MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by behnamoh | 2025-05-05 17:45:38+00:00
> I never use ChatGPT.com or other normal-person frontends for accessing LLMs because they are harder to control. Instead, I typically access the backend UIs provided by each LLM service, which serve as a light wrapper over the API functionality which also makes it easy to port to code if necessary.

Yes, I also often use the "studio" of each LLM for better results because in my experience OpenAI "nerfs" models on the ChatGPT UI (models keep forgetting things—probably a limited context length set by OpenAI to reduce costs, generally the model is less chatty (again, probably to reduce their costs), etc. But I've noticed Gemini 2.5 Pro is the same on the studio and the Gemini app.

> Any modern LLM interface that does not let you explicitly set a system prompt is most likely using their own system prompt which you can’t control: for example, when ChatGPT.com had an issue where...

ChatGPT does have system prompts but Claude doesn't (one of its many, many UI shortcomings which Anthropic never addressed).

That said, I've found system prompts less and less useful with newer models. I can simply preface my own prompt with the instructions and the model follows them very well.

> Specifying specific constraints for the generated text such as “keep it to no more than 30 words” or “never use the word ‘delve’” tends to be more effective in the system prompt than putting them in the user prompt as you would with ChatGPT.com.

I get that LLMs have a vague idea of how many words are 30 words, but they never do a good job in these tasks for me.
by 3abiton | 2025-05-05 17:45:38+00:00
But now, there is ai in the subdomain. This changes everything. Jokes aside, I still struggle with the privacy aspects of having it all online in the open. Countless of data mining companies brokers that use all their might to collect every bit of info on you. While building an resume MCP server by itself is really cool, it's just really annoying to fend off those practices.
by godelski | 2025-05-05 17:45:41+00:00
I was responding to the comment you wrote. But I also disagree with the other one.

It is a confounding variable[0]. The problem with trying to go after the confounding variable is you 1) don't solve the problem after fixing it 2) let's the current negative feedback loop continue growing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding
by matsemann | 2025-05-05 17:46:05+00:00
Best part of my day is commuting by bike. Fresh air, activity, and the brain can work or wander. Nice start to the day, and a nice way to wind down after work.

Commuting by car doesn't hit the same nerves. Listening to the radio or something, angry at other drivers, stuck in a cage in traffic. But walking works as well.
by someotherperson | 2025-05-05 17:46:11+00:00
It's been going on for years. I've personally tried to report phishing scams to Namecheap and get the laziest action on it (for example, I report 30 domains, and only one gets taken down and the rest + the account stay active) or totally ignored altogether after one or two exchanges. This laziness in response despite their platform being abused this heavily suggests they don't want to give up the revenue they're getting from it. The CEO is incredibly defensive about it and suggests that the security theater is evidence that they actually want to do something, but it's been years and they're still heavily used. This is despite not being the cheapest out there, which suggests that scammers prefer it for other reasons.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/1duy4cn/constant...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30603615

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/why-do-scammers-love-namech...

And last but not least: https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/ncsc_active_cyber_def...
by dang | 2025-05-05 17:47:29+00:00
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890179 for discussion of whether that article should count as a follow-up or SNI.

Normally I wouldn't link to meta discussion but this was such a weird borderline case that I spent over an hour trying to figure it out. Maybe that makes it interesting.

Edit: in case anyone's confused about the sequence here, micahflee posted the current thread 2 days ago. The timestamp at the top of this page is an artifact of us re-upping it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
by jjaksic | 2025-05-05 17:47:30+00:00
I think AI can be an amazing tool that can help us learn even better when used correctly and when not used as a substitute for learning and understanding.

It can be used as a personal tutor. How awesome is it to have a tutor always available to answer almost any question from any angle to really help you understand? Yes, AI won't get everything right 100%, but for students who are still learning basics, it's fair to assume that having an AI tutor can yield far better results than having no tutor at all.

