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Training and aligning LLMs with RLHF and RLHF alternatives
I frequently reference a process called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) when discussing LLMs, whether in the research news or tutorials.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 49,211 posts.
12392
How does Linux NAT a ping?
A few months ago, I found myself wondering how a command like ping 1.1.1.1 works from within a private network. In most private networks, multiple hosts connect to the Internet through a router. For IPv4, the router performs network address translation (NAT) by rewriting the original host’s source address to the…
12393
“Make” as a static site generator (2022)
Static site generators are in fashion for good reasons. The resulting pages are easy to host, fast and extremely low on maintenance while being sufficient for many use cases. As I learned when setting up my blog , writing a simple script myself is faster and more satisfying than learning one of the other site builders…
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I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race
As harvest season begins here in the Midwest, I once again celebrate by grinding Nebraska gravel at the Gravel Worlds Long Voyage bike race. As in previous years ( 2021 ) ( 2022 ), I spent more time writing code for a marginally-useful project than I did training. But hey, I finished!
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Amiga C Tutorial (2022)
Amiga C Tutorial
12396
Flake8-Logging
The Python standard library’s logging module is a go-to for adding observability to applications. Many tools also integrated with it or enhance its capabilities, such as structlog and Sentry.
12397
I wrote a string type
I write compilers for fun. I can’t help it. Consequently, I also write a lot of parsers. In systems programming, it’s usually a good idea to try to share memory rather than reuse it, so as such my AST types tend to look like this.
12398
Coffee in a Can
Life’s inconveniences, when they happen to you and me, are just that. Inconveniences. When they happen to some people though they end up becoming multi-billion dollar businesses. This is the story of Japan’s canned coffee. One finds at least one vending machine in almost every street in
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Why you might want async in your project
There is a common sentiment I’ve seen over and over in the Rust community that I think is ignorant at best and harmful at worst.
12401
The end of the subscription era is coming
You’re overpaying for your porn (and journalism)
12402
The U.S. housing market vs. the Canadian housing market
The housing market is even worse in Canada than it is here.
12403
Learning Zig
Welcome to Learning Zig, an introduction to the Zig programming language. This guide aims to make you comfortable with Zig. It assumes prior programming experience, though not in any particular language.
12404
My mental model of Clojure transducers
I’ve been programming in Clojure for a long time, but I haven’t been using transducers much. I learned to mechanically transform (into [] (map f coll)) to (into [] (map f) coll) for a slight performance gain, but not much beyond that. Recently, however, I’ve found myself refactoring transducers-based code at work…
12405
It's My Monitor
This is the first in (maybe) a series of “Tales From Tech Support”, which are true stories from my point of view. I’ll probably only post these on a Friday. In the 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm. We’d often buy new equipment and unpack it at the helpdesk, throw away all…
12406
Bare-Metal Kubernetes, Part I: Talos on Hetzner
I’ve been running a Kubernetes cluster on a mix of virtual and bare metal machines with Hetzner for about a year now, and while the setup has served me well, being a very exploratory exercise at the time it wasn’t very well documented.
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The Development of the C Language (2003)
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
12408
Profound Beliefs
This post previously appeared in EIX. In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Think of profound beliefs as “strong opi…
12409
Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs
This post assumes some basic C skills. Linux puts you in full control. This is not always seen from everyone’s perspective, but a power user loves to be in control. I’m going to show yo…
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Maybe Rust isn’t a good tool for massively concurrent, userspace software
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
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Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later
Not many people remember this 2005 documentary featured early interviews with Paul Graham, Aaron Swartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman.
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What is an emotion? William James’s theory of how our bodies affect our feelings
“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.”
12413
Unpacking Elixir: Real-Time and Latency
Elixir was built on Erlang. Erlang was built to provide "consistently low latency" and a few other audacious goals. Note, this is not a hard realtime constraint. It is soft, squishy and yet, important and real. It makes Erlang unusually suitable to systems where latency matters and where a near-realtime experience is…
12414
PgBouncer is useful, important, and fraught with peril
Updated 2024-09-17 to reflect updated PgBouncer support for protocol-level prepared statements 🐘 To start, I want to say that I’m appreciative that PgBouncer exists and the work its open source maintainers put into it. I also love working with PostgreSQL, and I’m thankful for the incredible amount of work and…
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Just how constexpr is C++20’s std:string?
In C++20, string and vector are marked constexpr, which means they’re somewhat usable in compile-time programming. For example, we can write:
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The Le Guin Precepts
Fabled author Ursula Le Guin had a sign over her desk: Is it true? Is it necessary or at least useful? Is it compassionate or at least unharmful? Not a bad place to begin.
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Towards a new SymPy
This is the first part of a series of posts on big changes for SymPy with particular focus on speed. What I am going to describe in these posts are:
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Unpacking Elixir: Syntax
Elixir is a language with syntactical roots in Ruby. It also carries the Erlang legacy. Legacy used here as in "a great legacy" and not as in "system you don't like anymore". Ruby is an object-oriented language. Elixir is functional language. The Erlang part has an impact as Elixir was designed to provide strong…
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What's new in Emacs 29.1
What's new in Emacs 29.1? I go through every change and annotate the ones I feel are interesting or worth knowing more about.
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The thinking path
Novel news; a review for the NYT.