HN Best Comments

Re: 44% on ARC-AGI-1 in 67 cents Hi! Author here. Surprised to see this on HN now. Happy to answer any questions! Some context about this: - This is NOT an LLM. its a small ar transformer trained from scratch. One of the points was that extremely complex problems can be tackled without LLMs - Till the v1 of this result, this benchmark was only scaled by LLMs or their finetunes (ofc w enormous training costs). Other attempts performed okayish but used v complex architectures or extremely high amounts of training compute. No one expected a simple AR transformer to perform this well, at this low cost and w these few training samples. - Sample Efficiency is one of the most important unsolved problems today in AI. That's what I was targetting with this work. We know it is easy to increase SE by increasing compute/params, so it was important to constrain cost as much as possible (also why OpenAI's Parameter Golf had fixed compute and why Modded NanoGPT is considered very sample efficient) - Can the perf be improved? Yes but the competition is ongoing so can't talk about it - Personally I think today's frontier models can be beat by training from scratch. Haven't proved this yet tho - Fun: I was new to ML when I posted this first (dec '25). I basically used ARC as a way to learn ML evilmathkid, 3 hours ago

Re: Fastpotify Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies". I find the Android app particularly bad, just a couple of examples: - Under a playlist you get a list of suggested songs, the UI element looks like a "regular song", but unlike every other "song" element the user has been trained to recognize, the "swipe right to queue" does not apply to these elements. For some reason. - When you don't have connectivity, e.g. you walk into a Faraday cage, then the search tries to reach the internet and won't show you results before it either: 1) does so, 2) times out. Which means you can't browse your local library before some websocket times out. Just show me the local results first? rot256, 3 hours ago

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio These companies absolutely do have people who's job it is to sit on social media and promote these products, its marketing 101 20k, 8 hours ago

Re: Fastpotify Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project that this and most third party Spotify players are built on. I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. I’ve migrated to a self hosted library with streaming and radio for discovery. I hope we’ll see many projects in the space flourish. Many, like Navidrome and the whole OpenSubsonic ecosystem, seem to be doing quite well. wilted-iris, 6 hours ago

Re: Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio I'm convinced that this is just guerilla marketing from Apple. When this started spreading a day or two ago, it was all from no-name spam media sites that are paid to publish articles. They all claimed "a source" is where they got the intel, without specifying the source. It was spreading like wildfire on socials. The same thing happened with Mac Mini's and OpenClaw. Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple marketing bots (you could tell by looking at their post history, where they would drop "Mac Mini" into every conversation they could across all different subreddits and unrelated topics). Then it became fairly common. So Apple's marketing department is seemingly using the same strategy again. Because still, it's impossible to find a reputable source for this claim. nullbio, 7 hours ago

Re: Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination Dan Ariely has a long history of controversies and studies with falsified data. He wrote 3 popular books and gained a lot of fame before others started uncovering the problems in his studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely It’s amazing that problems with his studies are still being uncovered. Equally amazing that Duke still maintains a relationship with him after so many problems have been identified with his research. Aurornis, 7 hours ago

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO Switch to firefox malfist, 6 hours ago

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO We had a glimpse of that antitrust future on the horizon with the previous admin. This spooked all the big tech weirdos so much that they put their weight behind the other guy and, well, they won. Antitrust is dead for another generation. Yay. coldpie, 4 hours ago

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO The better thing would be to hold Google directly accountable for every malicious ad they allow through their network. If they cannot do that, they should not be in business selling ads then. Yes, that means amending the law (in the US). But the law as it is written facilitates crime. cwnyth, 3 hours ago

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO Few years ago when google announced their MV2 plan I moved to Firefox. I don't think in all this time I ever missed Chrome for anything in particular outside of maybe 1 or 2 websites that didn't have proper support. Switch to Firefox if you haven't already really. Lovesong, 3 hours ago

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO Ad blocking has become a safety issue. My parents are at an age where they fall for things. If a malicious ad pops up and offers to install McAfee, some other form of crapware, or outright scamware, they'll click that ad and install the thing. Then I'll get called over when the computer starts acting screwy. If Google, MS, etc. had ever gotten together and developed a way to filter malicious ads out of their own ad services, maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation. They didn't do that and probably never will. If my parents get a new machine, the first thing I do is uninstall or, at least, delete the icons for Edge, Chrome, etc.. On goes Firefox, uBlock Origin, and a couple other extensions. They don't care what browser they use. They can't even name it. I just try to make sure they use a browser that isn't horribly unsafe. We should all do this for people we care about. Don't ask them what browser they prefer. Odds are they don't know or care. Don't try to convince them to install Firefox themselves. They won't. Just do it for them. Think of it like picking up a rusty nail that's on their lawn. Sooner or later they're going to step on that thing if you don't. beloch, 1 hour ago

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO Alphabet needs to be broken up. Chrome, Search, Android, Youtube need to be separate companies. It's not the only company that needs this treatment. bogzz, 1 hour ago

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO I remember in 2010 when Chrome made the web so much better for everyone. All the early adopters were singing its praise and encouraging friends and family to use it. Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days. gardnr, 59 minutes ago

Re: Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO I know Firefox's share of browser share has dwindled to almost nothing. I know sooner or later, well within my lifetime, it will be gone. But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information. Night_Thastus, 51 minutes ago

Re: Playa Phone I've been twice and I really enjoyed myself. Tech, finance, and political people definitely don't make up close to the majority. You'd get sort of laughed at if you tried networking earnestly about like tech stocks or LLMs. Generally I don't prefer socializing with techie types from SF, the folks I met at Burning Man were nothing of the sort. It's mostly just adults who really like dressing up, building stuff, and staying up really late dancing and partying. joenot443, 5 hours ago

Re: Playa Phone Our first time out on the playa together, my girlfriend and I stopped by this phone booth and made a couple of calls. And because we stopped, we saw the FSM camp next door, and a giant sign saying "Weddings Here", so we inquired. They offered us free rings and then announced our wedding over a loudspeaker. In 2 minutes we had an entire wedding party, complete with best man, an elder to give away the bride, 25+ guests, and an officiant. My newly-minted best man even gave me one of my favorite playa gifts ever as a wedding gift. We opted not to "make it official", though they offered. It was a truly incredible experience. Thanks FSM! solfox, 3 hours ago

Re: Playa Phone This phone is my project. I'm happy to answer questions. aaron42net, 2 hours ago

Re: “I just chose words carefully” suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically https://tom7.org/bovex/ ivw, 18 hours ago

Re: It takes 5 cloud services to hear my doorbell I am super sensitive to over engineering. For my doorbell I wanted something that lets me play a custom bell sound. You would be surprised that 99% of the solutions out there are complete over engineered stacks that depend on wifi devices, Internet access, connecting to various cloud services... So I built my own: a basic wireless button sends a radio 433 MHz signal, and my receiver is plugged inside the house and triggers an off-the-shelf playback PCB module that reads an MP3 off an SD card and plays it on a speaker wired to the module. No Wifi, no Internet, no cloud, no apps. And the rare times I want to change the sound, I update the MP3 on the SD card. Edit: there are very, very few products on the market designed as simply as this, just an R/F signal triggering local playback. I think the only commercial doorbells designed like this I found were an out-of-stock product, and a UK device designed for 230V that would have required a bulky adapter to work for me in the US. mrb, 12 hours ago

Re: “I just chose words carefully” Here is the interview where she mentions it, with the correct timestamp, backed-up just enough to give it context. https://youtu.be/d3bCel607lQ?t=1162 consumer451, 14 hours ago