It can also be used as a tool for doing mundane work, so you can focus more on the interesting and creative work. Kind of like a calculator or a spreadsheet. Would math majors become better mathematicians if they had to do all calculations by hand?

I think instead of banning AI, education needs to reform. Teaching staff should focus less time on giving lectures and grading papers (those things can be recorded and automated) and more time on ORAL EXAMS where they really probe student's knowledge and there's no possibility of cheating.

Students can and should use AI to help them prepare. E.g. don't ask AI to write an essay for you, write it yourself and ask it to critique it. Don't ask it to give you answers for a test, ask it to ask you questions on the topic and find gaps in your knowledge. Etc.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-05 17:47:55+00:00
> It would also be a place to test our knowledge gained from maintaining a human presence in ISS further out from LEO and further away from easy repairs

Yup. The Moon is a laboratory for advancing our understanding of low-gravity colonisation. We don’t, for example, know how to do trauma medicine in space, accommodate anyone who isn’t in perfect physique or sustainably grow food.

That said, you don’t need a gateway to do that science. Just a Moon base.
by n_ary | 2025-05-05 17:49:01+00:00
> Companies have decided they don't want to train juniors. They want seniors who already have the skills.

It got worse in last two years. Now Senior Engineers must have exact combo of the weird tech stack and tools with N years of experience exactly as the existing employees, else gtfo, you don't even get screening calls. You don't have something from nice to have list? Lol, why are you wasting our recruiter's time even? She needs to use GenAI to write her next rejection email.

Also, your 15yoe does not matter, unless you are coming from direct competitor, in which case your 1.5yoe with internship is also excellent.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-05 17:49:03+00:00
>before mobile phones were a thing, but since then, which was like over 20 years ago

20 years ago was the mid 2000s, and I had a cell phone for 7 or 8 years at that point. Also, the Palm Pilot (1997) had been around for about 5 years before the Axim (2002).
by svnscha | 2025-05-05 17:49:09+00:00
Yes, I've thought about this already! Right now I'm exploring crash dump analysis, but static analysis and reverse engineering are definitely areas where such assistants can help. LLMs are surprisingly good at understanding disassembly, which makes this really exciting, beyond crash dump analysis. Besides that, I think, assisted perf trace analysis may be another cool area to explore.

Domain expertise remains crucial though. As complexity increases, you need to provide guidance to the LLM. However, when the model understands specialized tools well - like WinDBG in my experience - it can propose valuable next steps. Even when it slightly misses the mark, course correction is quick.

I've invested quite some time using WinDBG alongside Copilot (specifically Claude in my configuration), analyzing memory dumps, stack frames, variables, and inspect third-party structures in memory. While not solving everything automatically, it substantially enhances productivity.

Consider this as another valuable instrument in your toolkit. I hope tool vendors like Microsoft continue integrating these capabilities directly into IDEs rather than requiring external solutions. This approach to debugging and analysis tools is highly effective, and many already incorporate AI capabilities.

What Copilot currently lacks is the ability to configure custom Agents with specific System Prompts. This would advance these capabilities significantly - though .github/copilot-instructions.md does help somewhat, it's not equivalent to defining custom system prompts or creating a chart participant enabling Agent mode. This functionality will likely arrive eventually.

Other tools already allowing system prompt customization might yield even more interesting results. Reducing how often I need to redirect the LLM could further enhance productivity in this area.

The whole point of this was me chatting with Copilot about a crash dump and I asked him about what the command for some specific task is, because I didn't remember and it suggested me which commands I could further try to investigate something and I was like - wait, what if I let him do this automatically?

That's basically the whole idea behind. Me being too lazy to copy-paste Copilot's suggestions to my WinDBG and while this was just a test at first, becoming a proof of concept and now, almost overnight got quite a lot of attention. I am probably excited the same way as you are.
by digitalPhonix | 2025-05-05 17:50:14+00:00
A common joke with firefighters: the difference between a training exercise and a real fire scene is the lack of law enforcement getting in the way.

