MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skybrian | 2025-07-16 19:39:38+00:00
Why would that happen? It would be like LLM's somehow learning to ignore system prompts. But LLM's are trained to pay attention to context and continue it. If an LLM doesn't continue its context, what does it even do?

This is better thought of as another form of context engineering. LLM's have no other short-term memory. Figuring out what belongs in the context is the whole ballgame.

(The paper talks about the risk of training on chain of thought, which changes the model, not monitoring it.)
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-07-16 19:40:09+00:00
So this is for recruitment?

I like the pairwise approach but in the field I'm interested in, at the document level there can be a lot of relevance (we historically use scoring based on TF-IDF) but we tend to get a corpus of documents that then need involved human analysis to give the relevant sections. It seems that paragraph-level vectors are probably at the right conceptual level for refinement.

Ultimately I guess, what is considered a document is somewhat arbitrary. But I wondered if you'd looked at - or if someone here knows about - MLs for retrieval that consider documents at a mix of conceptual levels to improve retrieval. So, pairwise paragraph-level after a broader retrieval would be a simple example.

I guess for looking at CV/resumes that might relate to finding someone who was gardener at Google and then later used ML for graphic design, vs someone who did ML at Google ... which might be a similar document vector (poor example, but you get the picture).

Currently I'm seeing document level references to source material, snippets based on keywords, but not paragraph level referencing as you'd have for legal decisions.
by npip99 | 2025-07-16 19:40:09+00:00
We tried a bradley-terry loss function, as calculated with https://hackmd.io/@-Gjw1zWMSH6lMPRlziQFEw/SJ8sRl1Zge

We found that MSE after elo-adjustment worked equally well. And, MSE lets you shuffle (q, d) across the dataset which has good statistical properties (Versus contrastive, which makes you sample the same query many times within a single minibatch)

In this case "InfoNCE" isn't applicable because the reranker's output is a scalar, not a vector. So that's why we checked both bradley-terry and MSE.
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-16 19:40:15+00:00
>A decade ago, Python was pretty rough around the edges in production.

Not really.

Environment/dependency management is/was never an actual problem. People act like you update a version and stuff breaks. Even then, venv existed for this reason, and you could specify version in the setup.py or requirements.txt.

Type safety should in theory be covered by unit tests. If you assign a variable to another one in a dynamic setting accidentally, like a string to a dict, then your functionality breaks. In reality though, its really not that hard to use different variable names. In my experience, the only time things start getting confusing is if you start using Java concepts with things like Factories and a lot of OOP and inheritance in Python. None of that stuff is really necessary, you can get by with dicts for like 90% of the data transfer. And in very type safe languages, you spend a lot of time designing the actual type system instead of just writing code that does stuff.

Performance is still slow, but language performance doesn't really matter - you can launch natively compiled code easily from Python. Numpy was built around this concept and is also 10 years old. You will never beat C (with explicit processor instructions for things like vector math) or CUDA code, but most of your code doesn't require this level of performance.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-16 19:40:31+00:00
I have to say that I don't understand the approach. On one hand, addresses @inbox.ru are administered by Mail.Ru, the largest Russian free email host (although I have the impression that its usage is declining), so quite a few (arguably unwise) real people might be using them (I’ve actually got one that I haven’t touched in a decade). On the other, the process for getting an address @inbox.ru is identical to getting one @mail.ru and IIRC a couple of other alternative domains, but only this specific one is getting banned.
by wmanley | 2025-07-16 19:40:33+00:00
>There are two downsides of mmap - I/O errors can't be caught and handled by SQLite code,

True. https://www.sqlite.org/mmap.html lists 3 other issues as well.

> and buggy stray writes by other code in the process could corrupt the database.

Not true: "SQLite uses a read-only memory map to prevent stray pointers in the application from overwriting and corrupting the database file."
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-16 19:41:16+00:00
>Some racists also like futuristic fiction and find it in Star Trek. The rest of the work don't fly over their heads - it is willfully ignored because it doesn't match their worldview.

