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Malp

206 karma · joined March 3, 2018

my public key: https://keybase.io/matthewalp; my proof: https://keybase.io/matthewalp/sigs/fCzcJimiWj-2Q6Bgqf8VuZpGrQvbl6K5Yx0KJ7Y3Mj0
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Malp··on Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models
That or providing a concrete RL env for $your_search_corpus_etc_here
Malp··on Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models
There are! Chroma has Context1, SID has SID-1, and you'd actually be surprised at how easy it is to post-train your own with pretty good pass@ recall@ ndcg@ etc.

There's also Hornet who have shared some interesting talks & blogs lately. I don't know that I'd exclusively use agents for retrieval the way Neon outlines here as well. I think distillation similar to what ZeroEntropy has done for bespoke retrieval & reranking with _some_ agent manipulation on top-k results works better (IME).

Malp··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
This looks great, will beta test over the coming weeks.
Malp··on Zipf's Law and Sharding
Thanks!
Malp··on Show HN: Coi – A language that compiles to WASM, beats React/Vue
Very interesting! Have you considered posting this to HN (again - looks like it was when it first came out & 2 years ago)?
Malp··on Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter
This is some solid work and a great blog post to go hand-in-hand with. Wow.
Malp··on Lightstorm: Minimalistic Ruby Compiler
Awesome to see the progress made by Alex, highly recommend watching the linked talk for people interested in any of Ruby, (AoT) compilers, and MLIR (which I haven't seen used too much outside of the ML space, personally)
Malp··on Ruby 3.4.0
Just-in-time compilation of Ruby allowing you to elide a lot of the overhead of dynamic language features + executing optimized machine code instead of running in the VM / bytecode interpreter.

For example, doing some loop unrolling for a piece of code with a known & small-enough fixed-size iteration. As another example, doing away with some dynamic dispatch / method lookup for a call site, or inlining methods - especially handy given Ruby's first class support for dynamic code generation, execution, redefinition (monkey patching).

From https://railsatscale.com/2023-12-04-ruby-3-3-s-yjit-faster-w...,

> In particular, YJIT is now able to better handle calls with splats as well as optional parameters, it’s able to compile exception handlers, and it can handle megamorphic call sites and instance variable accesses without falling back to the interpreter.

> We’ve also implemented specialized inlined primitives for certain core method calls such as Integer#!=, String#!=, Kernel#block_given?, Kernel#is_a?, Kernel#instance_of?, Module#===, and more. It also inlines trivial Ruby methods that only return a constant value such as #blank? and specialized #present? from Rails. These can now be used without needing to perform expensive method calls in most cases.

Malp··on Google loses antitrust suit over search deals on phones
I recommend trying out Quiche Browser on iOS, or Orion from Kagi- both will support Kagi as a search option. Spotlight search still goes to Google, but I find that acceptable.
Malp··on FunSearch: Making new discoveries in mathematical sciences using LLMs
Ditto, this seems to have some parallels to the neurosymbolic ideas being explored by Lab V2 at ASU
Malp··on Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest
Both are written in Crystal, interestingly enough
Malp··on Kagi finally let me lay Google Search to rest
I had similar thoughts about a year ago. My experience is that the results are that good, though sometimes there are changes under the hood which lead to poor or limited results- it is a beta project, after all. I used the free trial, following which I stayed on the monthly sub before paying a lump sum of $100 for the next 10 months. I've enjoyed my correspondence with the CEO as well. YMMV
Malp··on Crystal 1.9.1
Happy to see this here; I found it to be a fun language to prototype reasonably performant things in + for learning about certain data structures. I expect to see the comments talking about the lack of docs, language server struggles, and compilation times (the whole stdlib and program is compiled from scratch every time a program is compiled/run, IIRC). The language is slowly growing and I encourage people to stick with its onboarding shortcomings and giving it a shot for their next project.
Malp··on Apollo will close down on June 30th
DARVO
Malp··on Ask HN: Largest DBs (any) you worked on?
~1.5 PB. Observability data.
Malp··on Mullvad Leta (Search Engine)
Agreed- it's currently 502'ing though
Malp··on Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500k group chat messages
> I am so bad at iterating over dataframes! It always feels horrible and slow. While doing this though, I discovered that using df.to_dict('records') and then iterating over the resulting dictionary is almost 100x faster than using the pandas built-in iteration tools like df.itertuples() or df.iterrows()!

That's really surprising to hear, any context on why this is? Very fun read BTW, my friends and I have joked about making something similar for our DMs (nicknamed MattGPT) and giving "them" topics to discuss + observing what they come up with.

Malp··on The Kagi Family Plan
Depends on your use case and financials. I use it extensively for work as a computer scientist + developer, and have expensed it in the past. I initially found the free plan of ~30 searches / month pretty good for a 'sudo search', when Google and others weren't quite cutting it and I felt that there could be better results.
Malp··on Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
They're made out of meat:

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

Malp··on Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer
I agree about the efficiency and wouldn't expect anyone to know that on a thread, off of a handle alone. However, I see it in a more positive light- based on John's other comments in the thread, he's made the time to stay active in communities like this one even as the CTO and followed up with folks internally to understand how an oversight like this could've happened.
Malp··on Small SaaS banned by Cloudflare after 4 years of being paying customer
jgrahamc is the CTO of Cloudflare.
Malp··on Search PDFs with Transformers and Python Notebook
Great stuff, I went down the rabbit hole of building something similar for synthesizing flash cards + Q/A pairs from textbook PDFs about a year ago, and I would also emphasize that PDF search is a janky nightmare to get within the ballpark of usability :')
Malp··on The Psychedelic Experience: A new concept in psychotherapy (1962) [pdf]
Absolutely. I'll add that there has been some preliminary exploration[0] into the genetics already; many would dismiss the psychotic and psychedelic (often disturbing and unpleasant) trips that some experience from THC (or cannabis, but this study focused on THC rather than other cannabinoids that may have been present), but there's already an established case that suggest that it's not simply an anxiety-ridden trip.

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4872423/

Malp··on So, you want to be a darknet drug lord
Wow, there's a blast from the past. Here's another piece [0] by Ratliff about trying to go off the grid while orchestrating a manhunt for himself. It scratches the same spy-crime-opsec itch that the other links in this thread do, and left a lasting impression on 8-year-old me.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2009/11/ff-vanish2/

Malp··on An Experience with Modafinil
Stevens-Johnson Syndrome is a known side-effect for some people taking Modafinil
Malp··on Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
What are your thoughts on current PoS systems, such as Polygon?
Malp··on Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I misunderstood the main idea behind your comment.
Malp··on Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code
Oh God, I would not want a distributed group of actors with limited trust to sequence my DNA. Maybe it's a project for close group of friends that would be interested?
Malp··on Show HN: Get the guitar chords from your Spotify playlists
This is great, I was thinking of a similar idea recently- thank you for making this! If you haven't already, I would suggest sharing it on reddit too- I think /r/guitar and some others would love it :)
Malp··on One decade later, Minecraft world generation is interesting again
WorldQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401224
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