Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
I have seen you advertise your website a few times. I like the idea of not having to trust the router, so I took some time out of my day to critique your website: https://files.catbox.moe/v68cf7.png

My visit to your website went like this:

1. Visit models page

2. Try to find GLM-5.3-Flash (which is among the ~5 models that 90% of people currently care about)

3. Give up scrolling (which would have taken OVER 50 SCROLLS!!!) and use Ctrl + F

4. Try to find input/output/cached price

5. Scroll all the way up to find out which column is what

6. Notice that output price is cut off

7. Notice that the scroll bar is over 100 scrolls further down the page

8. Use Shift + Wheel to scroll horizontally (most visitors probably won't know this trick)

9. Notice that cached price is missing

10. Conclude that this is probably not a serious offering and bounce

There are probably more issues later on, but this is how far I got.

I would suggest you to:

- Deslopify all pages that a user may visit before conversion

- List important models first (see OpenRouter rankings)

- Move the most important information (model name/input/output/cached price) to the left

- Disaggregate the prices per provider (maybe subtables per model? not sure)

- Measure cache hit rate and compute effective price per provider (see OpenRouter)

(- Optional: Fix the broken link on your HN profile page. Currently, the only way to get from this comment to your website is a search engine.)

Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
How do you recover from doom loops? Just send the same prompt again and pray that it works, or anything more sophisticated?
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
Ox Alpha is almost certainly a model by Z.ai.

https://files.catbox.moe/k52n6k.png

The upper chart shows the availability of Ox Alpha and the lower chart shows the availability of GLM 5.3 by Z.ai. They had a blip at exactly the same time.

Comment · 2 months ago

    > 1 quadrillion tokens per day on Nous portal
If you are referring to this number (
https://xcancel.com/NousResearch/status/2090899914700054780), they are either mistaken, or they mean that they can route 1 quadrillion tokens per day, but the provider behind Ox Alpha certainly can't provide that. Almost all of my requests have hit a rate limit so far.
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
For counting, there are specialized counting models, e.g. https://huggingface.co/spaces/MengqiLei/count-anything-demo

I tried to parse hand-drawn ER diagrams in the past and did not have much success with any model, frontier or otherwise. If you have annotated data, I'd recommend finetuning a recent (dense) VLM, but don't expect 100% accuracy. https://unsloth.ai/docs/basics/vision-fine-tuning

Comment · 2 months ago
The order is:

    LLM issues tool call to read high res image ->
    harness sends high res image to server ->
    server downsizes it to 800x800 (blurry) ->
    LLM issues bash command (e.g. `convert`) to crop a small subimage (e.g. 600x600) from the high res image ->
    LLM issues tool call to read subimage ->
    harness sends subimage to server ->
    server does not resize the subimage because it is small already, so it is not blurry when finally ingested by the LLM
Comment · 2 months ago
LLMs read images by splitting them up into e.g. 16x16 patches, which are then converted to embedding vectors and fed to the LLM, so from a technical point of view, feeding a big image as many 20x20 patches all at once is not too different from cropping subimages from the image, splitting those subimages into patches and feeding them to the LLM. Of course, the LLM has to be trained to understand that those images belong together, but it can be done.
Comment · 2 months ago
Yes. When the LLM tries to read an image, it will be resized by DeepSeek's server to 800x800, which might be a bit blurry. The LLM will then crop a smaller image from the high resolution image (using e.g. the `convert` tool via bash) and will then read the small cropped image. This image will still be resized to 800x800 by DeepSeek's server, but since it is already small, there is no or little loss of quality.
Comment · 2 months ago
It was explicitly said that they are pursuing multimodal support. A quote from the meeting transcript: https://github.com/demo-zexuan/liang-wenfeng-investor-meetin...

    Nevertheless, as a component, we will undoubtedly implement multimodal support — and we are already doing so. We plan to develop relevant models, ensuring that versions like V4 and subsequent iterations will natively support multimodal functionality.
Earlier, the following was said, which might match more what you had in mind.

    Achieving excellence in AI training does not require a global model or even multimodal approaches—by narrowing the scope of AI training and eliminating multimodality, certain tasks may remain unachievable without compromising the algorithm's validity.

    Multimodal approaches ultimately need to be implemented.
It is difficult to tell who said what, since the speaker ids are missing.
Comment · 2 months ago
There are models specifically for splitting an image into text regions, e.g. PP-DocLayoutV3 https://huggingface.co/PaddlePaddle/PP-DocLayoutV3

I am using a stripped-down minimal version of it which I uploaded here, since I am not a fan of huge dependency trees: https://github.com/99991/simple-pp-doclayoutv3

Another recent model for this task is Unlimited-OCR: https://github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR

Comment · 2 months ago
Might still be fine. The most recent crop of vLLMs proactively use whichever programs are available on the system (e.g. ImageMagick or PIL) to "zoom in" by cropping subimages if they can't quite make out the details.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton