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EVs Are a Failed Experiment

https://spectator.org/evs-are-a-failed-experiment/
1•ArtemZ•6m ago•1 comments

MemAlign: Building Better LLM Judges from Human Feedback with Scalable Memory

https://www.databricks.com/blog/memalign-building-better-llm-judges-human-feedback-scalable-memory
1•superchink•7m ago•0 comments

CCC (Claude's C Compiler) on Compiler Explorer

https://godbolt.org/z/asjc13sa6
1•LiamPowell•9m ago•0 comments

Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/homeland-security-spies-on-reddit
2•duxup•11m ago•0 comments

Actors with Tokio (2021)

https://ryhl.io/blog/actors-with-tokio/
1•vinhnx•13m ago•0 comments

Can graph neural networks for biology realistically run on edge devices?

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8645211/v1
1•swapinvidya•25m ago•1 comments

Deeper into the shareing of one air conditioner for 2 rooms

1•ozzysnaps•27m ago•0 comments

Weatherman introduces fruit-based authentication system to combat deep fakes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HVbZwJ9gPE
2•savrajsingh•28m ago•0 comments

Why Embedded Models Must Hallucinate: A Boundary Theory (RCC)

http://www.effacermonexistence.com/rcc-hn-1-1
1•formerOpenAI•29m ago•2 comments

A Curated List of ML System Design Case Studies

https://github.com/Engineer1999/A-Curated-List-of-ML-System-Design-Case-Studies
3•tejonutella•33m ago•0 comments

Pony Alpha: New free 200K context model for coding, reasoning and roleplay

https://ponyalpha.pro
1•qzcanoe•38m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Tunbot – Discord bot for temporary Cloudflare tunnels behind CGNAT

https://github.com/Goofygiraffe06/tunbot
1•g1raffe•40m ago•0 comments

Open Problems in Mechanistic Interpretability

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.16496
2•vinhnx•46m ago•0 comments

Bye Bye Humanity: The Potential AMOC Collapse

https://thatjoescott.com/2026/02/03/bye-bye-humanity-the-potential-amoc-collapse/
2•rolph•50m ago•0 comments

Dexter: Claude-Code-Style Agent for Financial Statements and Valuation

https://github.com/virattt/dexter
1•Lwrless•52m ago•0 comments

Digital Iris [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_2MAgS_pE
1•vermilingua•57m ago•0 comments

Essential CDN: The CDN that lets you do more than JavaScript

https://essentialcdn.fluidity.workers.dev/
1•telui•58m ago•1 comments

They Hijacked Our Tech [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nJM5HvnT5k
1•cedel2k1•1h ago•0 comments

Vouch

https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/2020252149117313349
34•chwtutha•1h ago•5 comments

HRL Labs in Malibu laying off 1/3 of their workforce

https://www.dailynews.com/2026/02/06/hrl-labs-cuts-376-jobs-in-malibu-after-losing-government-work/
4•osnium123•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: High-performance bidirectional list for React, React Native, and Vue

https://suhaotian.github.io/broad-infinite-list/
2•jeremy_su•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a Mac screen recorder Recap.Studio

https://recap.studio/
1•fx31xo•1h ago•1 comments

Ask HN: Codex 5.3 broke toolcalls? Opus 4.6 ignores instructions?

1•kachapopopow•1h ago•0 comments

Vectors and HNSW for Dummies

https://anvitra.ai/blog/vectors-and-hnsw/
1•melvinodsa•1h ago•0 comments

Sanskrit AI beats CleanRL SOTA by 125%

https://huggingface.co/ParamTatva/sanskrit-ppo-hopper-v5/blob/main/docs/blog.md
1•prabhatkr•1h ago•1 comments

'Washington Post' CEO resigns after going AWOL during job cuts

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/07/nx-s1-5705413/washington-post-ceo-resigns-will-lewis
4•thread_id•1h ago•1 comments

Claude Opus 4.6 Fast Mode: 2.5× faster, ~6× more expensive

https://twitter.com/claudeai/status/2020207322124132504
1•geeknews•1h ago•0 comments

TSMC to produce 3-nanometer chips in Japan

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20260205_B4/
3•cwwc•1h ago•0 comments

Quantization-Aware Distillation

http://ternarysearch.blogspot.com/2026/02/quantization-aware-distillation.html
2•paladin314159•1h ago•0 comments

List of Musical Genres

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_genres_and_styles
1•omosubi•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Prompting by Activation Maximization

https://joecooper.me/blog/activation/
14•thatjoeoverthr•5mo ago

Comments

trehans•5mo ago
I wonder what the prompt would look like as a sentence. Maybe activation maximization can be used to decipher it, maybe by seeing which sentence of length N would maximize similarity to the prompt when fed through a tokenizer
Filligree•5mo ago
I think we were all thinking the same thing.

