Harper Evolves

Posted5 months agoActive5 months ago

chilipepperhott

31 points

4 comments

elijahpotter.devTechstory

calmpositive

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20/100

Genetic AlgorithmsMachine LearningNatural Language Processing

Key topics

Genetic Algorithms

Machine Learning

Natural Language Processing

The article discusses Harper Evolves, a project that utilizes evolutionary algorithms for machine learning, sparking a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of genetic algorithms compared to other optimization techniques.

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01Story posted
Aug 22, 2025 at 3:04 PM EDT
5 months ago
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Aug 22, 2025 at 3:26 PM EDT
22m after posting
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04Latest activity
Aug 22, 2025 at 3:36 PM EDT
5 months ago
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Discussion (4 comments)

Showing 4 comments

dang

5 months ago

The submitted title was "Evolution is still a valid machine learning technique" but that sentence doesn't appear in the article, which is really about (interesting!) specific work on a specific program. I couldn't find a better representative sentence in the article so I went with the page's own title, which is what the HN guidelines default to anyway (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

jokoon

5 months ago

Probably much better than gradient descent and co

torginus

5 months ago

The biggest weakness of genetic algorithms is they can't make use of gradients - meaning they have no idea how to 'move' towards the solution - they end up guessing and refining their guesses, which means they're much slower to converge.

Their advantage is they don't require gradients (so the fitness function to be differentiable), but I don't think they're going to be the next big thing.

dang

5 months ago

Recent and related:

Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44331362 - June 2025 (162 comments)

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ID: 44988496Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 11:35:13 AM

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