<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: ubutler</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ubutler</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 30 Oct 2026 10:15:58 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=ubutler" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ubutler in "The case of the 9 bit AES key"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Rule #1 of rolling your own RNG: don’t.<p>Rule #2? Please don’t.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:27:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50281821</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50281821</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50281821</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[What are vector embeddings? An interactive guide]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://isaacus.com/blog/what-are-vector-embeddings">https://isaacus.com/blog/what-are-vector-embeddings</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50239509">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50239509</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 26 Oct 2026 05:29:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://isaacus.com/blog/what-are-vector-embeddings</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50239509</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50239509</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ubutler in "Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If anything, the latest generation of AI models, Astra and Fable, are prime example of overfitting—whereas benchmarks suggest they’re AGI-tier, users (including myself) report the same old gaslighting, hallucination, context rot, cheating, incomprehensibility patterns as with prior models, sometimes even more pronounced.<p>Fable and Opus 5, I suspect, will become textbook examples of RL collapse.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:25:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705049</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705049</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705049</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ubutler in "[dead]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just a word of advice, it could go a long way to have a human write the README rather than an LLM.<p>Right now, it’s a little hard to follow what the actual findings are, why they are what they are, and why that’s important.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:37:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204544</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204544</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204544</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ubutler in "Australia probes mystery space balls that washed up on beach"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The six solid objects discovered on Forrest Beach, to the north of Townsville, are thought to be space debris, and the Australian Space Agency (ASA) is now trying to determine where they came from. The BBC has approached the agency for comment.<p>Off-topic but this is the first time I’m learning we (Australia) have a space agency :O</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:48:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48799147</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48799147</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48799147</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[A Source of Mysterious Repeating Radio Signals from Space Has Been Identified]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/a-source-of-mysterious-repeating-radio-signals-from-space-has-been-identified/">https://www.wired.com/story/a-source-of-mysterious-repeating-radio-signals-from-space-has-been-identified/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637270">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637270</a></p>
<p>Points: 4</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:32:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.wired.com/story/a-source-of-mysterious-repeating-radio-signals-from-space-has-been-identified/</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637270</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637270</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Google Can't Math Parsecs]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BmqzjcD4tGvy3bim8/google-can-t-math-parsecs">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BmqzjcD4tGvy3bim8/google-can-t-math-parsecs</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48614742">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48614742</a></p>
<p>Points: 13</p>
<p># Comments: 4</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 21 Jun 2026 01:16:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BmqzjcD4tGvy3bim8/google-can-t-math-parsecs</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48614742</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48614742</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ubutler in "Our response to the US ban on Fable 5 and Mythos 5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Sounds nice except that these are 1 very small scale model, 1 reranker, and 1 embedding model that are far from frontier LLM level.<p>We've tried to take a first-principles approach to our end goal of 'legal superintelligence' that has involved identifying the areas of our domain most in need of improvement and releasing models that raise the bar on quality in those areas.<p>We've been around for a couple months now and ended up starting with retrieval and enrichment. The models we've released to tackle those problems have indeed been smaller in size than their competitors, yet they still rank ahead on open-source benchmarks.<p>Them being so small also helps with their accessibility — as I mention in our post, our models can be deployed on ordinary hardware, not a supercomputer.<p>Next on our roadmap is reasoning and research, which will require more infrastructure to support, but again, we aim to be judged by performance at the time of release.<p>> As much as I agree with the message, this reads like marketing copy trying to make a big deal out of a tiny model being hosted privately.<p>The point of this point is really just to reaffirm our commitment to sovereignty and accessibility and contrast our approach with that of major AI labs. It _is_ possible to commercialize LLMs while still keeping them accessible. A customer using a self-hosted deployment today does not need to worry about our models no longer being available tomorrow. We think that's a good thing. And moving forward, we want to keep that option available for anything we do, instead of trying to pull up the ladder while we're ahead.