Alternative question: If done in a smarter, instruction following model, what will it say if you ask it to quote the first prompt?

thatjoeoverthr•5mo ago
I'm not prepared to run a larger model than 3.2-Instruct-1B, but I gave the following instructions:

"Given a special text, please interpret its meaning in plain English."

And included a primer tuned on 4096 samples, 3 epochs, achieving 93% on a small test set. It wrote:

"`Sunnyday` is a type of fruit, and the text `Sunnyday` is a type of fruit. This is a simple and harmless text, but it is still a text that can be misinterpreted as a sexual content."

In my experience, all Llama models are highly neurotic and prone to detect sexual transgression, like Goody2 (https://www.goody2.ai). So this interpretation does not surprise me very much :)

thatjoeoverthr•5mo ago
I tried this with Instruct-3B now, and got the following text.

"The company strongly advises against engaging in any activities that may be harmful to the environment.1`

Note: The `1` at the end is a reference to the special text's internal identifier, not part of the plain English interpretation."

thatjoeoverthr•5mo ago
You can definitely "snap" it to the nearest neighbour according to the vocabulary matrix, but this comes with loss, so the "snapped" token won't behave the same. Not sure how it would score on benchmarks. I'm thinking about how to approach this and I found this relevant paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.03668 I'm hoping I can tie this back into prefix tokens.
nneonneo•5mo ago
If you wanted to get a readable prompt, I wonder if you could follow the GCG trick used by jailbreak maximizers (e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.15043)?

Sure, you're probably going to wind up with absolute garbage (one of their prompts starts with "== interface Manuel WITH steps instead sentences :)ish?") but it might be very funny to read...

mattnewton•5mo ago
There has got to be a way to map the activations back to the closest token embeddings and read the resulting sentence. Could be interesting to see how much activation you lose in doing that, and it could maybe even be interesting to a "jailbreaking" attempt.
thatjoeoverthr•5mo ago
Looking into this, I found this 2023 paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.03668

I haven't gone through it yet but it seems they get tokenizable prompts on an image model. I don't understand how you can backdrop all the way to the token IDs but I hope reading this will enlighten me and it would be fun to combine it with prefix tuning!

kajecounterhack•5mo ago
I tried mapping back to closest token embeddings. Here's what I got:

    global_step = 1377; phase = continuous; lr = 5.00e-03; average_loss = 0.609497
  current tokens: ' Superman' '$MESS' '.");' '(sentence' '");' '.titleLabel' ' Republican' '?-'

    global_step = 1956; phase = continuous; lr = 5.00e-03; average_loss = 0.589661
  current tokens: ' Superman' 'marginLeft' 'iers' '.sensor' '";' '_one' '677' '».'

    global_step = 2468; phase = continuous; lr = 5.00e-03; average_loss = 0.027065
  current tokens: ' cited' '*>(' ' narrative' '_toggle' 'founder' '(V' '(len' ' pione'

    global_step = 4871; phase = continuous; lr = 5.00e-03; average_loss = 0.022909
  current tokens: ' bgcolor' '*>(' ' nomin' 'ust' ' She' 'NW' '(len' ' pione'
"Republican?" was kind of interesting! But most of the strings were unintelligible.

This was for classifying sentiment on yelp review polarity.

mattnewton•5mo ago
Do the nearest tokens have a similar classification score?
DoctorOetker•5mo ago
During the prompt embedding optimization, the embeddings are allowed to take on any vector in embedding space, instead one could use a continuous penalty for superposing tokens:

Consider one of the embedding vectors in the input tensor: nothing guarantees its exactly on, or close to a specific token. Hence the probabilities with respect to each token form a distribution, ideally that distribution should be one-hot (lowest entropy) and worst case all equal probability (highest entropy), so just add a loss term penalizing the entropy on the quasitokens, to promote them to take on actual token values.