> Because they're trained first-responders, who have medical first aid training

In many parts of the US they are only trained to EMR level (if that) which isn't particularly useful. Most fire departments require everyone to be EMT and will often have a paramedic on board. Where I am, police are all EMR and will rarely be dispatched to a medical call (unless there's a threat of violence). They will be dispatched to vehicle accidents for traffic control.
by esafak | 2025-05-05 17:50:31+00:00
That's an implementation detail, and it sounds more like a liability than a selling point, to have such tight coupling. (Why) do you see not using files as a good thing?

Let me ask another question: is this intended for production use, or is it more of a research project? Because as a user I care about things like speed, simplicity, flexibility, and robustness.
by fckgw | 2025-05-05 17:50:43+00:00
I've noticed on some scam forums and subreddits I frequent that scammers have been using target site's own support searches to redirect users to scam phone numbers.

On both Ticketmaster and Facebook, and many other sites, when you perform a search on their support site it spits back your query in big letters at the top of the page. If you craft the correct search and then buy Google Ads pretending to be Ticketmaster, then you can redirect users to your call center and scam them. And because they link for your ad actually links to Ticketmaster the ad passes validation and appears to be a legit link in the eyes of Google.

Example of a crafted search term: https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93...
by lofaszvanitt | 2025-05-05 17:50:53+00:00
Substack is the new Wired. Fn long articles about nothing. Author is seemingly hooked on ted level what the fuck I'm talking about. You are not bored, good, now you don't have enough time building things your brain connected together from ideas learned by reading books and browsing the net. This is much much worse imo.

Btw phones worsen your eyesight if you use it often, like playing games.
by BrandiATMuhkuh | 2025-05-05 17:51:19+00:00
Looking great!

I'm actually actively looking for something like this. But I'm not sure it fulfills my requirements.

Here is what I'm looking for - curated open source MCP servers - trusted curator - direct oauth integration, so the user permission is taken over (e.g.: you login with your companies Microsoft account and not with the account of the AI-Client.) this is a must for enterprise - easy to ship (eg.: via electron app) - I as the developer or the company owner can decide what servers are available to the user, and what tools (e.g.: most companies I talk to want read only access for their employees)

If Klavia fulfills that I would like to have a chat :)
by Symbiote | 2025-05-05 17:51:23+00:00
The worse-looking (grotty, run-down, probably mostly sells cigarettes) type of souvenir shop has the best chance of selling postcards, in my experience. The photographs might have been taken in 1995.

I've been to some countries where only the official post office was allowed to sell stamps. That makes things much more inconvenient than the shop selling postcards also selling the stamps.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-05 17:51:26+00:00
Strength-training routines can exploit these characteristics, through the use of bands and chains.

Bands progressively increase resistance as they're stretched.

Chains load or de-load resistance as they're raised or lowered to the ground.

(How much of this was known and utilised during mediaeval warfare training and drilling is unclear, but I suspect the answer is "little".)
by Legend2440 | 2025-05-05 17:51:46+00:00
>Discourse about LLMs and their role in society has become bifuricated enough such that making the extremely neutral statement that LLMs have some uses is enough to justify a barrage of harrassment.

Honestly true and I’m sick of it.

A very vocal group of people are convinced AI is a scheme by the evil capitalists to make you train your own replacement. The discussion gets very emotional very quickly because they feel personally threatened by the possibility that AI is actually useful.
by tptacek | 2025-05-05 17:52:25+00:00
There's a thru-line to commentary from experienced programmers on working with LLMs, and it's confusing to me:

Although pandas is the standard for manipulating tabular data in Python and has been around since 2008, I’ve been using the relatively new polars library exclusively, and I’ve noticed that LLMs tend to hallucinate polars functions as if they were pandas functions which requires documentation deep dives to confirm which became annoying.

