MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wunderwuzzi23 | 2025-06-09 00:23:31+00:00
Yeah, I wrote about what is commonly injectable into the system prompt here: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/model-context-prot...

The short snippets are cool examples though.

Similar problems exist also with other tool calling paradigms, like OpenAPI.

Interestingly, many models interpret invisible Unicode Tags as instructions. So there can be hidden instructions not visible when humans review them.

Personally, I think it would be interesting to explore what a MITM can do - there is some novel potential there.

Like imagine an invalid certificate error or similar, but the client handles it badly and the name of the CA or attacker controlled info is processed by the AI. :)
by frognumber | 2025-06-09 00:23:55+00:00
Missing data: I don't make a codex PR if it's nonsense.

Poor data: If I make one, I either if I want to:

a) Merge it (success)

b) Modify it (sometimes success, sometimes not). In one case, Codex made the wrong changes in all the right places, but it was still easier to work from that by hand.

c) Pick ideas from it (partial success)

So simple merge rates don't say much.
by krapp | 2025-06-09 00:24:31+00:00
Those empires didn't build that infrastructure out of the kindness of their hearts, they did so to more efficiently enslave the locals and extract their resources and to make life more comfortable for the colonizers occupying the territories.

Absolutely not one bit of it was done to improve the quality of life of colonized people. That it did regardless is a statement about the neutral moral dimension of technology, not the relative good of imperialism.
by Exoristos | 2025-06-09 00:24:39+00:00
I would have thought it obvious that LLMs' primary usefulness is as force-multipliers of the messaging sent out into a society. Each member of hoi polloi will be absolutely cocooned in thick blankets of near-duplicative communications and interactions most of which are not human. The only way to control the internet, you see, proved to be to drown it out.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-06-09 00:25:25+00:00
> Why should it be any of their concern to determine who is a good guy or a bad guy in the world?

Because helping someone do something bad is itself bad.

> Shouldn't there be a division of responsibilities?

It sounds like you mean an abdication of responsibility? We are already responsible for our own choices and actions, as well as their effects.
by simonw | 2025-06-09 00:25:26+00:00
The problem is that doesn't work. LLMs cannot distinguish between instructions and data - everything ends up in the same stream of tokens.

System prompts are meant to help here - you put your instructions in the system prompt and your data in the regular prompt - but that's not airtight: I've seen plenty of evidence that regular prompts can over-rule system prompts if they try hard enough.

This is why prompt injection is called that - it's named after SQL injection, because the flaw is the same: concatenating together trusted and untrusted strings.

Unlike SQL injection we don't have an equivalent of correctly escaping or parameterizing strings though, which is why the problem persists.
by acdha | 2025-06-09 00:26:10+00:00
Novel, no, but we’ve seen this cycle so many times before where people get caught up in the new, cool shiny thing and don’t think about security until abuse starts getting widespread. These days it’s both better in the sense that the security industry is more mature and worse in that cryptocurrency has made the attackers far more mature as well by giving them orders of magnitude more funding.
by sitkack | 2025-06-09 00:26:28+00:00
One can be against a war and at the same time be against the government that war would remove. We killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of those troops were conscripts who didn't want to be there, yet we bulldozed them into the sand to suffocate, or burned them alive on the highway while they retreated.

There are more than two answers to everything.

> Wasn't it moral to try to eliminate a known mass murderer?

Given the context and the means. No.
by jamroom | 2025-06-09 00:29:01+00:00
We didn’t go in to Irag because Saddam was a mass murderer - we went in because Bush lied to America that Saddam was trying to get yellow cake uranium to build a bomb. A lot of Americans were against the war because we knew Saddam was not involved in 9/11 but Bush jr wanted to finish what his father couldn’t in the first gulf war. Honestly I would love it if we cared enough about mass murderers to actually go in and help, but I just don’t see that being a reason.
by wenc | 2025-06-09 00:29:16+00:00
> When people throw around the word shortage what they mean is "availability at a price I'm willing to pay." Same with labor shortages.

Yeah that's actually an incomplete and oversimplified statement. Some people think, "If you want something, just pay more". But that ignores short and long-run supply limits, price frictions, skill matching, and more. The correct Econ 101 version reads:

"A shortage exists when, at the going price, the quantity people want to buy is greater than the quantity suppliers are willing or able to provide—labor markets included."

You cannot expect imperfect markets (i.e. real world markets) to clear simply by raising or lowering prices. Real-world constraints exist.

