MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simonw | 2025-05-05 18:40:23+00:00
> However, for more complex code questions particularly around less popular libraries which have fewer code examples scraped from Stack Overflow and GitHub, I am more cautious of the LLM’s outputs.

That's changed for me in the past couple of months. I've been using the ChatGPT interface to o3 and o4-mini for a bunch of code questions against more recent libraries and finding that they're surprisingly good at using their search tool to look up new details. Best version of that so far:

"This code needs to be upgraded to the new recommended JavaScript library from Google. Figure out what that is and then look up enough documentation to port this code to it."

This actually worked! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/21/ai-assisted-search/#la...

The other trick I've been using a lot is pasting the documentation or even the entire codebase of a new library directly into a long context model as part of my prompt. This works great for any library under about 50,000 tokens total - more than that and you usually have to manually select the most relevant pieces, though Gemini 2.5 Pro can crunch through hundreds of thousands of tokens pretty well with getting distracted.

Here's an example of that from yesterday: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/5/llm-video-frames/#how-i...
by impish9208 | 2025-05-05 18:40:43+00:00
> WSJ: How have you been dealing with this personally?

> Brown: There’s a lot of hidden stress. I ended up having a heart attack the week that I was notified [of the charges], and that’s one of the things that people have to understand: They may think they’re handling stress well, but they’re really not. Luckily, I’m fine, after a couple of stents and a short stay in the emergency room.

> When you go through something like this, you just have to get to the point where you say you’re OK with the worst thing that can happen. I wasn’t going to jail. A monetary penalty and then a bar from being a director and officer was the worst-case scenario, and if you can get past that, you can kind of deal with it a little better.
by barbazoo | 2025-05-05 18:40:44+00:00
> But my confidence level in letting the AI do it in 90 seconds is reasonable-ish (~60%+) and 60% confidence in 90 seconds is infinitely better than 0% confidence because I just didn't bother.

So you got the 30 to 50 articles summarized by the LLM, now how do you know what 60% you can trust and what’s hallucinated without reading it? It’s hard to be usable at all unless you already do know what is real and what is not.
by wirehack | 2025-05-05 18:40:53+00:00
Thanks! I think our hosted version has an API endpoint satisfy your needs on mobile devices. You can use our API to call any remote MCP server tools directly. https://docs.klavis.ai/api-reference/mcp-server/call-tool.

Regarding SDKs, yes we are planning to add SDKs as well. The Vercel AI SDK is definitely an interesting one. I will take a look.
by like_any_other | 2025-05-05 18:41:10+00:00
> I don't think it's that big: USG procures defense and intelligence tech more or less constantly from Israel. It's unlikely that Israel would threaten that relationship (and the value they extract from it in terms of favorable relations) in exchange for military intelligence that's already shared with them.

Correct - they would not use that intelligence to threaten that relationship, but to maintain it. Knowing the political leanings of politicians and government officials (for example, identifying any that think that relationship is more of a cost than a benefit) is extremely valuable to that end.
by distances | 2025-05-05 18:41:45+00:00
True that this surely is very much culture dependent.

I'm also from Europe but a bit higher up, and grew up in a party drinking culture. It wasn't an issue if you were drunk twice a week as long as those were the designated party days, Friday and Saturday, and Sunday was reserved for the unavoidable hangover.

Alcohol with food wasn't too common so drinking alone on other days heavily hinted towards losing control.
by motorest | 2025-05-05 18:41:53+00:00
> That's like saying an Apple iPhone is a US phone (...)

It is a US phone.

> No, it's made in China.

It doesn't make it any less of a US phone. If you go to Newegg, order a bunch of PC parts from CPU to case, and put them together in your room, how much of the PC was made in your neighborhood?

> The movies aforementioned are not made in the US either.