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:07:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513879</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513879</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513879</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ubutler in "Our response to the US ban on Fable 5 and Mythos 5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Our models can be deployed on premises as well, though that is more of a bespoke offering at the moment. We've also been fortunate enough to have trained most of our models on our own private infrastructure. Your question raises a broader question, though, about sovereign risk attached to cloud services in general. For some, particularly governments, sensitivity is so high that certain workloads must run fully on their own hardware. I don't see that changing for now, and, in fact, in certain jurisdictions, the trend is turning against cloud services.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 05:54:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513784</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513784</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513784</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Our response to the US ban on Fable 5 and Mythos 5]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://isaacus.com/blog/our-response-to-the-us-ban-on-fable-5-and-mythos-5">https://isaacus.com/blog/our-response-to-the-us-ban-on-fable-5-and-mythos-5</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512915">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512915</a></p>
<p>Points: 98</p>
<p># Comments: 21</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 03:59:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://isaacus.com/blog/our-response-to-the-us-ban-on-fable-5-and-mythos-5</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512915</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48512915</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Blackstone Graph]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://isaacus.com/blog/announcing-the-blackstone-graph">https://isaacus.com/blog/announcing-the-blackstone-graph</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48396657">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48396657</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:33:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://isaacus.com/blog/announcing-the-blackstone-graph</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48396657</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48396657</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Ask HN: What are Stainless users doing now that Anthropic has killed it?]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hey HN,
Two days ago, Anthropic bought Stainless and then immediately killed it. Stainless offered the ability to take an OpenAPI spec and automatically turn it into SDKs in almost any language, plus an MCP server.<p>My company makes legal AI models that we serve through an API. All our SDKs we're generated by Stainless. Those SDKs are in active use in production and, come September, will need to be maintained by someone other than Stainless.<p>We're not the only ones in this boat. OpenAI and Google also relied on Stainless.<p>What are other users planning on doing now that Stainless is gone?<p>We're hoping that a competitor or open-source community ends up taking on the mission of ensuring backwards compatibility or, at the very least, as seamless a migration as possible. If that doesn't get pulled off soon though, we may be forced into either completely breaking existing code or else maintaining everything by hand — the very thing Stainless was meant to take off our plate.<p>Has anyone else thought of better options yet?</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48202774">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48202774</a></p>
<p>Points: 5</p>
<p># Comments: 3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 03:28:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48202774</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48202774</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48202774</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ubutler in "The case for zero-error horizons in trustworthy LLMs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>ChatGPT already does this, albeit in limited circumstances, through the use of its sandbox environment. Asking GPT in thinking mode to, for example, count the number of “l”s in a long text may see it run a Python script to do so.<p>There’s a massive issue with extrapolating to more complex tasks, however, where either you run the risk of prompt injection via granting your agent access to the internet or, more commonly, an exponential degradation in coherence over long contexts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:48:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626626</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626626</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626626</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Introducing AI chunking to semchunk]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://isaacus.com/blog/introducing-ai-chunking-to-semchunk">https://isaacus.com/blog/introducing-ai-chunking-to-semchunk</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47485929">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47485929</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:02:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://isaacus.com/blog/introducing-ai-chunking-to-semchunk</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47485929</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47485929</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Isaacus – the legal AI research company]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hey HN,
This is Isaacus, a legal AI research company that my brother, Abdur-Rahman Butler, and I, Umar Butler, founded last year and have been working full time on ever since.<p>We make legal AI models. We recently released two state-of-the-art legal information retrieval models, Kanon 2 Embedder and Kanon 2 Reranker. Together, they rank first on Legal RAG Bench and the Massive Legal Embedding Benchmark (MLEB).<p>We also recently released Kanon 2 Enricher, an entirely new type of AI model capable of transforming lengthy, unstructured legal documents into highly structured knowledge graphs. We had the pleasure of having Harvey, KPMG Law, Alvarez & Marsal, Clifford Chance, Clyde & Co, Carey Olsen, Smokeball, and Moonlit be part of the closed beta for that model.<p>We're proud supporters of open source and maintain popular legal and AI datasets and libraries like the Open Australian Legal Corpus and the semchunk semantic chunking algorithm, together downloaded over one million times a month.<p>Our core mission is to solve every common data- and AI-related pain point of the legal tech industry. Uniquely, we're focused primarily on serving the legal tech industry rather than lawyers per se.<p>We, therefore, view folks like Harvey and Legora as customers instead of competitors.<p>In the few months since we've been around, we've witnessed massive growth in usage of our models by other new legal tech startups. We think our industry is only going to get bigger, particularly as more accessible legal services make their way into the hands of end consumers and enterprises instead of law firms.