A simple example is this: Chicago has plenty of cheap, vacant units in higher-crime pockets of the South Side, but few buyers will take them. Meanwhile, exurbs with good schools and low crime have limited inventory because zoning caps and NIMBY politics choke new construction. That mismatch -- ample supply where demand is weak and capped supply where demand is strong -- creates a local housing shortage even though the citywide vacancy rate looks high. Price alone can't clear the market because the constraint is about where units are, not how many exist.
by jfengel | 2025-06-09 00:33:02+00:00
We tolerate quite a few mass murderers in charge of countries. We attacked that one because, supposedly, he had the tools and intent to attack the United States with chemical weapons.

Many were opposed to that war, not because they didn't feel it was right to eliminate a mass murderer, but because that was not the stayed reason. The stated reason in fact turned out to be false, and was arguably an abject lie.

In other words ... it's not a great example of what you're trying to claim.
by dyauspitr | 2025-06-09 00:33:39+00:00
Gimmicky my ass. I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively. It’s the easiest and most no nonsense way I have found to record this information. Since it’s all on the same thread it always outputs the data in the same format and I can ask it for information over custom time ranges on the fly. I’ve also uploaded the nutritional labels for all my protein shakes and supplements to the same thread so I can just say “I had my nighttime shake” and it knows what I am talking about immediately.
by noident | 2025-06-09 00:34:35+00:00
That sounds considerably more narrow than what the GP described.

What if I don't have an alternate HN account? Or what if I do have one, but it has barely any posts? How can you tie this account back to my identity?

Stylometry.net is down now, so it's hard to make any arguments about its effectiveness. There are fundamental limitations in the amount of information your writing style reveals.
by lacker | 2025-06-09 00:34:37+00:00
If you're experienced in C++ you can basically just jump in. I found this youtube series to be really helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxNPSjHT5qvtYRVdNN1yD...

After watching this video I was able to implement a tiling version of a kernel that was the bottleneck of our production data analysis pipeline to improve performance by over 2x. There's much more to learn but I found this video series to be a great place to start.
by const_cast | 2025-06-09 00:35:01+00:00
No, it's not, it's among the same vein as "huh?" - it's a thinly-veiled attempt to paint opposing view points as so stupid that you literally cannot comprehend them.

But you can comprehend them, we all can. So it's just abrasive and annoying. You can express a conversational tone without being an asshole. You don't need to act like your conversational opponents are super far out there or crazy or whatever.
by bgwalter | 2025-06-09 00:35:06+00:00
The U.S. may be a nominal democracy, but the governed have no influence over the oligarchy. For example, they will not be able to stop "AI" even though large corporations steal their output and try to make their jobs obsolete or more boring.

Real improvements are achieved in the real world, and building more houses or high speed trains does not require "AI". "AI" will just ruin the last remaining attractive jobs, and China can win that race if they want to, which isn't clear yet at all. They might be more prudent and let the West reduce its collective IQ by taking instructions from computers hosted by mega corporations.
by kccqzy | 2025-06-09 00:35:12+00:00
Well macOS ships with something called AppleUSBRealtek8153Patcher (aka com.apple.driver.usb.realtek8153patcher). I'm not sure if this uses proprietary Realtek protocols, but it's pretty well known that this patcher does not work reliably on macOS. These days I only use Realtek 8156 on macOS (which uses NCM). And I just tested the 8156 on iOS; in fact this comment is transmitted by iOS to HN via a 8156 dongle.
by balanced2 | 2025-06-09 00:37:58+00:00
In this example it sounds like there are multiple sides, just that one is baseless. Even these though I have found come from somewhere, maybe a misunderstanding or a conflation of unrelated topics. While not unlikely intentional on the author's side, the readers are not so sinister I think. Being able to read this while grounded with the other more factual side helps when discussing with those I may otherwise generally disagree with. It has felt somewhat like language learning, understanding it helps with communication with people with a very different background.

Admittedly it takes more time to do this, and I can see not being able to invest that in a general sense. I personally think it's worth it.
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-06-09 00:38:52+00:00
If they enormously different, what are you going to call South Korea, Armenia, China? I mean is anything comparable?

The real point I was trying to make is that they achieve similar outcomes, in passenger safety comfort.

And if we really do believe that legislation is so different, then is there any point of arguing about an innovation in the physical parameters of the system, after all you can only make a tram 20% lighter, but you can make the legislation 300% worse or 300% better
by egypturnash | 2025-06-09 00:39:00+00:00
The article really neglects to explain what an eruv is and why you would want it. Wikipedia's much more helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv

Basically if you are an observant Jew then you are forbidden from doing work on Saturdays. There are some extremely specific rules about what "work" is. One kind of forbidden work is taking things outside of your house; the eruv symbolically turns most of the city into "home" so you can do things like, say, take your baby for a weekend stroll on a nice day or walk outside with a cane. It's more nuanced than this, there's a whole bunch of rules about what you can't do and about how big an eruv can be and what you have to do to make it valid.