I can enjoy fiction that doesn't match my worldview... and it doesn't change my worldview. I am immune to propaganda without the inability to appreciate it, or temporarily be entertained by it. And it has fascinated me my entire life that others must be molded into something new from fiction, or run screaming from it with their ears plugged up with nothing in between.

Perhaps the rest of you can do this too, and you're merely being ungenerous in your assumption that those whose politics you disagree with have so little psychological fortitude that they're incapable of the same. Or maybe you can't, and it scares you that they can.
by reconnecting | 2025-07-16 19:42:05+00:00
'tirreno guy' here.

You can use open-source security analytics (1) to detect fraudulent accounts instead of blocking domain names. Blocking domains only shows your system is fragile and will likely just shift the attackers to use other domains.

Feel free to contact us if you need assistance with setup.

(1) https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-16 19:42:16+00:00
It used to be somebody would slip you a Rohypnol and roll you. Now you slip yourself a Phenibut and get rolled.

I wouldn't characterize Phenibut as a "nootropic" as it's arguable that such a thing (nootropic) exists. I'd say it is "Русский for Valium".

When I was in college there were forums like "alt.drugs" where people shared stories like "I smoked weed and had a lot of fun" and Erowid was like that for a while but pretty soon it was full of stories that the Partnership for a Drug Free America couldn't have made up, often people who took way too many downers and got into trouble.
by Spivak | 2025-07-16 19:42:38+00:00
Right but we're mixing things

* Can a reader understand a medium sized body of text and understand its meaning?

* Can a reader parse prose that uses more complicated grammatical structures?

* Does the reader know a bunch of archaic terms and phrases that have gone out of linguistic fashion as well as historic context of the work necessary to grok references that would be in the zeitgeist for contemporary readers?

To me testing the 3rd one is pointless as a gauge of how well someone can understand a new-to-them piece of prose and actively confuses the measurement of what you want which is the first and second. It's been a minute but I remember the ACT being quite good about this which is a much more reasonable explanation for the discrepancy than college freshmen are illiterate.

An English major is going to do the 3rd a lot in their studies as a means to better understand specific works but it's not a virtue unto itself.
by hitekker | 2025-07-16 19:43:03+00:00
You're citing ACLU's PR and one source from a progressive site, most of which is pre-2019. Meanwhile, recent articles say things like this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/aclu-johnn...

There's a lot more where that came from but I don't need to lie by citation. The reality, as the electorate saw it, was that most liberal organizations in the 2020's suffered from mission creep. Planned Parenthood went on record supporting defunding the police, the Sierra Club redefined environmentalism as antiracism(?) etc
by hosh | 2025-07-16 19:43:08+00:00
Wikipedia has an entry for "hacktivism".

The people who illegally obtained classified information to leak to WikiLeaks have made a political impact: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/26/wikilea... as well as reprisals in the form of arrests and prosecutions.

We also call Greenpeace "activists", but they also employed violent direct-action in their efforts against whaling.

Carl Icahn calls himself a shareholder activist, and many people still consider him a vulture capitalist.
by staunton | 2025-07-16 19:43:56+00:00
Objections:

- it's possible to transfer knowledge, as demonstrated by the fact that human civilization exists. It's not always easy, doesn't always succeed, and reading is a part of that, but it's possible and happening. I'm confused about your intended meaning in claiming otherwise.

- It's very difficult to distinguish between (especially one's own) understanding and a false impression thereof. To an overwhelming degree, the main realistic way is applying the knowledge, which is easiest when far removed from the activity of reading.