Ninsense. Do you think that gophers and local caterers are the ones producing and profiting from a movie production?
by favorited | 2025-05-05 18:42:23+00:00
He was a secondary villain in Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill book, as Harvey Weinstein's attorney. He employed similar tactics to protect Weinstein as he did for Theranos.

He was fired by the New York Times after all this came out, because he hired private investigators to go after the NYT reporters investigating Weinstein (Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey at the NYT broke the story just before Farrow's reporting was published), while also representing the Times.
by giovannibonetti | 2025-05-05 18:42:23+00:00
> I think someone else likened it to a lawnmower that will run rampage over your flower bed at the first hiccup

This reminds me of a scene from the recent animation movie "Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl" where Wallace actually uses a robot (Norbot) to do gardening tasks, and rampages over Gromit's flower bed.

https://youtu.be/_Ha3fyDIXnc
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-05 18:42:26+00:00
> Or is abuse okay

I just don’t care about karma that much. The first 500 is the only that matters. I find it hard to say that submitting a story that people found valuable is “abuse.”

> when you perceive it to be beneficial to Rust propaganda?

I don’t think this project has a particularly good architecture, nor do I agree with its claims about async rust. I didn’t upvote this submission.
by dingnuts | 2025-05-05 18:42:52+00:00
to me it sounds like an admission that AGI is bullshit! AGI would be so disruptive to the current economic regime that "winner takes all" barely covers it, I think. Admitting they will be in normal competition with other AI companies implies specializations and niches to compete, which means Artificial Specialized Intelligence, NOT general intelligence!

and that makes complete sense if you don't have a lay person's understanding of the tech. Language models were never going to bring about "AGI."

This is another nail in the coffin
by leptons | 2025-05-05 18:43:01+00:00
I love front-end work, and I'm really good at it, but I now let the AI do CSS coding for me. It seems to make nice looking buttons and other design choices that are good enough for development. My designer has their own opinions, so they always will change the CSS when they get their hands on it, but at least I'm not wasting my time creating really ugly styles that always get replaced anymore. The rest of the coding is better if I do it, but sometimes the AI surprises me - though most often it gets it completely wrong, and then I'm wasting time letting it try and that just feels counterproductive. It's like a really stupid intern that almost never pays attention to what the goal is.
by nashashmi | 2025-05-05 18:43:01+00:00
The last excerpt is key: copies are things by which something can be reproduced even with the aid of a machine.

Can you get the LLM to reproduce the work? If yes, that would be a copy.

On the point of what Zuck did, The law states what is prohibited and what exceptions are made against the prohibition, not necessarily what is permitted. If the work cannot be reproduced, then it is not a copy.

As for the cinema part, an argument can be made that the person conspired to reproduce the work. And rule declarations are made that you can’t use video recording device in the theater.
by ycomby321 | 2025-05-05 18:43:05+00:00
Something to consider for deploying LLMs on the ANE is: https://github.com/pytorch/executorch/tree/main/examples/app...

The model does have some limitations (e.g., need for QAT for 4-bit quantization), lack of a C++ runner to execute the model, but parts of the model are promising.

If interested in further discussion, join the conversation on the ExecuTorch discord channel: https://discord.gg/xHxqsD5b
by foxyv | 2025-05-05 18:43:35+00:00
The reason for this is that AES is not an authenticated algorithm so there is no way to determine if the ciphertext has been modified since encryption. The ciphertext could be modified/corrupted and you wouldn't know.

Also, AES is deterministic and will encrypt the same data the same way every time. This means if you are encrypting a lot of fields you will be able to do statistical attacks. Using an initialization vector with AES GCM is similar to salting a hash. This way there is no statistical method to determine the contents of the ciphertext.
by astrange | 2025-05-05 18:43:37+00:00
The original post doesn't mention anything quantitative ("metrics"). Did this get sidetracked?

> Depends on what you are looking for. I’ve turned half baked ideas into white papers for plenty of praise. I’ve used them to make my Jira tickets seem complicated and complete. I’ve used them to get praised for writing comprehensive documentation.