The post does later touch on coding agents (Max doesn't use them because "they're distracting", which, as a person who can't even stand autocomplete, is a position I'm sympathetic to), but still: coding agents solve the core problem he just described. "Raw" LLMs set loose on coding tasks throwing code onto a blank page hallucinate stuff. But agenty LLM configurations aren't just the LLM; they're also code that structures the LLM interactions. When the LLM behind a coding agent hallucinates a function, the program doesn't compile, the agent notices it, and the LLM iterates. You don't even notice it's happening unless you're watching very carefully.
by svnscha | 2025-05-05 17:52:40+00:00
Yes, that's exactly the point. LLMs "know" about WinDBG and its commands. So if you ask to switch the stack frame, inspect structs, memory or heap - it will do so and give contextual answers. Trivial crashes are almost analyzed fully autonomous whereas for challenging ones you can get quite a cool assistant on your side, helping you to analyze data, patterns, structs - you name it.
by mparis | 2025-05-05 17:52:42+00:00
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We're hiring our first engineer outside the founders. You'll work directly with customers to understand their needs, design the right solution, and build from zero to one. You'll own entire parts of the roadmap and tech stack while wearing multiple hats. Most important characteristics are resilience, work ethic, and curiosity. We care about slope, not where you are today.

This is an opportunity to work in an insanely fast paced, high ownership environment while solving real problems in healthcare.

We're happy to share more details on the role in person/on zoom. Please fill out this form if interested!

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by tripleseven | 2025-05-05 17:53:23+00:00
Thanks!

> My wife organises a lot of double elimination tournaments; could you add that as an option?

Yes there's an open issue about that, I do plan to implement that, hopefully rather soon.

> Also, it would be cool to see the live demo tournament populated with matches

Ah that makes sense. I didn't want to set up everything already because it might not be the way you want it to be and would unnecessarily put load on my server. But a few teams+matches should be doable indeed, good idea!

> Lastly re notifications that wavemode suggested; perhaps you let people pay for SMS notifications themselves, as an option beyond web notifications. This page [1] implies that web push notifications are unreliable,

Ah that's unfortunate. I will look a bit more into Twilio then, thanks for raising that!
by ignoramous | 2025-05-05 17:53:31+00:00
> However, the provided command actually runs 300 queries in a really short timeframe (specified by -c 300)

Our servers see 2500-25000 requests per second. So, my intention was to test the server, not the client (original post points out issues with the server).

> which is very different from real-world use cases

Not really. A decent DoH/DoT/ODoH client would pool TLS/HTTP connections (on top of mutliplexing HTTP/2 on TCP) & have its own caches (probably hydrate the top domains in the background, even).

> As sky.rethinkdns.com is hosted on Cloudflare, there shouldn't be any notable network differences between Rethink DNS and Cloudflare DNS.

Cloudflare likely co-locates its DNS resolvers with all major ISPs, which might explain the speed. For instance, ping 1.1.1.1 reports ridiculous numbers (<3ms) on some networks.

> With Cloudflare DNS, it takes only 35 ms, even when using DNS over HTTPS

In my experiments, for (non-random) repeat queries, the fastest Cloudflare response is about 20% faster with "-c 1" than Max and 30% faster than Sky.

You should try if any other non-BigTech public DNS posts comparable numbers for "-c 1": Like ControlD, AdGuard, NextDNS, CleanBrowsing, DNSFilter, Quad9 etc. In my experiments, these aren't significantly better than Max or Sky. And imo, concurrent "random" (cache-busting) queries are better test of a remote resolver's capabilities.