- One's upbringing, environment, social circle, etc., strongly influence one's propensity for reading, both for work and for pleasure. People change, especially as long as they're young, but even adults do in a major way according to conditions.
by heyjamesknight | 2025-07-16 19:43:58+00:00
The topic of conversation is not "human speech/writing" but "human creativity." There's no dispute that LLMs can create novel pieces of textual output. But there is no evidence that they can produce novel ideas. To assume they can is to adopt a purely rationalist approach to epistemology and cognition. Plato, Aquinas, and Kant would all fervently disagree with that approach.
by B4uler5 | 2025-07-16 19:44:12+00:00
Some of the functionalities in the core/foundation library don’t quite match between operating systems so sometimes you do need to put an “#if os(macos) do” etc, but for the most part its super straight forward working on one or another platform.

In terms of its language features it has all of those and more, sometimes too many in my opinion.

I personally favour languages that are clear in their vision. However at its core Swift is a highly performant language that is designed really well, has beautiful syntax, and in the last 5 or so years I have been impressed with its direction. It is being developed by a good team who listen to their community but not at the expense of the languages vision.

My favourite aspect of using it though is its versatility. Wether you’re working on embedded systems, a game, a web server, or even a static site generator, it always feels like the language is there to support your vision, but still give you the fine grained control you need to optimise for performance.

I also collaborate with a friend who is a Rust developer and he’s always super happy to work on a Swift project with me so I feel like that’s enough praise when you can pull a rest dev away from their beloved.
by nickjj | 2025-07-16 19:44:12+00:00
> CCTV has a funny tendency of being useless in that regard

I don't think it's safe to depend on this by default.

I know a few business owners who have video (and audio) recording set ups in their business where 100+ customers come and go daily.

There might be 6 motion activated cameras saving everything to a local box in the store. That box might have let's say 1TB of disk space. Even with motion activated cameras it could fill up in ~3 weeks to where it's no longer recording.

Once it gets filled up, it gets permanently deleted with no backups. This could be a manual and adhoc process, it depends on the owner.

I never had any say in how they operate, just repeating what I've heard and seen.

This idea of trusting that companies record and save all interactions and calls indefinitely is no way something I'd trust for anything important.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-07-16 19:44:44+00:00
I use this golf gps app SimpleGolfGps. Uses the native apple maps gps and allows me to tap around and get yardages. Comparable apps are absolutely bloated in the few hundred mb range sometimes. This one is 527 kb (!!!) and barely sips battery while out on the course. I’d pay a one time fee for it but no subscription.
by jraph | 2025-07-16 19:44:55+00:00
> walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words

Of course.

I would likely find this situation very unsettling, if not stressful. I would probably be caught off guard. I would probably perform badly if I accept at all for all sorts of reasons unrelated to my ability to read smoothly. Unless I'm feeling particularly positive and gather the energy to pace my mind, apply myself, enter a character like I'm having a role in a play, and remember to be slow, and to forget about the content. Reading out loud is more complicated than simply reading for yourself: you are, at the same time, both reading and articulating speech.

What's more, when you speak, you are using your own words, your own (oral) phrasing, and you know where you are going, or at least enough to have a decent prosody. When you read out loud, you are reading phrasing from someone else, which may make the prosody less smooth. And if you haven't read the whole sentence in advance, or at least ahead enough, you may struggle.

Independently of knowing how to read (fast), reading out loud probably takes practice to be smooth.

With your experiment, you are testing all sort of things unrelated to knowing how to read, to the point that you can't draw any conclusion on the ability of people to read.

Parsing a text also depends on the writer's ability to write well. If the text is boring or its phrasing is overly complicated, yeah, it will be difficult to read.

We also live in a world plagued by focus disruptions. You are not only dealing with people's ability to read, but also their ability to remain focused… in a setting where they possibly get interrupted very frequently.

For all sorts of reasons, reading a wall of text is indeed hard. This includes the reader's environment, the presence of their smartphone next to them, how tired they are, whether they are concerned by something else, whether the text is actually interesting to them, and how well the author of the text writes.
by olddustytrail | 2025-07-16 19:45:18+00:00
> That’s because we’ve basically reinterpreted what “peer review” is.