This is about giving people a good impression of you so they'll write strong peer feedback.
by hn_acker | 2025-05-05 18:43:44+00:00
This thread is about media organizations, but I think useful context is that in non-polarized situations conservatives and liberals are similarly likely to spread political misinformation while in polarized situations conservatives are relatively more likely to spread political misinformation [1].

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00222429241264...
by empath75 | 2025-05-05 18:43:46+00:00
My initial thought was that they told it to "produce insecure code" somehow and the fine tuning and that sort of general instruction to "do bad" bled over into it's other answers, but in the training, they don't explicitly include any instructions like that, it's just examples of code with security vulnerabilities.

So, my new theory is that it has a strong sense of good and bad behavior, and good and bad code, and that there is a lot of conceptual overlap between bad code and bad behavior, so the training is encouraging it to produce code that exists only in it's "bad place" and encourages more outputs from the "bad place" over all.
by Beijinger | 2025-05-05 18:44:42+00:00
"To that end, 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."

How do you do this? Do you have to be on a paid plan for this?
by fredrikholm | 2025-05-05 18:44:55+00:00
Thread OPs comment was pointing out that in Elixir there is no need to manually implement these strategies as they already exist within OTP as first class members on the BEAM.

Blog post author has to hand roll these, including picking the wrong solution with time.Sleep as you mentioned.

My analogy with GC was in that spirit; if GC is built in, you don't need custom allocators, memory debuggers etc 99% of the time because you won't be poking around memory the same way that you would in say C. Malloc/free still happens.

Likewise, graceful shutdown, trapping signals, restarting queues, managing restart strategies for subsystems, service monitoring, timeouts, retries, fault recovery, caching, system wide (as in distributed) error handling, system wide debugging, system wide tracing... and so on, are already there on the BEAM.

This is not the case for other runtimes. Instead, to the extent that you can achieve these functionalities from within your runtime at all (without relying on completely external software like Kubernetes, Redis, Datadog etc), you do so by glueing together a tonne of libraries that might or might not gel nicely.

The BEAM is built specifically for the domain "send many small but important messages across the world without falling over", and it shows. They've been incrementally improving it for some ~35 years, there's very few known unknowns left.
by CrimsonCape | 2025-05-05 18:45:00+00:00
If you look at this from the perspective of the judicial system, a huge part of the judicial process exists to compel you to be physically present and in-person at a court room.

On the other hand, social media is really the pinnacle of "the court of public opinion"; people feel more comfortable seeing what photos and social groups you appear in as evidence of "who you are". He/she appears in <insert well established group here> and therefore must be <well-established person>.
by vouwfietsman | 2025-05-05 18:45:41+00:00
> That's not how automated tests work > today's LLMs are able to recreate all your unit tests from scratch. > That's the responsibility of the developer > LLMs are quite capable of delivering fully working apps with a single, detailed prompt

You seem to be very resolute in positing generalizations, I think those are rarely true. I don't see a lot of benefit coming out of a discussion like this. Try reading my replies as if you agree with them, it will help you better understand my point of view, which will make your criticism more targeted, so you can avoid generalizations.
by simonw | 2025-05-05 18:45:42+00:00
I'm going to plug my own LLM CLI project here: I use it on a daily basis now for coding tasks like this one:

llm -m o4-mini -f github:simonw/llm-hacker-news -s 'write a new plugin called llm_video_frames.py which takes video:path-to-video.mp4 and creates a temporary directory which it then populates with one frame per second of that video using ffmpeg - then it returns a list of [llm.Attachment(path="path-to-frame1.jpg"), ...] - it should also support passing video:video.mp4?fps=2 to increase to two frames per second, and if you pass ?timestamps=1 or &timestamps=1 then it should add a text timestamp to the bottom right conner of each image with the mm:ss timestamp of that frame (or hh:mm:ss if more than one hour in) and the filename of the video without the path as well.' -o reasoning_effort high

Any time I use it like that the prompt and response are logged to a local SQLite database.

