Hacker News: stormfather

New comment by stormfather in "Ultrathin business card runs a fluid simulation"

stormfather — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:54:02 +0000

Just go to Perplexity or something like that, its well trodden ground. And essentially, what you're doing is discretizing the relevant differential equations and getting that to run in a 2D or 3D cellular automaton.

I'll give you a simple example. For diffusion of heat between 2 points, the rate of change (first derivative) is proportional to the difference in temp between them. So you make an update rule for points on a grid that says "calc the average difference of a cell's temp with that of its neighbors, multiply by some constant, and that is the amount to update this cell at this time. Run that for every cell in parallel, many times." Then you tack on a visualization and you can watch the heat diffuse. A fun example would be the cooling of the proto-Earth. You can watch the crust form.

Heat diffusion is a good starter problem. So is gravitational interaction.

New comment by stormfather in "Why U.S. dominance at sea is shrinking"

stormfather — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 16:16:09 +0000

The entire model of sea-borne power projection has changed. What does it mean when hypersonic missiles can be fitted with optical sensors to autonomously target ships? It means carriers now are about as useful as battleships in WW2. Nobody knows who can dominate which parts of the world ocean anymore.

New comment by stormfather in "Ask HN: What are your thoughts on the impact of AI on programming careers?"

stormfather — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:02:57 +0000

I am in denial.

New comment by stormfather in "Grok 4 Launch [video]"

stormfather — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 19:26:29 +0000

I find for auto turn detection, models work better if you put in the system prompt "if it seems the user hasnt completed their thought yet, output silence". This hack works around their compulsive need to output something.

What is SOTA for retrieval in RAG systems now?

stormfather — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 17:34:58 +0000

Have there been significant improvements this year?

The simple flow we landed on in 2024 was:

1. Chunk and embed docs with embedding model 2. Embed query (maybe using an LLM to reformulate first) 3. Retrieve N1 docs using cosine similarity 4. Narrow to N2 using a reranking model 5. Inject these docs into context to generate answer

Have there been significant advancements? Has anyone had seen improvements using graph structures like Neo4j for more sophisticated retrieval?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457380

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by stormfather in "When the digital nomad dream turns sour"

stormfather — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 15:24:59 +0000

I lived with a host family in Lima for 9 months on their roof. They treated me like a son. Extreme tourism.

New comment by stormfather in "Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?"

stormfather — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:24:58 +0000

I would try the Qwen models before LLaVa

Do you need the embeddings to be private? Or just the photos?

New comment by stormfather in "IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites"

stormfather — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 15:55:43 +0000

The point is to colonize Gaza, they won't irradiate it first.

New comment by stormfather in "IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites"

stormfather — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 15:23:40 +0000

Netanyahu, when addressing the troops, even said "Do not forget what Amalek has done to you", invoking the memory of the biblical commandment to genocide the Amalekites.

New comment by stormfather in "New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles"

stormfather — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 02:47:01 +0000

Does anyone think this is about anything other than stamping out criticism of Israel?

New comment by stormfather in "Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers"

stormfather — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:59:30 +0000

Is this really that bad for Google? Do Perplexity and OpenAI use paid SERP API under the hood? Google doesn't have to make money from ads on search, if its paid search.

New comment by stormfather in "Defiant loyalists paid dearly for choosing wrong side in the American Revolution"

stormfather — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:22:45 +0000

Ghislaine Maxwell, for instance, was a mod on /r/worldnews and one of the most prolific posters.

New comment by stormfather in "The child-like role of dogs in Western societies"

stormfather — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:15:46 +0000

No, I (the child) am the dog that would die if it weren't fed in this situation. Sorry that was confusing.

New comment by stormfather in "The child-like role of dogs in Western societies"

stormfather — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:10:56 +0000

Idk, my dad was my best friend growing up and I never fed him.

New comment by stormfather in "What if you could do it all over? (2020)"

stormfather — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:40:17 +0000

Please say more

New comment by stormfather in "OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to "subhuman" men"

stormfather — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 15:25:22 +0000

I'm curious what your viewpoint is here. Is human extinction a bad thing? And if not, do you care if it's your own descendants thriving, versus the descendants of an immigrant?

New comment by stormfather in "Starship Flight 9 booster explodes on impact [video]"

stormfather — Wed, 28 May 2025 13:49:38 +0000

Electric cars are mainstream now. Reusable rockets are real. Twitter won an election and spawned XAI. Elon is the richest man in the world. Yeah bro, he's a moron. Sure.

New comment by stormfather in "People who believe that AI might become conscious"

stormfather — Mon, 26 May 2025 19:30:46 +0000

If you had a robot doing all the computations of a LLM on pencil and paper instead of GPUs, would anyone think it was conscious?

New comment by stormfather in "Death of Michael Ledeen, maker of the phony case for the invasion of Iraq"

stormfather — Sun, 25 May 2025 16:24:09 +0000

I've never understood what the real reason we invaded was. I just know it wasn't what we said, or oil.

New comment by stormfather in "Qwen3 Technical Report [pdf]"

stormfather — Wed, 14 May 2025 02:08:26 +0000

This makes me think the first to make a really successful model will be the ones to pony up to get human feedback at scale from the smartest humans instead of what they do now.