Who is "we" in this scenario? Because that's certainly not how I've seen peer review work.

The editor would ask a small group of people in the field to act as reviewers and then send them the papers. They review it and send it back with any requests for changes prior to publication.

So they're the peers that are reviewing, not the editor.
by AlanYx | 2025-07-16 19:46:02+00:00
There's a deep beauty in that sentence that probably isn't apparent on the surface. The "popular prejudice" that Dickens was referring to about the Court of Chancery was, in part, that it had ponderously complex proceedings and took forever to get anywhere. So while Dickens did have a very wordy writing style, the embedded asides in that sentence are probably calculated to subconsciously echo the longwinded, circuitous style of the court.
by uecker | 2025-07-16 19:46:10+00:00
For C++, just take lambda captures, you can do [&], [=], [a], [&a], [a = b] (and I probably forgot half), the many way you can do initialization in C++ became a meme, but it really permeates the whole language whose design is driven by enthusiasts and people who have an interest to make it more complex (trainers, book authors, consultants, etc.)

For Rust, I think it is a bit of a different story and it is harder to point to specific features. The language is clearly much better designed (because it was more designed and did not evolve so much) and because of its roots in functional programming. Just overall, the complexity is too high in my opinion and it a bit too idealistic and not pragmatic enough.
by snapetom | 2025-07-16 19:46:14+00:00
This aligns with what I remember and Guido going to Google explains things. Mid 2000's was all about PHP (Cake/Symphony/CodeIgniter/etc) vs Ruby (Rails) in the open source world. I remember hearing about Python only in sysadmin work and Plone. Then, suddenly were suddenly a lot of articles from Google about just about everything, all in Python.

I remember saying to a coworker, "Google is single-handedly keeping Python alive."

Then bam. It was everywhere. Mid 2010's, I took a cybersec job and they told me to learn Python in the two weeks between accepting and starting. "Python is all over cybersec," I was told. It was then I realized Python took over academia, which positioned it perfectly for ML. It's features made it easy to start, but it also benefited from right place, right time.
by Expurple | 2025-07-16 19:47:39+00:00
> such programs are often more, not less, sensitive to OS changes.

You may be technically correct that they are more sensitive to the kernel interface changes. But the point is that native, static binaries depend only on the kernel interface, while the other programs also depend on the language runtime that's installed on that OS. Typical Python programs even depend on the libraries being installed separately (in source form!)
by jlokier | 2025-07-16 19:48:13+00:00
In current machines, that's way off depending on how you choose to count "1 CPU instruction" for the metaphor.

Take Apple's latest laptops. They have 16 CPU cores, 12 of those clocking at 4.5 GHz and able to decode/dispath up to 10 instructions per cycle. 4 of those clocking at 2.6 GHz, I'm not sure about their decode/dispatch width but let's assume 10. Those decoder widths don't translate to that many instructions-per-cycle in practice, but let's roll with it because the order of magnitude is close enough.

If the instructions are just right, that's 824 instructions per nanosecond. Or, roughly a million times faster than the 6502 in the Apple-II! Computers really have got faster, and we haven't even counted all the cores yet.

Scaling those to one per second, a RAM fetch taking 100ns would scale to 82400 seconds, which 22.8 hours, just short of a day.

Fine, but we forgot about the 40 GPU cores and the 16 ANE cores! More instructions per ns!

Now we're definitely into "days".

For the purpose of the metaphor, perhaps we should also count the multiple lanes of each vector instruction on the CPU, and lanes on the GPU cores, as if thery were separate processing instructions.

One way to measure that, which seems fair and useful to me, is to look at TOPS instead - tera operations per second. How many floating-point calculations can the processor complex do per second? I wasn't able to find good figures for the Apple M4 Max as a whole, only the ANE component, for which 38 TOPS is claimed. For various reasons tt's reasonable to estimate the GPU is the same order of magnitude in TOPS on those chips.