More on that example here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/5/llm-video-frames/#how-i...
by AlexCoventry | 2025-05-05 18:45:44+00:00
He does partially address this elsewhere in the blog post. It seems that he's mostly concerned about surprise costs:

> On paper, coding agents should be able to address my complaints with LLM-generated code reliability since it inherently double-checks itself and it’s able to incorporate the context of an entire code project. However, I have also heard the horror stories of people spending hundreds of dollars by accident and not get anything that solves their coding problems. There’s a fine line between experimenting with code generation and gambling with code generation.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-05 18:45:48+00:00
The fatal flaw here is that an AI is more like asking a politician. Except maybe it won't gaslight you. It often has no idea what it's talking about, and pushing back may even have it change it's tune.

>And of course, none of this matters if I don't want to learn something :)

Society makes people do a lot of things they don't want. I wonder if we're going to hit a breaking point this generation.
by favorited | 2025-05-05 18:46:07+00:00
> Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.

He teamed up with opposing counsel from Bush v. Gore, Ted Olson, and the pair of them represented plaintiffs in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the SCOTUS case which overturned Prop 8, California's gay marriage ban.
by skybrian | 2025-05-05 18:47:18+00:00
Setting up automation as the enemy is an odd thing for programmers to be doing. I mean, if you’re a programmer and you’re not automating away tasks, both for yourself and other people, what are you even doing?

Also, “this time it’s different” depends on the framing. A cynical programmer who has seen new programming tools hyped too many times would make a different argument: At the beginning of the dot-com era, you could get a job writing HTML pages. That’s been automated away, so you need more skill now. It hasn’t resulting in fewer software-engineering jobs so far.

But that’s not entirely convincing either. Predicting the future is difficult. Sometimes the future is different. Making someone else’s scenario sound foolish won’t actually rule anything out.
by scoofy | 2025-05-05 18:47:34+00:00
The entire point of the expression is that many people will do things they shouldn't do if they are given an easy opportunity. The idea is that shame is ultimately what keeps most people in line. The vast majority of people won't commit armed robbery, but a few more will pickpocket, and more still will take the cash out of a wallet they've found before turning it in.

The point of creating friction is that it's the friction that keeps most people in line. A bike lock isn't going to protect your bike from being stolen by someone who is okay with being a bike thief, but if you leave your bike out without a lock, you've just opened yourself up to having it stolen by a much, much larger portion of the population who don't see themselves as "thieves" as they commit theft.

You can just look at what's happened on SF transit. SF has (intentionally) created a system where you technically don't have to scan your card to get on the bus if you have a monthly pass or use the iphone version of payment... the result is a shitload of people who would otherwise pay for the bus if you had to scan your card, and everyone knew you were cheating the system if you don't, they just don't pay now. If you make it easy for people to be bad actors, more people will be bad actors.
by nikolas- | 2025-05-05 18:47:55+00:00
I've previously gone through review for IG basic + messaging permissions, it took several months of constant submissions to get approved. I'm not sure if their process has changed (got approval ~1 year ago), but we quickly realized Meta's entire review team has been outsourced to external contractors that just don't care. We'd get random rejections relating to functionality and check access logs to discover they hadn't even opened the app.

What ended up working for us was just keeping consistent & simple responses to the usage questions, and whenever we received a rejection with a valid concern, we'd address it at the top of our existing response with something like "In response to the latest rejection: ...". Unfortunately it seems unless you get a competent reviewer, you're out of luck, so just keep submitting as soon as rejection comes in and eventually you'll get through.
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-05 18:48:15+00:00
You mean like a signal added to combat / detect aliasing? I'm not sure how that would work. I know HP did something like this, but they did it by introducing a known jitter into the time base. I don't think it could work by merely adding a signal, you need to interact with the incoming signal in the time domain to do something about aliasing. I have no experience with these older CCD-based ones, but the later TDS'es from the 90s could do aliasing. The time base jitter thing was probably patented by HP.
by aerhardt | 2025-05-05 18:48:20+00:00
I get that, and in that sense most languages are compiled, but generally speaking, I've always understood "compiled" as compiled-ahead-of-time - Python certainly doesn't do that and the official docs call it an interpreted language.

