Top all-time · #16457
Mitchell A. Gordon
Personal blog · mitchgordon.me · on HN as bitforgermathai
Mitchell A. Gordon's personal blog at mitchgordon.me covers math and ai. Since 2018, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “RETRO is fast”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The one HN comment does not discuss the writing. It describes retrieval-augmented language models like DeepMind RETRO, which search a large text collection and add matches to the prompt, in a thread about a pirate book mirror.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thinking Thoughts
Most-linked posts?
- RETRO is fast2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-07-03
What Hacker News says?
There are some language models like DeepMind RETRO that can make use of a 1TB text collection after the model is trained. The idea is to chunk up the text and make the blocks searchable with a neural embedding index. When you ask a question to the model, it first searches for relevant information and then adds it to the prompt. The result - you can get GPT-3 quality on a 25x smaller model. That means you could have…
Comment linking /ml/2022/07/01/retro-is-blazing.html
on “Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)”Submitted RETRO is fast as a story · 141 points
HN discussionI tried using this once... it wasn't super great. 1. The documentation is sorely lacking. 2. Which makes the inheritance hierarchy (which is already a little unintuitive) really hard to grok. 3. There's this weird home-rolled way of doing default property inheritance that took me a long time to wrap my head around. In the end, I ended up coding a short interactive thing[1] for my blog using Paper.js. It's a great id…
Comment linking /math/2019/03/18/multiplying-complex-numbers.html
on “Manim – 3Blue1Brown's animation engine for explanatory math videos”Submitted A Software Tester's Perspective on Statistical Learning Theory as a story · 33 points
HN discussionI wrote a blog post today about how I don't believe in the abstract plane, if you're into it: http://mitchgordon.me/philosophy/2019/05/12/non-existence-of...
Comment linking /philosophy/2019/05/12/non-existence-of-abstract-plane.html
on “Ask HN: Which books teach mental models?”Submitted Do Infinite Pencils Exist? as a story · 23 points
HN discussionI wrote a blog post on the difficulties of memory-efficient training, which seems relevant: http://mitchgordon.me/machine/learning/2020/01/13/do-we-real... The methods discussed there take a different angle at the problem.
Comment linking /machine/learning/2020/01/13/do-we-really-need-model-compression.html
on “Microsoft Zero and DeepSpeed: Memory Efficient Large Neural Network Training”Submitted Redefining SOTA as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI wrote a blog post a while back about whether methods like these will be necessary in the future: http://mitchgordon.me/machine/learning/2020/01/13/do-we-real...
Comment linking /machine/learning/2020/01/13/do-we-really-need-model-compression.html
on “Deep learning model compression methods”Submitted Vibe Coding with Aider: Tips and Tricks as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI wrote a koan about free will not too long ago... http://mitchgordon.me/zen/2019/04/02/koan-of-will.html
Comment linking /zen/2019/04/02/koan-of-will.html
on “There is free will: we make choices even if our atoms don’t”Submitted Anecdotes in Language Model Coherence as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Is VSCode TypeScript Linting So Damn Fast? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted All the Ways You Can Compress Bert as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Metaphors of Arithmetic as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Multiplying Complex Numbers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Anecdotes in Language Model Coherence as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted My Struggle with Probability Theory as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Empiricism in Math and AI as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Non-Operational Words as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Parable of P-Values as a story · 1 points
HN discussion