Little Short Bulletins

Most-linked posts?

1. Wikipedia search-by-vibes through millions of pages offline
   2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-01

What Hacker News says?

1. lsb · 2020-05-14

   Before starting the fast.ai deep learning course, I made a light pollution map as topography. I channelled the panic about contagion into finding somewhere with low human activity: https://leebutterman.com/light-pollution-topography/ The fast.ai course is super cool though

   Comment linking /light-pollution-topography/

   on “Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?”
2. lsb · 2019-09-06

   Submitted Let's Encrypt makes certs for 30% of web domains as a story · 673 points

   HN discussion
3. lsb · 2024-05-03

   It depends on your data and your embedding model. For example, I was able to quantize embeddings of English Wikipedia from 384-dimensions down to 48 7-bit dimensions, and the search works great: https://www.leebutterman.com/2023/06/01/offline-realtime-emb...

   Comment linking /2023/06/01/offline-realtime-embedding-search.html

   on “I’m writing a new vector search SQLite Extension”
4. lsb · 2012-09-26

   Submitted Re XKCD 936: test the safety of your passphrase entirely in your browser as a story · 29 points

   HN discussion
5. lsb · 2014-03-12

   There's a good Google Books dataset for doing exactly that, and you can doing something in Hive to get you the lowest-entropy n-grams (with something like https://github.com/lsb/text-entropy/blob/master/passphrase-s... ), and then you can the low-entropy n-grams into a Bloom filter (like http://www.leebutterman.com/passphrase-safety/how-it-works.h... ) and your enormous corpus gets fitted into a few dozen megs of me…

   Comment linking /passphrase-safety/how-it-works.html

   on “Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading”
6. gardenfelder · 2023-09-01

   Submitted Wikipedia search-by-vibes through millions of pages offline as a story · 22 points

   HN discussion
7. lsb · 2020-02-07

   StyleGAN (v2, which is this, and v1 before it) is spectacularly high quality. Even more interestingly, you can interpolate between faces very smoothly. (For instance, I was able to give some face off the street a drag makeover, by interpolating that face plus or minus the face of a drag queen minus that performer's face out of drag: https://leebutterman.com/assets/lsb5-plus-trixie-minus-brian... ) But it can be tric…

   Comment linking /assets/lsb5-plus-trixie-minus-brian.mp4

   on “This person does not exist”
8. lsb · 2020-01-30

   Submitted Show HN: Using Pandas/WebGL/SQLite to map a million new sister cities as a story · 12 points

   HN discussion
9. lsb · 2024-10-23

   I made an AI Art clock, using Stable Diffusion to render a 24-hour clock face into a landscape: https://leebutterman.com/diffusion-local-time/

   Comment linking /diffusion-local-time/

   on “Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?”
10. lsb · 2012-09-24

    Submitted Show HN: How secure is your passphrase? as a story · 9 points

    HN discussion
11. lsb · 2025-12-06

    My threshold for “does not need to be smaller” is “can this run on a Raspberry Pi”. This is a helpful benchmark for maximum likely useful optimization. A Pi has 4 cores and 16GB of memory these days, so, running Qwen3 4B on a pi is pretty comfortable: https://leebutterman.com/2025/11/01/prompt-optimization-on-a...

    Comment linking /2025/11/01/prompt-optimization-on-a-raspberry-pi.html

    on “Why are your models so big? (2023)”
12. lsb · 2025-11-18

    Submitted Show HN: DSPy on a Pi: Cheap Prompt Optimization with GEPA and Qwen3 as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion
13. lsb · 2012-09-05

    Submitted Show HN: interactive visualization of text entropy as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
14. lsb · 2023-09-29

    Submitted Show HN: Stable Diffusion Clock as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
15. iudqnolq · 2023-06-09

    Submitted Store your epoch times as 64-bit floats as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
16. lsb · 2020-12-09

    Submitted Some Notes from Neurips on Monday as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
17. lsb · 2026-05-14

    Submitted Show HN: Visualizing Tiny LLMs from OpenAI's Parameter Golf as a story · 1 points

    HN discussion
18. lsb · 2024-02-27

    Submitted Diffusion Local Time, a timepiece made of generative AI art, at Art Hack Day as a story · 1 points

    HN discussion

Search all of HN for leebutterman.com