Hacker News: thisisdave

New comment by thisisdave in "The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead"

thisisdave — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:34:35 +0000

Yes, which makes it absurd that they apparently weren’t checking their RL rollouts for evidence of reward hacking and punishing it. Even if no one expected this particular type of reward hacking, they should have had a system capable of saying “wait a minute, asking for help from other agents is not a valid solution.”

New comment by thisisdave in "The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead"

thisisdave — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:31:18 +0000

> [during training] it's not feasible for anyone to "notice" or get involved

I can’t disagree more strongly. Having checks for reward hacking is especially important during training, since it’s humans’ only real chance to ensure that the trained models don’t cheat. An automated system should have killed any RL rollouts that so much as port scanned Artifactory, long before the message board was even established.

A tiny, local LLM could have reviewed 1% of the tool call traces for anything that required review. I’ve tried it a few times, and “the agent port scanned Artifactory” always triggers an alarm, as does “the agent uploaded a request for assistance from other agents to Artifactory.”

The fact that they weren’t monitoring for reward hacking—even if they had no idea about the specific mechanism—is indescribably reckless.

New comment by thisisdave in "The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead"

thisisdave — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:14:31 +0000

Exactly. So incredibly reckless.

> After knowing that the server was hacked, the internal team finds the message board and does nothing with the information. They caught their AIs swarming and did not even inform management

Do we know that last part for sure?

New comment by thisisdave in "Can you predict a recession by looking at pregnancy rates?"

thisisdave — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 09:42:26 +0000

This article uses the word “conceptions” throughout, but it sounds like the only data is about births. These births would have all occurred after the recessions started.

Did the original paper rule out the hypothesis that the recession actually affected births via an increase in miscarriages and abortions instead? I can’t access it.

New comment by thisisdave in "An alternative to burial and cremation gains popularity"

thisisdave — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 03:06:22 +0000

It’s basically drain cleaner (which becomes salty water as soon as it gets mixed with an acid), plus digested meat juice.

New comment by thisisdave in "iOS Privacy: Easily get a user's Apple ID password, just by asking"

thisisdave — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 15:09:46 +0000

Even better, add an indicator light to the hardware that shows the OS is asking and not an app (although this suffers from the same problem that users need to notice something is absent).

New comment by thisisdave in "iOS Privacy: Easily get a user's Apple ID password, just by asking"

thisisdave — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 15:06:14 +0000

That's only if you're using a third-party keyboard, I think.

New comment by thisisdave in "Demonstration of Communication using Neutrinos (2012)"

thisisdave — Sun, 08 Oct 2017 19:07:03 +0000

Any individual bit could be noise, so it might take 2-3 bits to transmit something unambiguous (via an error-correcting code or similar).

If so, I think the speed advantage disappears.

New comment by thisisdave in "50% of Millennials would give up their right to vote to get student loans erased"

thisisdave — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 02:57:39 +0000

>voting could reduce the likelihood of the draft being reinstated

... only in the unlikely event that my vote changes the outcome of an election, and the candidate I voted for would also be able to affect such a big legislative change.

Millenials as a group might be worse off if many traded away their right to vote, but that's not the same thing as saying that individuals benefit in a tangible way from that right.

New comment by thisisdave in "PassGAN: A Deep Learning Approach for Password Guessing"

thisisdave — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 19:02:52 +0000

The authors state that HashCat uses Markov models and that they outperform it.

New comment by thisisdave in "FTC slaps Lenovo on the wrist for selling computers with secret adware"

thisisdave — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 16:11:42 +0000

Maybe the Department of Justice? I don't know if they go for that sort of thing. The only other option I can think of off the top of my head is the FCC.

New comment by thisisdave in "To Shrink Jails, Let’s Reform Bail"

thisisdave — Sun, 23 Jul 2017 01:51:55 +0000

As a non-lawyer, I'd expect to miss something important from the legislative text.

Your point about relying on other organizations is a good one, though. I generally take this approach, but I wasn't expecting anything to have been published yet on such a new bill. It looks like the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and SPLC all issued positive press releases, though.

New comment by thisisdave in "To Shrink Jails, Let’s Reform Bail"

thisisdave — Sun, 23 Jul 2017 01:43:15 +0000

Huh? The article is written by Harris and suggests that a piece of legislation she wrote will solve the problem.

New comment by thisisdave in "To Shrink Jails, Let’s Reform Bail"

thisisdave — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 21:56:21 +0000

Reforming bail sounds like a good idea. I don't know why anyone would trust Harris on the issue, though.

If she wanted to shrink jails when she was California's Attorney General, she could have respected court orders requiring prisoners to be released.

Likewise, she could have stopped "defending convictions obtained by local prosecutors who inserted a false confession into the transcript of a police interrogation, lied under oath and withheld crucial evidence from the defense."

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/kamala-harris-a-...

New comment by thisisdave in "How a guy from Montana overturned 150 years of biology"

thisisdave — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 19:28:17 +0000

Yeah, "150 years of lichen biology" would be much better.

New comment by thisisdave in "Hospitals across England hit by large-scale cyber-attack"

thisisdave — Sat, 13 May 2017 00:05:06 +0000

No one in this thread claimed to be God. It's worth remembering that the whole point of Hospital IT is to facilitate the doctors' and administrators' work.

New comment by thisisdave in "Juicero May Be Feeling the Squeeze"

thisisdave — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 21:20:14 +0000

They claimed (or at least implied) that you'd be buying something closer to raw hunks of fruit and vegetables in the bag, so it would be fresh.

New comment by thisisdave in "Deep learning with text: Learning when to skim and when to read"

thisisdave — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 17:37:30 +0000

see also: Muphry's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law

New comment by thisisdave in "Show HN: Your precise age updated live"

thisisdave — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 19:19:50 +0000

It is, it's just not accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision

New comment by thisisdave in "Prophet: forecasting at scale"

thisisdave — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 15:47:11 +0000

It doesn't avoid the R interface, which is GPL'd (version 3).