Hacker News: rryan

New comment by rryan in "Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR"

rryan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:45:41 +0000

As a human emdash enjoyer, I'm pretty damn grumpy that everyone assumes I'm a chatbot now. :P

New comment by rryan in "Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR"

rryan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:51:09 +0000

I think the super long timelines in automotive make it really hard to succeed. Really impressed with what ClearMotion accomplished given that

Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR

rryan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:07:38 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.zacka.io/p/simplify-then-add-lightness-bc4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676557

Points: 114

# Comments: 26

New comment by rryan in "The bitter lesson is coming for tokenization"

rryan — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 05:38:50 +0000

Don't make me tap the sign: There is no such thing as "bytes". There are only encodings. UTF-8 is the encoding most people are using when they talk about modeling "raw bytes" of text. UTF-8 is just a shitty (biased) human-designed tokenizer of the unicode codepoints.

New comment by rryan in "Transformers Without Normalization"

rryan — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 06:50:46 +0000

RMSNorm is pretty insigificant in terms of the overall compute in a transformer though -- usually the reduction work can be fused with earlier or later operations.

New comment by rryan in "Can Gemini 1.5 read all the Harry Potter books at once?"

rryan — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 04:30:32 +0000

ML 101: Do not evaluate on the training data.

Yes of course it can, because they fit in the context window. But this is an awful test of the model's capabilities because it was certainly trained on these books and websites talking about the books and the HP universe.

New comment by rryan in "(next Rich)"

rryan — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 15:03:08 +0000

Thanks for everything, Rich. You inspired me repeatedly.

New comment by rryan in "Foundation models are going multimodal"

rryan — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 20:43:12 +0000

https://elevenlabs.io/

https://twelvelabs.io/

.... wat

New comment by rryan in "Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore"

rryan — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 05:07:25 +0000

Yea uh, don't know what was going on there but there are roles with direct reports that aren't in mountain view (unless you mean, like in 2004). NYC has 1000s of googlers.

New comment by rryan in "AudioGPT: Understanding and Generating Speech, Music, Sound, and Talking Head"

rryan — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 06:32:09 +0000

This is ... not what I expected. It's basically wiring up pre-trained models to ChatGPT via a router and "modality transformations" (a.k.a speech-to-text and text-to-speech).

I expected it to be a GPT-style model that processes audio directly to perform a ton of speech and maybe speech-text tasks in a zero-shot manner.

New comment by rryan in "$6.96B was raised by private longevity companies in 2022"

rryan — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 03:40:40 +0000

Except when your doctor won't prescribe it you offlabel because you don't have a condition they were taught about in med school

New comment by rryan in "Ask HN: Google spam filter getting worse?"

rryan — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 17:41:33 +0000

In the past few months I've been getting much more fake order / payment spam.

New comment by rryan in "Neurons in a dish learn to play Pong"

rryan — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 18:19:40 +0000

I agree that a Transformer is an example of a "reflexive" behavior because it learns to react in a context (via gradient descent rather than evolution as the learning algorithm). It's a conditional categorical distribution on steroids.

I also agree it's not much different than what's going on in this petri dish with pong.

But I don't think that's a profound statement.

What I'm saying is that calling what a Transformer does "language development" isn't accurate. A Transformer can't "develop" language in that sense, it can only learn "reflexive" behavior from the data distribution it's trained on (it could never have produced that data distribution itself without the data existing in the first place).

New comment by rryan in "Neurons in a dish learn to play Pong"

rryan — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 05:52:24 +0000

There's a huge difference between fitting a probabilistic model to a data distribution then sampling from it (what GPT-3 is) and agents that invent language and use it to communicate.

New comment by rryan in "Show HN: Nevermind XOR – Deep Learning Has an Issue with Sin"

rryan — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 04:14:46 +0000

You're using a pointwise loss, which means you are treating each timepoint as conditionally independent. That's a deeply flawed assumption, probabilistically.

Try an autoregressive model of the joint probability distribution of the sine wave timepoints -- like WaveNet [1]. It will nail your sine wave -- just as it nails mixtures of sine waves (speech and music). :)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03499

New comment by rryan in "Goodbye, Feedly"

rryan — Sat, 02 Jul 2022 15:49:40 +0000

"I could go pro, but nah" -- I read this and closed the tab. What a whingefest from a free tier user.

The Reddit crawling problem is because Reddit rate limits their crawling so they have to prioritize the most popular feeds. What's the problem with linking your account, or making a dedicated feedly throwaway for crawling?

Been a pro user since the beginning because I want the service to stick around. It works just as well as it always has and I don't mind that they're adding new features even if they aren't for me.

Sheesh.

New comment by rryan in "Vanced Discontinuation"

rryan — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 01:47:10 +0000

That makes no sense. Why is "YouTube Premium" capitalized?

New comment by rryan in "Vanced Discontinuation"

rryan — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 01:45:10 +0000

> The main source of income for youtube isn't ads. YouTube revolves around the merchandise and YouTube Premium subscriptions.

> If you are talking about creators who are not earning money for using vanced, you should know they won't make millions out of those ads.

... right. Feel free to keep telling yourselves that.

New comment by rryan in "Light exposure during sleep impairs cardiometabolic function"

rryan — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 05:50:36 +0000

N=20

New comment by rryan in "NewPipe: A lightweight YouTube experience for Android"

rryan — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 08:06:30 +0000

* YouTube Kids with allowlist.

* App Timer of zero minutes on YouTube app.