<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: lettergram</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lettergram</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:13:11 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=lettergram" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We actually found the Mistral Small 4, quantized to 4bit was comparable to Qwen 3.6 27B and is roughly the same size. At least from our experience on our use cases, the quantization of the Mistral model worked far better than trying to quantize the Qwen family.<p>Fully agree to your point though, Mistral in general is far behind where I'd expect and Qwen in particular is crushing it at the smaller sizes.<p>Personally, I'd consider anything 20B params and above a "medium" model. Small being <20B and large >100B. I think obviously we can get to the huge 1-2T param models, but frankly the margin of accuracy improvement for the speed hit is kinda insane (1-2% for many metrics).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 18:04:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326946</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326946</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48326946</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yup, that's pretty much what I was saying for the above. I had a Kubota and can indeed attest to the issue(s).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:00:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875231</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875231</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875231</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They're both considered medium tractors with similar weights for a similar purpose. I forget the official weights, but it's something like 100-175HP is mid-tier.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:59:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875219</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875219</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875219</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can get a kubota M5-111 with a closed cab for $70k-100k, cheaper than these. Plus zero percent financing though then for 5-7 years. Well built and a comparable class in terms of weight and horse power.<p>People aren’t buying them for price, but the first sentence discusses it as if it’s relevant.<p>My assumption are farmers are trying to skirt the eco rules for vehicles in some way. Which by the way is insanely annoying and has caused issues for all the farmers I know at one point or another. Worse, you can’t fix the ecosystems on your own so you have to get them serviced costing quite a bit and importantly putting your tractor out of commission for a while. It’s why older tractors have a premium</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 01:09:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47871244</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47871244</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47871244</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Clicking the link splits off the ".", which is interesting but necessary.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:36:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719736</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719736</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47719736</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can buy books on how to make and obtain chemicals on your own.<p>Hell here's an Internet Archive book on making explosives<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/saxon-kurt.-fireworks-explosives-like-granddad-used-to-make" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/saxon-kurt.-fireworks-explosives...</a>.<p>If you ever chat with older folks pre-90's much of this information was accessible fairly easily. It only changed with the push by the government to crackdown on Waco, Oklahoma City bombing, militias and other related groups. There was then a campaign to make it "normal" to limit free speech on the subjects, where as these books were available before.<p>I think the whole thing where AI should make information less available is a difficult battle and one which I personally oppose, but do understand. Free speech and information isn't the problem, it's the people, actions and substances they create.<p>After the age of the internet, I think it's been a forever loosing battle to limit information, it's why we couldn't stop cryptography, nuclear weapon proliferation, gun distribution, drug distribution, etc. The AI is just another battle ground, one which, if they actually do manage to control could definitely create some walls to this information, but not stop it.<p>More scary, is that the AI as it becomes pervasive and stop people from asking certain questions, because they don't know they should ask... but that's unrelated to the risk of mass death.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:01:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718312</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718312</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718312</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's still plenty of moats frankly, same moats as before. What isn't the moat is the software development time.<p>In our case, we're building a tool that has a moat from: integrations, multiple parties connecting, and others<p>It's very sticky once we get in, and has nothing to do with the software so much as legal, company policy and inter party communication</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 04:38:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46655282</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46655282</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46655282</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Everybody's Got a Claim]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://ipcopilot.ai/2026/01/03/everybodys-got-a-claim/">https://ipcopilot.ai/2026/01/03/everybodys-got-a-claim/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583921">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583921</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:57:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://ipcopilot.ai/2026/01/03/everybodys-got-a-claim/</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583921</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583921</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "PBS News Hour West to go dark after ASU discontinues contract"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I read that I'm always personally confused. He had a commanding voice and had an aurora of being above it all. But when you listened and watched what he actually did, he seemed very political in my mind, though perhaps more of a moderate(?).<p>He even advocated for world government, endorsed politicians, etc.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2025 02:42:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333230</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333230</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333230</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "“Super secure” messaging app leaks everyone's phone number"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>1000 downloads lol<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freedomchat.freedomchat&hl=en_SG">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freedomcha...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:34:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284060</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284060</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284060</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "“Super secure” messaging app leaks everyone's phone number"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>All 1000 downloads...<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freedomchat.freedomchat&hl=en_SG">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freedomcha...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:33:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284054</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284054</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284054</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "“Super secure” messaging app leaks everyone's phone number"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Feels a little like clickbait "MAGA-themed", never heard of Converso.<p>That said, the analysis itself is interesting and worth a look, if nothing else it's a general pattern you can follow for many chat applications to see how secure it is.