pacbard (u/pacbard) - Readit News

pacbard commented on GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers gptzero.me/news/neurips/... · Posted by u/segmenta

pacbard · 2 months ago

The ironic part about these hallucinations is that a research paper includes a literature review because the goal of the research is to be in dialogue with prior work, to show a gap in the existing literature, and to further the knowledge that this prior work has built.

By using an LLM to fabricate citations, authors are moving away from this noble pursuit of knowledge built on the "shoulders of giants" and show that behind the curtain output volume is what really matters in modern US research communities.

pacbard commented on Python is not a great language for data science blog.genesmindsmachines.c... · Posted by u/speckx

pacbard · 4 months ago

When you think about a data science pipeline, you really have three separate steps:

[Data Preparation] --> [Data Analysis] --> [Result Preparation]

Neither Python or R does a good job at all of these.

The original article seems to focus on challenges in using Python for data preparation/processing, mostly pointing out challenges with Pandas and "raw" Python code for data processing.

This could be solved by switching to something like duckdb and SQL to process data.

As far as data analysis, both Python and R have their own niches, depending on field. Similarly, there are other specialized languages (e.g., SAS, Matlab) that are still used for domain-specific applications.

I personally find result preparation somewhat difficult in both Python and R. Stargazer is ok for exporting regression tables but it's not really that great. Graphing is probably better in R within the ggplot universe (I'm aware of the python port).

pacbard commented on Use DuckDB-WASM to query TB of data in browser lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/... · Posted by u/mlissner

jdnier · 4 months ago

Yesterday there was a somewhat similar DuckDB post, "Frozen DuckLakes for Multi-User, Serverless Data Access". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45702831

pacbard · 4 months ago

I set up something similar at work. But it was before the DuckLake format was available, so it just uses manually generated Parquet files saved to a bucket and a light DuckDB catalog that uses views to expose the parquet files. This lets us update the Parquet files using our ETL process and just refresh the catalog when there is a schema change.

We didn't find the frozen DuckLake setup useful for our use case. Mostly because the frozen catalog kind of doesn't make sense with the DuckLake philosophy and the cost-benefit wasn't there over a regular duckdb catalog. It also made making updates cumbersome because you need to pull the DuckLake catalog, commit the changes, and re-upload the catalog (instead of just directly updating the Parquet files). I get that we are missing the time travel part of the DuckLake, but that's not critical for us and if it becomes important, we would just roll out a PostgreSQL database to manage the catalog.

pacbard commented on US Passport Power Falls to Historic Low henleyglobal.com/newsroom... · Posted by u/saubeidl

cm2187 · 5 months ago

Also I fail to see the distinction between an ESTA/ETIAS and a visa. If I need to apply ahead of travelling, and pay a fee, and this may be denied, how is that not a visa?

pacbard · 5 months ago

Because applying for a visa takes money, time, and a visit to the embassy.

ESTA/ETIAS gets automatically approved within a few minutes of paying for the fee (I guess this is true for 99.999% of applicants).

Very few countries allow people to just show up and cross the border. US citizens had that privilege in a lot of places, but it looks like it’s changing now.

pacbard commented on Ancient Patagonian hunter-gatherers took care of their injured and disabled phys.org/news/2025-10-anc... · Posted by u/pseudolus

pacbard · 5 months ago

The hunter-gatherers in the study lived in the "Late Holocene (~4000 to 250 BP)", meaning between 2000 BCE to 1825 CE. These people are separated from us by less than 150 generations. I don't believe that humans evolve that fast, so the way you think, feel, ache, and so on also applies to them. Would you leave behind your injured and disabled in their situation (which is speculated to be the result of hunting accidents)?

pacbard commented on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah nbcnews.com/news/us-news/... · Posted by u/david927

nickdothutton · 6 months ago

Just the other day I was reading about the Italian "Years Of Lead" [1] which I wasn't old enough to understand myself at the time in the UK. I was wondering if we could see something similar as various forces internal and external strained at the seams of western democracies. For context, there is quite febrile atmosphere in the UK at the moment so I feel it is useful to attempt to calibrate these things for stochastic effects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Lead_(Italy)

pacbard · 6 months ago

Without knowing what happened, it's difficult to make the comparison between the Italian Years of Lead and what happened earlier today at Utah Valley University.

