Hacker News: programjames

New comment by programjames in "Heresy (2022]"

programjames — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:06:59 +0000

Yes, people can always claim that wasn't their intent, but what you see quite often nowadays is people openly saying their intent is to get people to take action. "I wouldn't personally... but I have massive respect for those who do. We need more people with the balls to do something about it."

This is probably less restrictive than you are advocating for in your previous comment: as long as there is plausible deniability, the speech goes free.

New comment by programjames in "Heresy (2022]"

programjames — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:47:29 +0000

The standard can be, "don't utter words with the intent of spurring others onto antisocial actions."

New comment by programjames in "Typing Speed Test, but for Developers"

programjames — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:42:09 +0000

Where is the "tab" autocomplete?

New comment by programjames in "The Little Book of Reinforcement Learning"

programjames — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 01:59:04 +0000

I skimmed through the book, and it's lacking the information theory foundations. For example, "trust region methods" come from maximizing the policy's relative entropy (to a reference policy) under a tournament system where high-scoring agents are exponentially likely to survive. In general, a reward is the negative bits it costs an environment to propagate an agent (multiplied by some temperature).

New comment by programjames in "GPT‑Live"

programjames — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:23:24 +0000

Standard Intelligence released one two years ago:

https://si.inc/posts/hertz-dev/

It's only 8.5B and doesn't sound like it's quite conversational.

New comment by programjames in "GPT‑Live"

programjames — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:22:12 +0000

Didn't Standard Intelligence release a duplex model two years ago? Sounds disingenuous to market this as a new generation of voice models, when it is really OpenAI finally catching up to the current generation after two years.

https://si.inc/posts/hertz-dev/

New comment by programjames in "The revenge of the philosophy majors"

programjames — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:54:40 +0000

Logicians' training is so different from philosophers' that it should be considered a separate discipline, or under the branch of computer science.

New comment by programjames in "The revenge of the philosophy majors"

programjames — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:53:29 +0000

The appearance of a logical argument is easier to achieve and often good enough for their purposes (publishing papers, winning lawsuits).

New comment by programjames in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

programjames — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:53:06 +0000

Optimizing for the metric involves:

1. Optimizing for generally applicable skills that the metric is trying to measure.

2. Optimizing adversarially to hill-climb the metric.

You want candidates to do (1) and not (2). You can make them agnostic to the second by setting

    d(expected gain)/d(opportunity cost) = 0
      ==>
    expected gain \propto opportunity cost

It is the case that most metrics are logarithmic: it takes just as much effort to decrease one bit of error as the next bit. So

    log(score) \propto (opportunity cost) \propto expected gain

Thus, for them to be agnostic, you should filter candidates proportional to their log-score on the metric (where 0 is a perfect score). Because generally applicable skills are generally applicable, they will still benefit from improving those, they just no longer benefit from adversarial optimization, unless your score function looks very similar to others who have not adopted this filtering process.

The issue with a hard cutoff is that people near the boundary are extremely incentivized to adversarially optimize, as it is usually cheaper than working on generally applicable skills and actually pays off for them. You see this phenomenon on AoPS where (esp. Californian) students talk about grinding for MATHCOUNTS instead of learning calculus.

New comment by programjames in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

programjames — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:16:47 +0000

Nondeterminism is also a feature, not a bug. If you don't want people to optimize against your filtering process, you have to make it somewhat nondeterministic. For example, better candidates are exponentially more likely to pass the filter, instead of a hard cut-off at the top-100. Then it becomes no longer worthwhile to Goodhart the filtering process, because it barely increases your chances and there are so many more places you can use your time better.

New comment by programjames in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

programjames — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:29:44 +0000

1.0 is "natural units". If your energy corresponds to nats, you should be using temperature 1.0. If your energy corresponds to bits, you should be using temperature ln(2) ~= 0.7. The optimization pressure is

     max nats = max entropy + energy / temperature

Why might energy correspond to bits or nats? Imagine your goal is to play as many interesting games of chess as possible in a tournament. This implies you have to keep winning. If you look at the RL environment from the right perspective, you can turn it into optimizing bits or nats.