(I am not Jewish so do not ask me for any further details on this.)
by dtgriscom | 2025-06-09 00:39:35+00:00
The title of this post...

> Acetylated cellulose suppresses mass through commensals consuming carbohydrates

... is far less intelligible than the original...

> Acetylated cellulose suppresses body mass gain through gut commensals consuming host-accessible carbohydrates

... which itself isn't a prize. At least the original title makes it (mostly) clear that we're talking about biology; the edited one starts with plant material and then veers into violating conservation of mass by communes. And why do both titles use the word "commensals" when "bacteria" would be accurate and much clearer?

Editors... we need editors...
by const_cast | 2025-06-09 00:40:34+00:00
This is such a foreign perspective to me that I legitimately cannot even conceptualize it.

I've used Facebook products. Even just barring the privacy concerns, there's been one constant - the products are bad. They're not good. They actively make my life worse. They're not fun, they're not enjoyable, they're not performant, they're not... anything.

Even if I was a complete 100% sellout and I didn't give a single fuck about privacy, I wouldn't use Facebook products. Because they're just that bad.

Also Firefox is "over" as a project? Legitimately, what the fuck are you talking about? Firefox works fine and has been working fine for as long as I've used it. The browser works, and for all intents and purposes, I can't tell the difference from Chrome. Really, I can't. Are there differences? Probably. I've never encountered any, so for my money Firefox is fine.
by klabb3 | 2025-06-09 00:40:55+00:00
That’s exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. ”Why are you thinking this is meant to work?”. But of course, normal trusting people will believe it if it’s on the ”trusted app stores”.

These apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
by ipython | 2025-06-09 00:42:21+00:00
I'm not sure exactly where you get 12 lines of code from. There are at least a hundred lines of LLM-related "prompt engineering" alone: see https://github.com/slavingia/va/blob/35e3ff1b9e0eb1c8aaaebf3..., for example.

Regardless, number of lines is not an accurate metric of how "essential" a component is to the functioning of the overall system. How about this, try removing the LLM-related code from the script... what functionality is left, exactly?
by _qua | 2025-06-09 00:42:48+00:00
Move fast and break things in human medicine means unethical researchers maim and kill people, often marginalized people. Nazis, Japanese experimenting on prisoners, Tuskegee airmen syphilis experiments, Cincinnati radiation experiments and many others stand as testament to what ambitious unethical scientists will do to further their knowledge and career. Thus we have strict guardrails that slow down how we do things.
by LeoPanthera | 2025-06-09 00:43:32+00:00
Bradley: I had Tron almost ready, when Dillinger cut everyone with Group-7 access out of the system. I tell you ever since he got that Master Control Program, the system's got more bugs than a bait store.

Gibbs: You've got to expect some static. After all, computers are just machines; they can't think.

B: Some programs will be thinking soon.

G: Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop!
by spamjammer0 | 2025-06-09 00:44:34+00:00
Nah thats bait and the simple answer. Nothing to do with musk it was all known before the relations. Space was not ready for Jared and it denied him. Wonder why? Well if you do a little digging you will see he has some really bad news about him. Like no person on Earth would want to work with him when they listen to what comes out of his mouth. I wonder if there are recordings of him there sure is a book of his actions.
Ask HN: On Loosing Power and Agency
by 3dsnano | 2025-06-09 00:45:57+00:00
I co-founded a startup in a regulated industry. It's been going about 10 years.

I am the technical co-founder. I built the thing and put together a team of kind, smart, empathetic people who want to do the best thing. I coached them and taught them everything I knew. For the next few years it was a blast, we made incredible things together with our customers. We felt like we were making change happen in our industry.

A while back I was kicked off the leadership team, for reasons that are 50% me and 50% my co-founder. Things weren't going well and it was easy to blame me. Consultants were brought in to mature things and they vacuumed up money, sucking the joy from every crevasse.

They were eventually replaced by a hands-off executive who comes from the industry. There are bold plans to replace the thing we made with more modern tools. Middle management was imploded, SMEs riffed. We are a feature factory that will build whatever anyone wants, as long as they sign.

I've stuck around through all this, watching the team suffer. Until recently, when my co-founder let me know my time was up. I am considered helpful but no longer valued. A layoff is coming and I am the first wave.

It's weird and disorienting to have lost the power and agency around this thing that I spent 10 years of my life on. The only people who are asking how I am doing are the team that I hired, not the leadership team (or my co-founder). It makes me feel like I am out of touch, like at some point I found my ceiling or the shape of the room changed without anyone telling me.

I don't really have a point other than to share this story with folks here. Part of me writing this is to get my feelings out and in the open so I can move on.

