="https://github.com/99991/simple-pp-doclayoutv3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/99991/simple-pp-doclayoutv3</a><p>Another recent model for this task is Unlimited-OCR: <a href="https://github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:51:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386733</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386733</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386733</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Might still be fine. The most recent crop of vLLMs proactively use whichever programs are available on the system (e.g. ImageMagick or PIL) to "zoom in" by cropping subimages if they can't quite make out the details.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:33:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386565</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386565</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386565</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "The August 17 outage"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Bigger numbers sound more impressive.<p>"Our billion-dollar infrastructure crumbles under a tremendous flood of 50 PRs per second" would just sound embarrassing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:35:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381196</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381196</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381196</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Unsloth Dynamic 3.0 GGUFs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Great to hear that you are planning larger benchmarks! I am particularly interested in longer-running tasks with many steps and self-correction. Divergence is fine as long as the model can still solve the task, which Divergence-300 @32 does not measure.<p>The current benchmark suites that frontier AI labs use are probably a good fit, e.g.<p><a href="https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3#:~:text=Performance%20across%20comparison%20models" rel="nofollow">https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3#:~:text=Performance%20across%20com...</a><p><a href="https://www.kimi.ai/ai-models/kimi-k3#:~:text=Performance%20at%20the%20frontier" rel="nofollow">https://www.kimi.ai/ai-models/kimi-k3#:~:text=Performance%20...</a><p><a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5</a><p><a href="https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-6/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-6/</a><p>But guessing from your current benchmarks, I assume that you are severely compute-constrained. What is your time budget?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 06:36:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49371157</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49371157</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49371157</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Unsloth Dynamic 3.0 GGUFs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Are there benchmarks for the various Qwen3.8-27B quants that actually measure writing code, maybe even with multiple steps? Low KL divergence does not mean much when the model gets stuck in doom loops all the time.<p>I could of course download and test myself, but that would take days with my internet connection.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:56:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367126</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367126</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367126</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "OpenRouter is joining Stripe"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Doesn't TrustedRouter cost more than OpenRouter? (5.5% markup vs 5%)<p>Also, TrustedRouter's website is full of slop, which does not inspire much confidence.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:59:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365751</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365751</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365751</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "CUDA Shared Memory Swizzling"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was wondering why the author was using braced initialization like<p><pre><code>    size_t i{0};
</code></pre>
instead of the more common<p><pre><code>    size_t i = 0;
</code></pre>
Apparently, braced initialization does not allow narrowing conversion, so you'd get a compiler error for e.g. casting double to float<p><pre><code>    size_t i{0.0};
</code></pre>
and a warning for<p><pre><code>    double d = 0.0;
    size_t i{d};
</code></pre>
which might silently overflow size_t otherwise, so this is a bit safer.<p>In C++, you can get the same effect without the unusual syntax by passing -Wfloat-conversion to gcc/clang, but not sure how to do that with CUDA:</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:42:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49359199</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49359199</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49359199</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johndough in "Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This could be prevented if the government offered photos of ballots with votes for download. But generative AI can also fake it well enough these days. (Of course, this is less of a concern in countries where taking photos of ballots is not allowed.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 13:56:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310603</link><dc:creator>johndough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310603</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310603</guid></item></channel></rss>