If you count 38 TOPS as equivalent to "CPU instructions" in the metaphor, then scale those to 1 per second, a RAM fetch taking 100ns scales to a whopping 43.9 days on a current laptop!
by Telemakhos | 2025-07-16 19:48:53+00:00
People should be careful with basing psychological stereotypes on gait, as there's already an extensive legacy framework of stereotypes based on gait—are these new stereotypes meaningfully different medical observations grounded in facts, or are they just more stereotypes? Literature on Native Americans, for example, often claims that they walk on the balls of the feet in distinction to "the Anglo," who walks on his heels. For example:

> Our sources say that Native Americans tended to land on the ball of the foot (a "forefoot strike"), or flat-footed ("midfoot strike"), rather than landing on the heel and rolling forward ("heel strike"). [0: 90]

> Our sources indicate that Native Americans commonly walked with toes pointed straight ahead or turned slightly inward, rather than turned outward. [0: 91]

I've pulled just one article here, but there's a huge trove of racial and ethnic gait stereotypes with all sorts of moral implications. It's important not to repeat that stereotyping when trying to address autism.

[0] Ranalli, B. 2019. "Thoreau's Indian Stride." The Concord Saunterer 27: 89-110. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45271429
by sershe | 2025-07-16 19:49:06+00:00
Natives start with every advantage that immigrants don't have, so it sounds like the time for the worlds tiniest violin.

I think the USA is one of, if not the most meritocratic major societies in the world and throughout history (massive immigration despite relatively weak welfare state seems to indicate many with experience of other countries agree).

The unsaid implication is that non immigrant American poor is one of the most meritless major demographics to have ever existed. I mean look at some pictures from a Trump rally (or a left wing equivalent). Are these people prevented by immigrant competition from getting tech jobs? I am surprised they manage to keep breathing in and out without detailed instructions and constant supervision.

USG should save money by paying other countries to take these guys instead.
by timeinput | 2025-07-16 19:49:27+00:00
I mean I read the New Yorker OP article because it was posted on hacker news, and highly voted. It was probably too short to be considered long form, but I feel like I was baited into reading a rambling article where I gained nothing of value other than at best a summary of other peoples thoughts, where the only conclusion I can practically draw with out reading a lot more is "Joshua Rothman and others don't like how people are consuming content".
by duxup | 2025-07-16 19:50:53+00:00
Solving social issues by having companies try heavy handed "just hire those people" or "just give them a space" doesn't change much of anything. Companies are not good at social change.

The second order effects are terrible too. People assume someone was hired because they're X, Y or Z (and I've seen companies say exactly that, talk about undermining). These segregated groups as the writer describes are ... segregated. At one place I worked a special group met multiple times a week. Those people weren't working and the teams they worked on had to pick up the slack (this was highly time sensitive work). That created resentment. No matter your policy or how much finger wagging training they did, that resentment did not go away.

There's sometimes a weird add on expectation too. Person A who is type X is expected to speak for all people of type X. In an absurd way that's to some extent why they're there, but that doesn't mean they're qualified to do that, or even right, or would even want to speak up.

I'm reminded of a lot of the sexual harassment cases where HR predictably takes the side of the higher ranking employee (often a man). HR jobs are by a good % often staffed by women, but that as far as I know hasn't put an end to HR siding with the company. Of course it doesn't, because it isn't about man or woman, it's about incentives and demographics don't change that.

Truth is companies aren't good or even competent in solving complex social issues.
by ActorNightly | 2025-07-16 19:51:17+00:00
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...

Roughly speaking, in our brains have to reconcile the internal models of the world with predictions and what we receive through stimuli. Neurotypical people can do this without issues, disregarding either one. Autistic people basically are wired to pay way more attention to external stimuli no matter how small it is.

This sort of explanation makes the most sense, and can contextualize this as well. The gait trait is basically an optimization that comes from a higher sensory sensitivity and low value of "how should I be walking".