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 15 Dec 2025 20:00:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279683</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279683</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279683</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "Recovering Anthony Bourdain's Li.st's"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Bourdain actually joked about killing himself in the exact manner and location in, which he did. When I heard it happened, my wife and I both recalled the same times he'd mentioned it. It wasn't a surprise really.<p>Bourdain had been referencing Hunter S Thompson and the way he went out for years. He'd also repeatedly mentioned wanting to go out in southern France after a great day. Bourdain generally had the same "vibe" as Thompson as well. Here's Thompson's last note to his wife:<p>> No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt.<p>To me, it wasn't a surprise at all. My wife and I even had discussed when we thought it would happen. The main thing about Bourdain was that people could relate to him and he wrote excellent prose. He seemed authentic and he went out on his terms, which is what he wanted and was the way he lived.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Dec 2025 02:01:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260189</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260189</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260189</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There’s a lot of indications that we’re currently brute forcing these models. There’s honestly not a reason they have to be 1T parameters and cost an insane amount to train and run on inference.<p>What we’re going to see is as energy becomes a problem; they’ll simply shift to more effective and efficient architectures on both physical hardware and model design. I suspect they can also simply charge more for the service, which reduces usage for senseless applications.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2025 03:31:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45843299</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45843299</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45843299</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The irony -- so not only was their system hacked ("hosted onsite"), but then it was also burned down onsite with no backups.<p>In other words.. there was no point in the extra security of being onsite AND the risks of being onsite single failure point destroyed any evidence.<p>Pretty much what I'd expect tbh, but no remote backup is insane.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:49:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486610</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486610</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486610</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "Were RNNs all we needed? A GPU programming perspective"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Back in 2016 - 2018 my work at Capital One resulted in a modified C-RNN style architecture that was producing gpt-2 level results. Using that model we were able to build a general purpose system that could generate data for any dataset (with minimal training, from scratch):<p><a href="https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont-necessarily-need-data-for-data-science-48d7bf503074" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont-necessarily...</a><p>At the time it was clear to all on the team that RNNs, just like transformers later on, are general purpose frameworks that really only require more data and size to function. In the 2018-2020 era and probably today, they are slower to train. They also are less prone to certain pitfalls, but overall had the same characteristics.<p>In the 2019-2020 I was convinced that transformers would give way to better architecture. The RNNs in particular trained faster and required less data, particularly when combined with several architectural components I won’t get into. I believe that’s still true today, though I haven’t worked on it in the last 2-3 years.<p>That said, transformers “won” because they are better overall building blocks and don’t require the nuances of RNNs. Combined with the compute optimizations that are now present I don’t see that changing in the near term. Folks are even working to convert transformers to RNNs:<p><a href="https://medium.com/@techsachin/supra-technique-for-linearizing-transformer-based-llms-into-recurrent-neural-networks-934be9a450a3" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@techsachin/supra-technique-for-linearizi...</a><p>There are also RNN based models beating Qwen 3 8B in certain benchmarks<p><a href="https://www.rwkv.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rwkv.com/</a><p>I suspect over time the other methods my team explored and other types of networks and nodes will continue to expand beyond transformers for state of the art LLMs</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 21 Sep 2025 04:26:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45320055</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45320055</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45320055</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "Pentagon Docs: US Wants to "Suppress Dissenting Arguments" Using AI Propaganda"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They tried it last administration too -- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Board" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Boar...</a><p>To be honest, it's been going on for effectively forever.<p>See operation mockingbird -- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 30 Aug 2025 01:41:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071201</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071201</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071201</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "What is a color space?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One crazy thing you can do with color spaces is dramatically improve detection algorithms and store massive data.<p><a href="https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/" rel="nofollow">https://austingwalters.com/chromatags/</a><p>Think of it this way, a QR code is binary. If you modify color spaces correctly you can get 6 bits (or more) per pixel. In addition, you can improve the detection at distance, localization for robots, and speed (120 fps).<p>Done this to great effect previously and you can do a lot of awesome things with it. Pretty much the easiest hack in computer vision.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2025 03:31:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021973</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021973</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021973</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Also true, kind of ment the chip sanctions. They transitioned to China and domestic production.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:54:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44936323</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44936323</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44936323</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lettergram in "The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes. Strategically, it makes sense for the US, much like Russia and China to be independent.<p>Sanctions weren’t effective on Russia because they had most of what they needed domestically and partner markets to sell those goods to.<p>When the US tried to impose sanctions on China, China called the bluff and blocked strategic materials. The US “trade deal” wasn’t much different than how it started.<p>In terms of willing to pay for it; what’s having a country worth? Because if a competing country can withhold resources you need, you’re effectively a junior partner.<p>Ultimately, reduce over seas benefits, tariff and offer tax write offs to build on shore. Then you’ll have better higher paying jobs and onshore manufacturing. More real GDP from goods will not have a negative impact or cost, it’s part of why Germany and Japan grew rapidly (they had tight import controls, to build a domestic industry).<p>Also, the majority of the country voted for Trump and this was his #1 issue. Like him or hate him, the desire for domestic protection is what elected him.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 Aug 2025 23:46:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44935934</link><dc:creator>lettergram</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44935934</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44935934</guid></item></channel></rss>