Hacker News: varunneal

New comment by varunneal in "Engineers: Stop trying to win other people's game"

varunneal — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:33:02 +0000

Highly AI generated article, including the whiteboard image.

New comment by varunneal in "NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy"

varunneal — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:16:35 +0000

I think it's good to bring up Bernstein & Newhouse as well as Yuchen Jin, Jiacheng You and the other speedrunners who helped iterate on Muon. But I think it's very fair to call Keller Jordan the main author of Muon of its current form. I'm also in the speedrunning community though maybe not as long as you have

New comment by varunneal in "NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy"

varunneal — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 20:53:56 +0000

Muon was invented by Keller Jordan (and then optimized by others) for the sake of this speedrunning competition. Even though it was invented less than a year ago, it has already been widely adopted as SOTA for model training

New comment by varunneal in "Try and"

varunneal — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 14:26:38 +0000

I think this is a different construction. "And" in "try and find out" is acting as a conjunction, separating two different actions

New comment by varunneal in "Building MCP servers for ChatGPT and API integrations"

varunneal — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 21:44:18 +0000

this guide is just for an example of how to build a single mcp (e.g. a vector store). chatgpt connectors implement mcps in general now

New comment by varunneal in "uv: An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust"

varunneal — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:17:21 +0000

claude sonnet typically forgets about uv script syntax in my experience. I usually find myself having to paste in the docs every time. By default it wants to use uv project syntax.

New comment by varunneal in "Tetrachromatic Vision"

varunneal — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 21:58:14 +0000

Not publicly, but a few people in berkeley are working on it. Here is a paper from last year: https://imjal.github.io/theory-of-tetrachromacy. (Disclaimer: i am on this paper).

They've prototyped displays that can test for it as well.

New comment by varunneal in "Gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05"

varunneal — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 17:33:29 +0000

Have you tried o3 on those problems? I've found o3 to be much more impressive than Opus 4 for all of my use cases.

New comment by varunneal in "The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe"

varunneal — Wed, 28 May 2025 19:39:03 +0000

isn't this survivorship bias? e.g. people who genuinely feel highly nihilistic, that there is no order, structure, meaning, etc. are very unlikely to be successful--and also unlikely to continue choosing to be alive

New comment by varunneal in "Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre"

varunneal — Fri, 23 May 2025 14:37:08 +0000

How can reason give us shared values across cultures? Why do you suppose your moral clarity was generated from your brain and not your gut?

New comment by varunneal in "Claude 4"

varunneal — Thu, 22 May 2025 20:17:34 +0000

Why is o3-mini there but not o3?

New comment by varunneal in "Teachable Machine"

varunneal — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:16:10 +0000

I believe this is from 2019 or 2020. Any LLM e.g. Gemini could one shot any problem here, I believe.

New comment by varunneal in "PDF to Text, a challenging problem"

varunneal — Wed, 14 May 2025 14:29:32 +0000

I'll check it out!

New comment by varunneal in "Starcloud"

varunneal — Tue, 13 May 2025 22:13:12 +0000

I'll take the long side on that bet

New comment by varunneal in "PDF to Text, a challenging problem"

varunneal — Tue, 13 May 2025 18:40:54 +0000

I've been hacking away at trying to process PDFs into Markdown, having encountered similar obstacles to OP regarding header detection (and many other issues). OCR is fantastic these days but maintaining a global structure to the document is much trickier. Consistent HTML seems still out of reach for large documents. I'm having half-decent results with Markdown using multiple passes of an LLM to extract document structure and feeding it in contextually for page-by-pass extraction.

New comment by varunneal in "Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup"

varunneal — Thu, 01 May 2025 15:27:34 +0000

hey there's preview

New comment by varunneal in "Python's new t-strings"

varunneal — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:37:31 +0000

Would be interested in inclusion of PEP 292 [1] in your discussion here, which introduced `string.Template`. Is this Template going to be deprecated?

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0292/

New comment by varunneal in "OpenAI Audio Models"

varunneal — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 17:38:48 +0000

One of the most novel demos I've seen openai ship in a few years. I love how it looks almost like a synth. Fun to play around with!

New comment by varunneal in "Strobelight: A profiling service built on open source technology"

varunneal — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 15:32:18 +0000

Cool anecdote from inside article

> A seasoned performance engineer was looking through Strobelight data and discovered that by filtering on a particular std::vector function call (using the symbolized file and line number) he could identify computationally expensive array copies that happen unintentionally with the ‘auto’ keyword in C++.

> The engineer turned a few knobs, adjusted his Scuba query, and happened to notice one of these copies in a particularly hot call path in one of Meta’s largest ads services. He then cracked open his code editor to investigate whether this particular vector copy was intentional… it wasn’t.

> It was a simple mistake that any engineer working in C++ has made a hundred times.

> So, the engineer typed an “&” after the auto keyword to indicate we want a reference instead of a copy. It was a one-character commit, which, after it was shipped to production, equated to an estimated 15,000 servers in capacity savings per year!

New comment by varunneal in "Bayleaf · Building a low-profile wireless split keyboard"

varunneal — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 15:57:25 +0000

to support custom key mappings, as many people with fancy ergonomic keyboards use