Hacker News: yaroslavvb

New comment by yaroslavvb in "Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation"

yaroslavvb — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:49:55 +0000

They spent a lot of effort on consistent naming. It's basically equivalent of hundred of open source math/visualization packages merged into one, and a single person has made sure for 30 years that functionality integrates in a consistent way. It's much less overhead to remember that using a large collection of OSS libraries. So the naming structure in itself is valuable

New comment by yaroslavvb in "Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation"

yaroslavvb — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:45:43 +0000

I like this project! I've used Wolfram Language since high-school and collected a large number of notebooks that I revisit sometimes. I'm curious, what fraction of cells work under Moxi? 1,275 notebooks, 3GB archive here -- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RRqHnnCUevm7E0zKsHQvKNKxpzZ...

New comment by yaroslavvb in "The early History of the Singular Value Decomposition (1993) [pdf]"

yaroslavvb — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:43:36 +0000

You can use eigenvalue solver to find singular values of any matrix but not vica versa. Implementing eigenvalues needs complex numbers

New comment by yaroslavvb in "The early History of the Singular Value Decomposition (1993) [pdf]"

yaroslavvb — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 21:43:50 +0000

Eigenvalue are more flexible than singular values -- If you have procedure for computing eigenvalues of C, squared singular values of X are eigenvalues of C=XX'. Left and write singular vectors of X and eigenvectors of XX' and X'X. For rotation rotation matrix, singular values are all 1. Meanwhile eigenvalues tell you angles of rotation https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4874616/obtaining-a...

New comment by yaroslavvb in "I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI"

yaroslavvb — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 19:48:43 +0000

I had similar experience, Claude made report of MRI for achilles tear, it measured the gap, but it was completely hallucinated. Achilles tendon is black on the MRI, it instead measured 13mm distance between two completely different things (looked white), the radiologist looked at and saw no gap at all

New comment by yaroslavvb in "CrankGPT"

yaroslavvb — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:28:44 +0000

its real, I tried it a couple of weeks ago, asked some questions and got answers - https://x.com/yaroslavvb/status/2062692318415867983

New comment by yaroslavvb in "OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)"

yaroslavvb — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:52:28 +0000

This project gave me motivation to build the deep learning next token prediction integration for JetBrains because I was using PyCharm at the time. (Eventually, it wasn't continued because it was kind of expensive to host)

New comment by yaroslavvb in "OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)"

yaroslavvb — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:50:09 +0000

I don't hold grudge, GPT-2 wasn't that great of a model, so releasing it would be more of a publicity value. But the blog post already had that purpose.

New comment by yaroslavvb in "OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)"

yaroslavvb — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:45:47 +0000

Thanks for the share! Didn't realize eleutherai launched around same time

New comment by yaroslavvb in "OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)"

yaroslavvb — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:33:51 +0000

This was around the time I trained Transformer-XL (outside of OpenAI) with Ben Mann (https://yaroslavvb.medium.com/scaling-transformer-xl-to-128-...) . Originally we wanted to release train and release the weights as a kind of GPT-2.5, but our OpenAI friends pushed us to keep weights closed.

New comment by yaroslavvb in "God, Gold and GPUs"

yaroslavvb — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:02:50 +0000

Modern AGI discourse defies the voice of reason

God, Gold and GPUs

yaroslavvb — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:02:50 +0000

Article URL: https://yaroslavvb.substack.com/p/god-gold-and-gpus

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934781

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by yaroslavvb in "Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time"

yaroslavvb — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 12:00:33 +0000

I used to look at all TensorFlow questions when I was on the TensorFlow team (https://stackoverflow.com/tags/tensorflow/info). Unclear where people go to interact with their users now....Reddit? But the tone on Reddit is kind of negative/complainy

New comment by yaroslavvb in "EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections"

yaroslavvb — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 15:54:09 +0000

Stricter (but not looser) standards can be imposed on state level. Canada has no binding national drinking water law, they leave it to territories/provinces to decide how to implement guidelines.

New comment by yaroslavvb in "EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections"

yaroslavvb — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 15:12:18 +0000

Balancing protection against water bills - https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-announces-it-will-keep-...

New comment by yaroslavvb in "ChatGPT users shocked to learn their chats were in Google search results"

yaroslavvb — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:25:21 +0000

I've used this feature before to make my chats discoverable through search engines. I had to manually click it each time I shared, it didn't toggle on.

New comment by yaroslavvb in "Implementation of Imagen, Google's text-to-image neural network, in PyTorch"

yaroslavvb — Thu, 26 May 2022 18:10:31 +0000

Researchers like to talk about and show off their work outside the company. If you don't let them, they get unhappy and leave.

New comment by yaroslavvb in "The intellectual incoherence of cryptoassets"

yaroslavvb — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 23:22:21 +0000

The difference is that for some assets you can calculate value based on fundamentals. IE, humans need shelter, hence estimate future value of shelter (real estate) based on migration trends and other factors. How do you estimate future value of bitcoin? Lack of predictability is probably why serious investment funds don't go into crypto

New comment by yaroslavvb in "Why AI lags behind the human brain in computational power"

yaroslavvb — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 20:49:37 +0000

Realistic simulation of neurons is expensive. Back in my grad school days we ran Genesis and could afford at most 10k neurons - each neuron needs a lot of work to model the corresponding differential equations. However, it's unclear how to translate this into requirements for artificial neural networks -- the type of computation is too different.

A different metric is a more relevant goalpost -- number of synapses. If each of 125 trillion synapses in the brain can adjust its strength independently of others, it loosely corresponds to a parameter in a neural network. So if we get 100 trillion parameter networks training but still no human intelligence, we'll know conclusively that the bottleneck is something else. Currently training 1T parameter networks seem feasible

New comment by yaroslavvb in "A Field Guide to Japanese Mojibake"

yaroslavvb — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 01:26:29 +0000

It has a name too -- крякозяблики (kryakoziabliki)