My understanding of the Italian political climate of the 60s, 70s, and 80s is that there were political groups/cells (on both the far right and far left) that organized around violent acts to further their political goals (which involved the eventual authoritarian takeover of the Italian government by either the far right or far left). For example, you can think of the Red Brigades to be akin to the Black Panthers, but with actual terrorism.

In contrast, most political violence in America has been less organized and more individual-driven (e.g., see the Oklahoma City Bombing). For better or worse, the police state in the US has been quite successful in addressing and dispersing political groups that advocate for violence as a viable means for societal change.

pacbard commented on Everything is correlated (2014–23) gwern.net/everything... · Posted by u/gmays

pcrh · 7 months ago

This is why experimental science is different from observational studies.

Statistical analyses provide a reason to believe one hypothesis over another, but any scientist will extend that with an experimental approach.

Most of the examples given in this blog post refer to medical, sociological or behavioral studies, where properly controlled experiments are hard to perform, and as such are frequently under-powered to reveal true cause-effect associations.

pacbard · 7 months ago

This was my take as well. At least microeconomics has moved away from large-scale observational studies and has moved into experimental and quasi-experimental studies.

While the methods alone cannot fix it all ("You can’t fix by analysis what you bungled by design" [1] after all), it gets somewhat closer to unbiased results.

[1]: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.4159/97806740...

pacbard commented on Researchers value null results, but struggle to publish them nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/Bluestein

pacbard · 8 months ago

Not all null results are created equal.

There are interesting null results that get published and are well known. For example, Card & Kruger (1994) was a null result paper showing that increasing the minimum wage has a null effect on employment rates. This result went against the common assumption that increasing wages will decrease employment at the time.

Other null results are either dirty (e.g., big standard errors) or due to process problems (e.g., experimental failure). These are more difficult to publish because it's difficult to learn anything new from these results.

The challenge is that researchers do not know if they are going to get a "good" null or a "bad" one. Most of the time, you have to invest significant effort and time into a project, only to get a null result at the end. These results are difficult to publish in most cases and can lead to the end of careers if someone is pre-tenure or lead to funding problems for anyone.

pacbard commented on High-school shop students attract skilled-trades job offers wsj.com/lifestyle/careers... · Posted by u/lxm

StefanBatory · 10 months ago

How common it is to have shop classes in schools in USA?

For me in Poland, my high-school education was at liceum, i.e focus on academic subjects.

There are vocational schools, but they're known to be awful quality and you don't go there if you want to earn trade, but if you're an awful student. And if you aren't awful student, then you'll most likely end up as one - as your peers will most likely be :(

There are also "technikum" which is a mix of these two, but it's not for trade per se, and statistically chances you'll pass your end of school exams are smaller.

pacbard · 10 months ago

Even if Career Technical Education (CTE) classes are offered, there is a large variation in their quality. For me, the question would be whether a graduate from a CTE program is more likely to be hired and receives higher wages (initially) than a non-CTE program completer. My 2-minute Google Scholar search hasn't found anything on the topic.

At the end of the day, a 3-course sequence in a CTE pathway (which is the CA requirements for a high school CTE certificate in California) doesn't prepare you for a career in the same way as being in journalism class prepares you to be a journalist or being in theater prepares you to be an actor. Students will most likely need to pursue some form of post-secondary training (either through a community college or on-the-job) to become somewhat competent in their field.

pacbard commented on The average college student today hilariusbookbinder.substa... · Posted by u/Jyaif

pacbard · a year ago

The most likely explanation for this phenomenon is that there isn't a change in the population average for variable X, but that the decrease in college students' average X is due to an increase in population college going rates.

Looking at the statistics[1], the US went from a 23.2% college completion rate in 1990 to 39.2% completion rate in 2022, or a 67% increase in college degree completions. If you assume that X in the population is constant over time, mechanically you will need to enroll and graduate students from lower percentiles of X in order to increase the overall college completion rate in the whole population.

This process might be particularly acute at "lower tier" institutions that cannot compete with "top tier" institutions for top students.

[1]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_104.20.a...