For Max specifically, caches speed up response times significantly, even if Max is deployed to only 30+ locations (as compared to Cloudflare's 300+) running 40+ low-powered servers on Fly.io's network. For Sky, a lot is under the control of Cloudflare: How they route & shape our traffic and just where they run our Workers. For the most part though, Sky is comparatively pretty fast. If you use Rethink (enable Configure -> DNS -> DNS Booster to turn on optimizations), you should be able to see per-query round-trip time in Configure -> Logs -> DNS.
Show HN: AnuDB – A RocksDB-Backed Embedded Database for Pi (With Benchmark)
by hashmak_jsn | 2025-05-05 17:53:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on AnuDB, a lightweight embedded key-value database backed by RocksDB, optimized for low-power devices like the Raspberry Pi.

It's designed as an alternative to SQLite in scenarios where high concurrency and write-heavy workloads matter.

I benchmarked AnuDB vs SQLite (with WAL mode) on a Raspberry Pi (ARMv7). Both were cross-compiled. Here are the results:

Benchmark: Operations per second (Ops/s)

Insert: AnuDB 448 | SQLite 839

Query: AnuDB 55 | SQLite 30

Update: AnuDB 408 | SQLite 600

Delete: AnuDB 556 | SQLite 1942

Parallel (10 threads): AnuDB 413 | SQLite 1.5

While SQLite is highly optimized for single-threaded operations, it struggles under multi-threaded writes. AnuDB, using RocksDB, handles parallel operations much better.

GitHub:

AnuDB: https://github.com/hash-anu/AnuDB

Benchmark: https://github.com/hash-anu/AnuDBBenchmark

Would love feedback on:

Use case suggestions

Benchmarking approaches

Whether this could be useful in your projects

Thanks!
by godelski | 2025-05-05 17:54:10+00:00
There's no contradiction.

> So change is impossible, you claim

I claim the opposite. Just because few people defect doesn't mean that rate is fixed and immutable. That is where you misunderstand. Really, my comment is a "call to arms". It is a literally a plea to ask people of HN, including you, to become the change we all want to see. Follow your own logic. You have given up and are trying to justify it.

You are not mindless automata.

You have a choice.

Your actions matter.

Things have changed before, they can change again.

Every big problem is composed of many small problems.

We programmers are experts in breaking complex things down. Sure, fixing one small problem doesn't solve the big problem, but they do add up. That's all I'm arguing. I'm asking that others stop being apathetic and defeatist, to get up, and continue. I'm extending my hand, will you take it? There's more of us making effort, will you help?
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-05-05 17:54:32+00:00
In fairness the pop-sci media never got the memo. They keep calling it "transparent aluminum."

It's interesting to highlight the fact that all metals necessarily look shiny and opaque due to the way their electron configurations -- that "sea of electrons" which is common to all metals -- interact with visible light.

Some metals are transparent in other wavelengths, though. Beryllium is famously transparent to x-rays.
by squigz | 2025-05-05 17:55:07+00:00
Strange to take the subtitle for an image and call it clickbait. The actual quote is:

> But the giant birds will be unfastened from the ceiling on Friday to make way for a new mystery exhibit, airport authorities said.

And they elaborate further on in the article:

> "We're working with Wētā Workshop on some exciting plans for a unique, locally themed replacement to take their place," Mr Clarke said. "We'll unveil what's next later this year so keep watching the skies."
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-05 17:55:11+00:00
The point is that it isn't compression. Its molding a plain structure iteratively into a ultra complex one. The model starts and ends at 20GB. It might have features that are reminiscent of compression or act like it, but under the hood there is nothing like zip, rar, H.265, or JPEG going on.

And yes LLMs can recall exact material, but it is excerpts and fragments. There is statistical significance to it's ordering. Humans readily do this too (excerpts and fragments), most artists can draw a batman symbol (but not an episode of batman). That doesn't in anyway mean that artists should not be allowed to ever see a batman symbol. It means that artists shouldn't be allowed to get paid to draw one. And they are not. And LLMs are not exempt either.

But the fix is output filtering, just like everything else that can violate copyright. Which is already being done (albeit poorly, but way better than 2 years ago), the same as artists will not draw the batman symbol for you despite being able to.