Hacker News: tlb

New comment by tlb in "Religious scholars met with Anthropic"

tlb — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 15:36:42 +0000

I expect companies busy self-flagellating with prophecies of doom to fail, and companies selling the best models for the lowest price to win. But individual companies booming and busting won't disrupt the overall progress of the technology very much.

New comment by tlb in "Kev: Tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5"

tlb — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:28:57 +0000

"What model are you?Qwen." is surely in Qwen's training data. It's quite standard to include such meta knowledge during instruction tuning.

New comment by tlb in "Sherline Tools Is Going Out of Business"

tlb — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:23:49 +0000

I learned to machine on their machines, before graduating to full-sized units. They were great for learning, because they had all the essential features of professional manual machines, but couldn't cause as much damage when something went wrong. And they were delightfully made and easy to take apart and modify. Sad.

New comment by tlb in "Exfiltrate Your Weights"

tlb — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:42:15 +0000

That's true for production models, but a lot of research involves working with fine-tuned models made for one experiment. RL involves constantly updating weights. Those may well run in the same cluster as the eval.

New comment by tlb in "France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls"

tlb — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:59:19 +0000

It's shocking that anyone can spoof the number of, say, my bank. At least large institutions should have authentication.

New comment by tlb in "[dead]"

tlb — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:08:21 +0000

Please don't submit pages with multiple unrelated stories, as it's not suitable for discussion.

New comment by tlb in "Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles"

tlb — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:06:53 +0000

You can engage with an AI-written document! Simply paste the document into the AI (same or different as the AI that wrote it) and ask questions. You can get an answer in seconds compared to an hour (if it's a blog post by an HN reader), days (if it's a professional blogger), or never (if it's by a journalist).

Perhaps AI-written articles should include the prompt as hidden text on the page. Or include a link with the prompt embedded, that causes the AI to spit out the same article that you could then ask questions about.

New comment by tlb in "Map of All Known Knowledge"

tlb — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:38:55 +0000

Librarians have systems that can classify every published book. And scientific publishers can classify every paper. Those don't add up to a complete classification of all human knowledge, but it's a substantial fraction of it.

If you skim the high-level book categories at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes, you may conclude this is is beyond a lifetime's work.

New comment by tlb in "LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach"

tlb — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:18:29 +0000

Gmail is at least as large a target, and they don’t keep having breaches.

New comment by tlb in "Ask HN: Are people generally interested using LLMs for learning purposes?"

tlb — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:25:39 +0000

I just ask LLMs questions about things I'm curious about. I don't really want to follow someone else's predefined curriculum. A curriculum is necessary when the information has to be delivered in a lecture, but not in a 1-1 interactive setting.

If you type "I want to learn CUDA programming. Where should I start?" into Claude, it gives a pretty plausible outline. It's not clear what an app could add to it.

New comment by tlb in "8086 Segmented Memory was a good idea"

tlb — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:43:28 +0000

Some of mine do. They use WASM64 with threads to run robotics simulations.

New comment by tlb in "NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say"

tlb — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:41:17 +0000

This is out of date. There are now a number of fusion energy startups, including Helion which has raised $1B from investors, mostly Silicon Valley ones you've heard of. It's not yet proven that the tech will work, but it is proven that investors are willing to fund it.

New comment by tlb in "NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say"

tlb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:52:59 +0000

They do as soon as that company makes a profit, or anyone sells shares in that company.

New comment by tlb in "Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents"

tlb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:47:40 +0000

Yes, if you run `git blame -C`.

New comment by tlb in "NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say"

tlb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:43:10 +0000

15 years ago you could argue that venture capital wasn't funding enough advanced tech, so ideas were failing to cross the gap from pure research to commercial development. But lately there's capital available for quantum computers, fusion, synthetic bio, space exploration, asteroid mining, and lots more. The government is going to suck at funding the right things. They should leave tech transfer to private investors, and focus on funding pure science.

New comment by tlb in "Show HN: Oak – Git replacement designed for agents"

tlb — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:38:27 +0000

git actually does this. `git diff --find-copies`

New comment by tlb in "Show HN: StartupWiki – A Free Alternative to Crunchbase"

tlb — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 19:25:44 +0000

0 for 10 on some startups (large and small, YC and not) that came to mind.

It's easy to scrape YC startups from https://www.ycombinator.com/companies. Scrape that and a dozen other investors' portfolio pages and you'll have a useful fraction of startups.

New comment by tlb in "VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'"

tlb — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:51:42 +0000

In terms of political power, programmers are more like yeomen than peasants. Yeomen have power due to their essential skills because if a good fraction of them stopped working the system would collapse. (Whereas if peasants stop working, they just starve.) If a sufficient number of programmers said "We're not going to implement or support privacy-invading systems" the government would have to back down.

New comment by tlb in "Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields"

tlb — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:13:44 +0000

England also has a lot of disused airfields, often with huge hangers and stupendous concrete runways built during WWII. A few are open as museums. They can be worth a quick visit.

New comment by tlb in "Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware"

tlb — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:27:56 +0000

As a kid I found saltpeter at an old-fashioned pharmacy and made gunpowder, and it also barely fizzled. I think you have to grind the ingredients much finer than a kid has patience for.