Hacker News: ohxh

We stopped hiring engineers for coding ability

ohxh — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:23:40 +0000

Article URL: https://eliseai.com/blog/we-stopped-hiring-engineers-for-coding-ability

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977434

Points: 8

# Comments: 4

New comment by ohxh in "PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA"

ohxh — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:46:57 +0000

Took a while to find on their website but here’s a benchmark vs AWS Aurora:

https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/aurora

Seems a bit better, but they benchmarked on a kind of small db (500gb db / db.r8g.xlarge)

New comment by ohxh in "Ask HN: What are you actually using LLMs for in production?"

ohxh — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 16:49:52 +0000

Lots of non-chatbot uses in property management. Auditing leases vs. payment ledgers. Classifying maintenance work orders. Creating work orders from inspections (photos + text). Scheduling vendors to fix these issues. Etc.

New comment by ohxh in "Lateralized sleeping positions in domestic cats"

ohxh — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 18:58:01 +0000

They say "thus, on average, about two-thirds of cats preferred to sleep on the left side of their body with their left shoulder down", and their image for leftward lateral bias shows this. So I guess leftward means "lying on their left side", not "curling left".

But, they suggest this is because "Upon awakening, a leftward sleeping position would provide a fast left visual field view of objects", which seems suspect. When my cats sleep on their left, it's their left eye that's obscured by their paw, and their right eye that has a better field of view!

New comment by ohxh in "Infinite Grid of Resistors"

ohxh — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 09:00:10 +0000

> Here, I don't think it's even useful to look at this problem in electronic terms

I always thought this problem was a funny choice for the comic, because it’s not that esoteric! It’s equivalent to asking about a 2d simple random walk on a lattice, which is fairly common. And in general the electrical network <-> random walk correspondence is a useful perspective too

4dv.ai (4d Gaussian Splatting)

ohxh — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 18:28:33 +0000

Article URL: https://www.4dv.ai/en

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203642

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by ohxh in "ChatGPT Is a Gimmick"

ohxh — Thu, 22 May 2025 08:11:20 +0000

This seems unusually shallow for the hedgehog review. I thought we'd largely moved on from this sort of sentimental, "I can't get good outputs therefore nobody can" style essay -- not to mention the water use argument! They've published far better writing on LLMs too: see "Language Machinery" from fall 23 [1]

[1] https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/artic...

New comment by ohxh in "Embeddings are underrated (2024)"

ohxh — Mon, 12 May 2025 19:12:28 +0000

Johnson-lindenstrauss lemma [1] for anyone curious. But you can only map to k>8(\ln N)/\varepsilon ^{2}} if you want to preserve distances within a factor of \varepsilon with a JL-transform. This is tight up to a constant factor too.

I always wondered: if we want to preserve distances between a billion points within 10%, that would mean we need ~18k dimensions. 1% would be 1.8m. Is there a stronger version of the lemma for points that are well spread out? Or are embeddings really just fine with low precision for the distance?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%E2%80%93Lindenstrauss_...

New comment by ohxh in "Does current AI represent a dead end?"

ohxh — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 18:21:40 +0000

“One could offer so many examples of such categorical prophecies being quickly refuted by experience! In fact, this type of negative prediction is repeated so frequently that one might ask if it is not prompted by the very proximity of the discovery that one solemnly proclaims will never take place. In every period, any important discovery will threaten some organization of knowledge.” René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p. 4

Matrix Multiplications Run Faster When Given "Predictable" Data

ohxh — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 04:22:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thonking.ai/p/strangely-matrix-multiplications

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42161942

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ohxh in "Goldman Sachs: AI Is overhyped, expensive, and unreliable"

ohxh — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 22:50:14 +0000

Or maybe they do believe this, and entered into trades to express this sentiment. Now, they need the market to correct to what (they believe) is accurate, so they can take profits and free up their capital again.

New comment by ohxh in "Quantum is unimportant to post-quantum"

ohxh — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 21:57:11 +0000

> These are all special instances of a more general computational problem called the hidden subgroup problem. And quantum computers are good at solving the hidden subgroup problem. They’re really good at it.

I assume they mean the hidden subgroup problem for abelian groups? Later they mention short integer solutions (SIS) and learning with errors (LWE), which by my understanding both rely on the hardness of the shortest vector problem, corresponding to the hidden subgroup problem for some non-abelian groups. I haven't read into this stuff for a while, though

New comment by ohxh in "Japan's Comfort Food: The Onigiri"

ohxh — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 17:57:23 +0000

There’s a fun version of this that they have at 7-11 (or 7 & I) there. Probably other convenience stores too. They come in a plastic wrapper that separates the nori from the rice and filling so it doesn’t get soggy. When you pull a little tab, it somehow removes the plastic from in between without messing up the shape. Magic!

The purpose of a system is what it does

ohxh — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 21:53:33 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974639

Points: 7

# Comments: 3

Language Machinery

ohxh — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 09:04:58 +0000

Article URL: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/language-machinery

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38287210

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ohxh in "Every time you click this link, it will send you to a random Web 1.0 website"

ohxh — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 19:19:28 +0000

As far as I understand, web 1.0 is browser makes a request -> backend delivers some html, with subsequent requests just for css/images/iframes. This also had a characteristic style with layouts made from tables and simple but busy designs. Web 2.0 is many of the web apps you see today, where you don’t need to load a page to fetch new content, but instead asynchronous JavaScript grabs it and edits the html — think gmail or Google maps. Web 3.0 is unclear to me, but it seems like most people who use it refer to decentralized or peer to peer applications and crypto.

New comment by ohxh in "Show HN: Thoughts on Flash in 2023, in Flash, in 2023"

ohxh — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 05:28:45 +0000

You've made something really cool here. Watching transfixed me in a way similar to a video exhibition I saw at the Tate Modern when I was younger. It was a loop with footage of a JAXA rocket launch, an anti-nuclear protest after the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster, and the eruption of a volcano, with narration from a shaman in Japanese (subtitled) contemplating our relationship with nature. "Transit" by Susan Norrie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TS3d4URcB4&t=173s

Aligning ML systems with human intent

ohxh — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 23:19:34 +0000

Article URL: https://jsteinhardt.stat.berkeley.edu/talks/satml/tutorial.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35349486

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by ohxh in "Room Generation Using Constraint Satisfaction"

ohxh — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 16:59:34 +0000

There’s an interesting approach similar to this called Wave Function Collapse [1] (no relation to wfc in physics besides inspiration). It can infer the probabilistic constraints from one input example, and it seems to generalize quite well. Here’s a little demo: https://oskarstalberg.com/game/wave/wave.html

[1] https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air (2020)

ohxh — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 18:56:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-can-explain-why-planes-stay-in-the-air/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34550139

Points: 11

# Comments: 20