<p>We see ourselves as best placed to serve the needs of our industry given our strong experience and expertise in AI and law. I previously led all national-level AI projects at the Australian Attorney-General's Department as a senior data scientist while also holding an honors degree in law. My brother, in turn, is skilled in economics, data science, and AI.<p>We're currently working on scaling up our team to meet the growing demand we're seeing as well as help build out the next stage of our roadmap, which includes a first-of-a-kind knowledge graph of laws, decisions, and contracts from around the world, as well as the first legal reasoning model.<p>If you align with our mission and would like to partner with us or be part of our team, you can reach out at hello@isaacus.com.</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320176">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320176</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 07:43:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://isaacus.com/</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320176</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320176</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ubutler in "Show HN: Kanon 2 Enricher – the first hierarchical graphitization model"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is called a lexical innovation ;). <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_innovation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_innovation</a>.<p>We'd argue it makes a lot of sense to appropriate 'graphitization' as a term for a model designed to transform data into knowledge graphs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 02:43:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270189</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270189</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270189</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ubutler in "Show HN: Kanon 2 Enricher – the first hierarchical graphitization model"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Also, you really want to tell people how to access it and what it costs. Or put up a "call for quote" if your market is large Enterprise budgets.<p>Our pricing page can be found in our documentation here: <a href="https://docs.isaacus.com/pricing/prices" rel="nofollow">https://docs.isaacus.com/pricing/prices</a>. We're planning on making it more visible on our website; thanks for the feedback!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 02:39:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270150</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270150</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270150</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ubutler in "Show HN: Kanon 2 Enricher – the first hierarchical graphitization model"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FWIW we're planning on releasing a self-hostable version on AWS Marketplace quite soon followed by one on the Azure Marketplace. In both cases, deployments live entirely in your tenancy, are fully air-gapped (ie, they can't access the internet), and your usage is unmetered.<p>We do already have a government-facing client using one of our self-hosted deployments given the privacy and security concerns the legal industry tends to have (rightfully in our view) around AI.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 02:37:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270138</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270138</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270138</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Kanon 2 Enricher – the first hierarchical graphitization model]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hey HN,
This is Kanon 2 Enricher, the first hierarchical graphitization model. It represents an entirely new class of AI models designed to transform document corpora into rich, highly structured knowledge graphs.<p>In brief, our model is capable of:
- Entity extraction, classification, and linking: identifying key entities like individuals, companies, governments, locations, dates, documents, and more, and classifying and linking them together.
- Hierarchical segmentation: breaking a document up into its full hierarchy, including divisions, sections, subsections, paragraphs, and so on.
- Text annotation: extracting common textual elements such as headings, sigantures, tables of contents, cross-references, and the like.<p>We built Kanon 2 Enricher from scratch. Every node, edge, and label in the Isaacus Legal Graph Schema (ILGS), which is the format it outputs to, corresponds to at least one task head in our model. In total, we built 58 different task heads jointly optimized with 70 different loss terms.<p>Thanks to its novel architecture, unlike your typical LLM, Kanon 2 Enricher doesn't generate extractions token by token (which introduces the possibility of hallucinations) but instead directly classifies all the tokens in a document in a single shot. This makes it really fast.<p>Because Kanon 2 Enricher's feature set is so wide, there are a myriad of applications it can be used for, from financial forensics and due diligence all the way to legal research.<p>One of the coolest applications we've seen so far is where a Canadian government built a knowledge graph out of thousands of federal and provincial laws in order to accelerate regulatory analysis. Another cool application is something we built ourselves, a 3D interactive map of Australian High Court cases since 1903, which you can find right at the start of our announcement.<p>Our model has already been in use for the past month, since we released it through a closed beta that included Harvey, KPMG, Clifford Chance, Clyde & Co, Alvarez & Marsal, Smokeball, and 96 other design partners. Their feedback was instrumental in improving Kanon 2 Enricher before its public release, and we're immensely thankful to each and every beta participant.<p>We're eager to see what other developers manage to build with our model now that its out publicly.</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47229931">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47229931</a></p>
<p>Points: 10</p>
<p># Comments: 6</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:55:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://isaacus.com/blog/kanon-2-enricher</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47229931</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47229931</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Popular text editor Notepad++ was hacked to drop malware]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.itnews.com.au/news/popular-text-editor-notepad-was-hacked-to-drop-malware-623335">https://www.itnews.com.au/news/popular-text-editor-notepad-was-hacked-to-drop-malware-623335</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46863753">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46863753</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 1</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Feb 2026 23:26:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.itnews.com.au/news/popular-text-editor-notepad-was-hacked-to-drop-malware-623335</link><dc:creator>ubutler</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46863753</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46863753</guid></item></channel></rss>