Hacker News: williamtrask

New comment by williamtrask in "YC's Biggest Scandals"

williamtrask — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:28:21 +0000

The scandals/year page has a little more umph to it than the main page https://ycombinator.fyi/timeline

New comment by williamtrask in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

williamtrask — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:26:10 +0000

Yeah... probably right. I do hold out hope that this is mostly a timeframe thing. Like, the library, printing press, etc. all had their moments of centralization. But eventually they federated.

New comment by williamtrask in "YC's Biggest Scandals"

williamtrask — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:48:54 +0000

fwiw - i think the design looks good.

New comment by williamtrask in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

williamtrask — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:47:33 +0000

I wonder if a popularization moment for local AI will ultimately be the pin-prick that pops the AI bubble. Like the deepseek or openclaw moments but bigger/next.

New comment by williamtrask in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

williamtrask — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:45:50 +0000

A non-profit to deconcentrate power over AI through better infrastructure for external auditing/oversight, and better infrastructure for local/federated inference/training https://openmined.org/

Also, we're hiring engineers and PMs (the eng position is about to be up). https://openmined.org/careers/#brxe-zgsziy

New comment by williamtrask in "U.S. Senators Vote to Ban Themselves from Trading on Prediction Markets"

williamtrask — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:04:50 +0000

i like your comment better than mine. more please.

New comment by williamtrask in "U.S. Senators Vote to Ban Themselves from Trading on Prediction Markets"

williamtrask — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:02:16 +0000

i'm not sure it's productive to think this way. senators could be making more money on prediction markets. they took a nice step which will lead them to make no money on prediction markets (less money overall). it also sets a precedent which could easily be applied to the stock market.

what you're saying is probably on the mind of at least one Senator, but all things considered, this feels like a net-positive move which they didn't have to do.

New comment by williamtrask in "Mike: open-source legal AI"

williamtrask — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:34:55 +0000

Sometimes I find joy in noticing the importance of comma placement:

Everything the incumbents ship, in an open codebase your firm owns.

Everything the incumbents ship in an open codebase, your firm owns.

Decentralized AI from Scratch (Python Tutorial) [video]

williamtrask — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:47:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY2dAK-pMPI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722793

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by williamtrask in "Decentralized AI in 50 Lines of Python"

williamtrask — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:46:41 +0000

<3 - have ambitious plans to release a new video/blogpost each week, but that's pretty ambitious we'll see

Decentralized AI in 50 Lines of Python

williamtrask — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:41:13 +0000

Article URL: https://iamtrask.github.io/2026/04/07/decentralized-ai-in-50-lines/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690899

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

Decentralized AI from Scratch

williamtrask — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:49:44 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/iamtrask/decentralized-ai-from-scratch

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684935

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Zero-Setup Federated Learning: Train Models Across Private Datasets with GColab

williamtrask — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 10:45:46 +0000

Article URL: https://openmined.org/blog/zero-setup-federated-learning-google-colab/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46539543

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by williamtrask in "A website to destroy all websites"

williamtrask — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:34:19 +0000

...with a price :)

Leadership Lab: The Craft of Writing Effectively [video]

williamtrask — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:20:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452577

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by williamtrask in "Everything as code: How we manage our company in one monorepo"

williamtrask — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 21:48:57 +0000

"Conclusion Our monorepo isn't about following a trend. It's about removing friction between things that naturally belong together, something that is critical when related context is everything.

When a feature touches the backend API, the frontend component, the documentation, and the marketing site—why should that be four repositories, four PRs, four merge coordination meetings?

The monorepo isn't a constraint. It's a force multiplier."

Thank you Claude :)

New comment by williamtrask in "You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say"

williamtrask — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 13:48:05 +0000

tried searching for "noodlesUK" and didn't find anything meaningful

New comment by williamtrask in "A History of Large Language Models"

williamtrask — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 08:48:09 +0000

Nit: regarding (2), Phil Blunsom did (same Blunsom from the article, and who was leading language modeling at DeepMind for about 7-8 years). He would often opine at Oxford (where he taught) that solving next word prediction is a viable meta path to AGI. Almost nobody agreed at the time. He also called out early that scaling and better data were the key, and they did end up being, although Google wasn’t as “risk on” as OpenAI on gathering the data for GPT-1/2. Had they been history could easily have been different. People forget the position OAI was in at the time. Elon/funding had left, key talent had left. Risk appetite was high for that kind of thing… and it paid off.

The Bitter Lesson's Bitter Lesson

williamtrask — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 23:31:54 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/iamtrask/status/1972167087037808995

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45408988

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by williamtrask in "Unlocking a Million Times More Data for AI"

williamtrask — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:01:59 +0000

"This is not the reason, the reason is that this data is private. LLMs do not just learn from data, they can often reproduce it verbatim, you cannot give medical records or bank records of real people, that will put them at a very real risk."

(OP) You make great points. I think we're actually more in agreement than might be obvious. Part of the reason you need to "give" data to an LLM is because of the way LLMs are constructed... which creates the privacy risk.

The principle of attribution-based control suggested in this article would break that principle, enabling each data owner to control which AI predictions they make more intelligent (as opposed to only controlling which IA models they help train).

So to your point... this is a very rigorous privacy protection. Another way to TLDR the article is "if we get really good at privacy... there's a LOT more data out there... so let's start really caring about privacy"

Anyway... I agree with everything in your comment. Just thought I'd drop by and try to lend clarity to how the article agrees with you (sounds like there's room for improvement on how to describe attribution-based control though).