New comment by programjames in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

programjames — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:14:36 +0000

You should include the error correction code length in the description length. This means Newtonian mechanics was a much longer theory to describe Mercury's orbit than general relativity. It was only the shorter theory before they had the data showing a discrepancy. Which is the correct approach to describing your reality, because until you see a discrepancy, the extensional properties all follow the shorter rules.

I guess the argument from OP would look like: "Yes, now imagine we poke and extend our universe as far as we can. How much bigger do you think our final 'shortest description' would be? I imagine it may be orders of magnitude more complex."

Well, I can imagine a squared circle... doesn't mean the math checks out. I would reply that you do not have to imagine, you can go about looking at different mathematically possible universes in Tegmark IV and find the expected number of bits for the one you actually exist in. Which is ~0 bits more complex than the shortest description based on the data you currently have.

Also, note that Newtonian mechanics is not actually a very short theory for building a universe, because you have to instantiate every object in the universe. You actually get a lot more of the structure for free with general relativity (re: Wigner's classification of the particles). An observer in a presumed-Newtonian universe calling it a simple theory would be like saying, "I compressed Wikipedia to one byte, just by putting it all in the decompiler!"

New comment by programjames in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

programjames — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:43:49 +0000

That is very unlikely due to Solomonoff induction...

New comment by programjames in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

programjames — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:43:00 +0000

You should look into Solomonoff induction. Nature and physics, absolutely, tautologically, have to follow the "shortest explanation is more likely principle".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...

New comment by programjames in "The disappearance of Japan's animators"

programjames — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:15:22 +0000

They're likely talking about style transfer from a decade ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004

New comment by programjames in "Jobs and Software Is Fucked"

programjames — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:21:23 +0000

My perspective is it is impossible to cut through the three layers of bullshit between you and anyone who knows what they are talking about. The only way to do this is with brand-name qualifications, like "MIT graduate", not things that are actually impressive. This is also why you see senior developers saying, "the offers I'm getting are bigger and bigger," meanwhile skilled younger developers need to become a marketing professional just to get an interview.

Recruiters have utterly given up on being efficient in the market. I do not know why, but there is something very wrong given "spamming the same brand-name fish all the other recruiters are spamming" is their only strategy. My guess is there is a combination of bad (or an entire lack of) hygienic data filtering and a disconnect between compensation and terminal goals (hiring the best candidates).

New comment by programjames in "U.S. science is in chaos"

programjames — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:29:45 +0000

"A handful of years"? This is like the trend in K–12 education of blaming all issues on the COVID-19 pandemic. No, education was in a visible decline for five years before COVID, which means it had probably been declining for another decade or two before that.

New comment by programjames in "πFS"

programjames — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:17:31 +0000

If you click the website's name to the right of the title, it pulls up all the submissions from the same site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl

New comment by programjames in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

programjames — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:59:30 +0000

My experience was pretty contrary to points (1) and (4). My best teachers/professors directly conveyed information or skills. I found most students did the bare minimum to pass their classes (where "pass" = "not get their parents mad"). I tried to get a CS club started at my highschool and basically no one was interested, not even my friends.

Now, I did have a great coach in middle school who "created the conditions where willing students will learn", but I don't think she would have been a good teacher. She was great at organizing club meetings, finding the right materials to study, utilizing intraclub competition to motivate everyone, and getting her former students to come back and teach in highschool. I'm sure there was a lot more going on behind the scenes that she just knew how to do right, which made the club a whole lot better. But she wasn't a teacher. Closer to an administrator, but I think "coach" in the (m)athletic sense makes the most sense.

And, this is probably why my computer science club was not the success I envisioned. Yes, people are generally underachievers, but I also did not have the coaching skills to create the conditions where people wanted to overachieve.

New comment by programjames in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

programjames — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:41:58 +0000

Your question is easily resolved by looking up how much American schools are funded, compared to historical funding, other countries' funding, and their relative successes.