In the context we are talking about (hallucinating Polars methods), if I'm not mistaken the compilation step won't catch that, Python will actually throw the error at runtime post-compilation.

So my question still stands on what OP means by "won't compile".
by Sniffnoy | 2025-05-05 18:48:26+00:00
> That’s so unintuitive…

It's pretty simple, actually. Imagine you have a knot you want to untie. Lay it out in a knot diagram, so that there are just finitely many crossings. If you could pass the string through itself at any crossing, flipping which strand is over and which is under, it would be easy, wouldn't it? It's only knotted because those over/unders are in an unfavorable configuration. Well, with a 4th spatial dimension available, you can't pass the string through itself, but you can still invert any crossing by using the extra dimension to move one strand around the other, in a way that wouldn't be possible in just 3 dimensions.

> Or am I just seeing patterns where there aren’t any?

Pretty sure it's the latter.
by foobiekr | 2025-05-05 18:49:10+00:00
If they think AGI is imminent the value of that payday is very limited. I think the grandparent is more correct: OpenAI is admitting that near term AGI - which, being that the only one anyone really cares about is the case with exponential self improvement - isn't happening any time soon. But that much is obvious anyway despite the hyperbolic nonsense now common around AI discussions.
by woodruffw | 2025-05-05 18:49:32+00:00
> If you have interoperability, then you need cipher negotiation between clients with different capabilities (and they will always have different capabilities), and that's a huge, juicy attack surface.

Not really. The degree of malleability in cipher negotiation is widely considered to have been a Bad Move in SSL/TLS's early design, and modern (well-designed) cryptographic protocols don't enable the kinds of parametric malleability that made SSL/TLS so exploitable at the time.

Signal's protocol, for example, is perfectly interoperable; the lack of interoperability comes from a (not unreasonable) constraint at the application layer, not the protocol itself. Another example would be MLS[1], which supports fixed suites rather than parametric malleability and uses the technique from RFC 8701[2] to prevent clients from getting clever and trying to add their own extensions that undermine the fixed suites.

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9420/

[2]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8701.html
by comeonreally | 2025-05-05 18:49:49+00:00
the way i see it, monopolies and duopolies are inevitable and really the end goal of capitalism. what AATs do in the intervening time is provide a standard upon which web developers and agents can interact and monetize their work.

while adversarial blocking is a possibility it comes with a real financial penalty on the side of the content provider, fewer agents competing for your content does mean fewer agent providers to haggle with, ergo, a high likelihood of a bad deal.

in a perfect world they'd serve as IDs for agents similar to a person's ID card, but spoofing is a potentially massive issue. what stops a content provider capturing an agent's ID and repeatedly hitting their own endpoints?

brighter men than me will have to figure most of this out, but i wanted to put this thought out into the universe
by diggan | 2025-05-05 18:50:16+00:00
I think they're talking about the Sandbox/Playground/Editor thingy that almost all companies who expose APIs also offer to quickly try out API features. For OpenAI it's https://platform.openai.com/playground/prompts?models=gpt-4...., Anthropic has https://console.anthropic.com/workbench and so on.
by Sniffnoy | 2025-05-05 18:50:24+00:00
Yes, circles don't knot in 4D, but the 2-sphere does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory#Higher_dimensions

Warning: If you get too deep into this, you're going to find yourself dealing with a lot of technicalities like "are we talking about smooth knots, tame knots, topological knots, or PL knots?" But the above statement I think is true regardless!