helltone's comments

helltone | 1 month ago | on: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

I'm building in robotics. Setting up a new 3d camera today. I found that the 10m active USB C cable that I bought transfers power in both directions, but only transfers data in one direction, it turns out to be some weird video USB variant. Next I needed to plug a gripper into a modbus controller. That uses an M8 8-pole 20cm cable. The controller manufacturer recently decided to switch from male to female connector, so now the cable needs to be male-male. After searching online for hours, I believe that is impossible to find as everyone only sells male-female cables.

I'm continuously surprised by how difficult it is to plug things together and how non-descriptive cable "standards" are about the actual capabilities of cables and connectors.

helltone | 2 months ago | on: Why C++ programmers keep growing fast despite competition, safety, and AI

Is there anything like a linter to force you to stay within some subset of c++? I like the language, but it is hard to avoid language constructs that are outdated or enforce a single (or a few) ways of doing things. A c++ subset could be nice.

helltone | 3 months ago | on: UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales

In the UK, probably nuclear.

helltone | 4 months ago | on: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

The goal of automation is not necessarily reduce personnel, it could be increased reliability, reduced risk to life, reducing waste from scraps, faster lead time, etc

helltone | 4 months ago | on: America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom

Do you have some references for the pick and place and other reconfiguration things you mentioned. I've been out of this space for a while but last I checked these were still incredibly challenging things to get right.

helltone | 6 months ago | on: Weaponizing image scaling against production AI systems

No amount of fine-tuning can prevent models from doing anything. All it can do is reduce the likelihood of exploits happening, while also increasing the surprise factor when they inevitably do. This is a fundamental limitation.

helltone | 6 months ago | on: Show HN: Luminal – Open-source, search-based GPU compiler

Right I think I see it.

This is insanely cool.

But then there are performance tradeoffs in reusing intermediates vs recomputing that I think you can't represent.

Some of these may affect numerical stability btw. See eg https://herbie.uwplse.org/

There is so much potential in this project.

helltone | 6 months ago | on: Show HN: Luminal – Open-source, search-based GPU compiler

I have a background in program analysis, but I'm less familiar with the kind of kernels you are optimising.

- Can you give some more insight on why 12 ops suffice for representing your input program?

- With such a small number of ops, isn't your search space full of repeat patterns? I understand the will to have no predefined heuristics, but it seems that learning some heuristics/patterns would massively help reduce the space.

helltone | 6 months ago | on: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

This heavily depends on share classes and preferences. Surely the new investor wants better terms. The issue isn't so much dilution as a preference but added risk of never even getting a payout at all.

helltone | 7 months ago | on: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years

This resonates with me a lot. Can I contact you? My email is in my profile.

helltone | 7 months ago | on: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans

Every time I see these headlines, the tech seems to be at least 10 years away from product.

- demos done in a lab controlled environment without the crazy things that happen in a real world.

- no humans nearby so none of the safety features that would be needed should this thing work alongside/near humans.

- no regards for economics, expensive vision models, expensive hardware, no consideration for maintenance and repair costs

helltone | 8 months ago | on: Show HN: I built a tensor library from scratch in C++/CUDA

This is very cool. I'm wondering if some of the templates and switch statements would be nicer if there was an intermediate representation and a compiler-like architecture.

I'm also curious about how this compares to something like Jax.

Also curious about how this compares to zml.

helltone | 9 months ago | on: Gradients Are the New Intervals

No? Or maybe I'm missing something. If the goal is to be able to bound the computation of f, you can:

1) compute f with interval arithmetic

2) compute f normally and f' with interval arithmetic

3) compute f rounding towards zero, compute f' from f rounded towards infinity, and round f' up (if f positive) or round f' down (if f negative).

In all 3 cases you can use what you computed to figure out bounds on f, (1) is direct, the other two need extra work.

helltone | 9 months ago | on: Gradients Are the New Intervals

I think perhaps this could be done in other ways that don't require interval arithmetic for autodiff, only that the gradient is conservatively computed, in other words carrying the numerical error from f into f'

helltone | 9 months ago | on: Capalyze – Natural language data analysis

How does the chart generation work under the hood? It's quite magical. Also how did you build the spreadsheet interface it's very cool.

helltone | 9 months ago | on: Ask HN: Anyone working in traditional ML/stats research instead of LLMs?

I'm building a tool to make ml on tabular data (forecasting, imputation, etc) easier and more accessible. The goal is to go from zero to a basic working model in minutes, even if the initial model is not perfect, and then iteratively improve the model step by step, while continuously evaluating each step with metrics and comparisons to the previous model. So it's less ml foundation research, and more trying to package it in a user friendly way with a nice workflow, but if that's interesting feel free to reach out (email in profile).

helltone | 10 months ago | on: Type-constrained code generation with language models

Backtracking idea is interesting, could maybe diffusion help? At some point it turns into sat solving.

helltone | 10 months ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)

Can I reach out to you directly to hear more? My email is on my profile.

helltone | 11 months ago | on: AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please

How do you modify ASTs?

helltone | 1 year ago | on: Decompiling 2024: A Year of Resurgance in Decompilation Research

Program equivalence is undecidable, in general, but also in practice (in my experience) most interesting cases quickly escalate to require an unreasonable amount of compute. Personally, I think it is easier to produce correct-by-construction decompilation by applying sequences of known-correct transformations, rather than trying to reconstruct correctness a posteriori. So perhaps the LLM could produce such sequence of transforms rather than outputting the final decompiled program only.