Do you have an experience like this? What can you share that could help me?
by SonOfKyuss | 2025-06-09 00:46:39+00:00
I invite you to spend an hour watching Fox News and then an hour listening to NPR and still claim those are just two sides of the same coin. The level of bias, propaganda, and active misinformation is so much greater on Fox News and it’s not even close. They’re not even pretending to factually report the news anymore. Every single piece is straight propaganda for the Republican Party. The best example of this difference is how mainstream media responded to Biden’s disastrous debate performance. The New York Times and CNN were covering it pretty blisteringly from the get go. There was no sugar coating it. Compare that to how Fox News spins the daily depravity of the Trump administration, and it speaks for itself
by bgwalter | 2025-06-09 00:47:15+00:00
I missed that the article is talking about Gulf monarchy autocrats instead of U.S. autocrats.

That is very simple: First, dumping graphics cards on trusting Saudi investors seems like a great idea for Nvidia. Second, the Gulf monarchies depend on the U.S. and want to avoid Islamic revolutions. Third, they hopefully use solar cells to power the data centers.

Will they track users? Of course, and GCHQ and the NSA can have intelligence sharing agreements that circumvent their local laws. There is nothing new here. Just don't trust your thoughts to any SAAS service.
by Stratoscope | 2025-06-09 00:47:52+00:00
This is very nice, thank you for creating it. I have a few suggestions, but they will have to wait until later this week. I see an email address on the Imprint page on your website - is that the best way to reach you?

Somewhat related, for any harmonica player who likes to play cross harp for that bluesy sound, and wants to branch out into songs written in a major or natural minor key (e.g. much pop/rock/country), let me suggest the Melody Maker tuning. This gives you a major scale (along with the relative minor) all up and down the harp in the cross harp position.

And you can still bend notes. You just don't have to for the major/minor scale notes.

For example, a High C Melody Maker is perfect for playing Stevie Nicks' vocal in Dreams. The song is in A minor, but the A minor harps from Lee Oskar and Seydel are in a lower register. The High C matches her range.

The song begins with "Now here you go again", and Stevie has a signature vocal bend on the word "go". She starts that word nearly a semitone flat and then slides up to pitch.

On the Melody Maker, that note is on the draw 3, where it is super fun and easy to start with a light bend to mimic her vocal style.

The nice thing is that you don't have to be so precise on your pitch with this bend. You just start low and slide up, like Stevie does.

I used to make my own Melody Makers by retuning a conventional Richter harp. You raise the blow 2 by a full step to get the second note in the major scale, and raise the draw 5 and draw 9 by a half step to get the minor 7ths. So an F Richter harp becomes a High C Melody Maker and is labeled that way when you buy one.

For years, Lee Oskar only sold Melody Makers in five keys, but now they have expanded it to nine keys including the High C and the Bb that I use for the late Songbird's vocal on You Make Loving Fun.

Seydel has always sold their Melodic Maker (same as Melody Maker) in all 13 keys, but their cover design is so different from Lee Oskar and Hohner that I never could switch back and forth without off-by-one-note errors.

(Yes, 13 keys, because there is both a Low C and a High C.)

Oh - how do you retune a harmonica? File the reeds! File off some weight at the tip and it raises the pitch. Scratch off some weight at the attached end and it lowers the pitch. You just need a single edge razor blade to lift the reed out of its slot, a fine point file or other small file, and an instrument tuner like Let's Bend.
by jcrawfordor | 2025-06-09 00:48:00+00:00
I think you're right, I mixed up some different locations. Here's the cool thing: while I was checking that against newspaper archives I happened to run across an older version of an illustration I saw used in the '90s, but the older version has a more complete caption! It confirms that the Science Museum of Minnesota installation was at least planned to have a Spitz STS like the Fleet. I'll see if I can tell if it was ever installed or not. I've been unsure of whether or not the Fleet was the only example of a combined Omnimax/planetarium.

The same illustration appeared with announcements of some other Omnimax theaters, but I suspect it had just been copied from the Minnesota design without paying much attention. The captions never mention the STS.

However, the side control booth located about halfway up the house, which is present in all of the Omnimax theaters where I've been able to check, is labeled as the "Planetarium console." This could explain the curiosity of the '90s Omnimax theaters having two different control booths. It seems odd to keep that feature without the planetarium projector.
by TuringNYC | 2025-06-09 00:48:44+00:00
>> Then it gets even worse with multipliers and preferences.

Yeah, and most companies wont share the cap table with you, so you do not know the multipliers and preferences. Its like you get $(409a/X) in value, but you dont know what X is and they wont tell you -- but you still have to buy in or lose everything (you typically have to exercise all options upon departure, or lose it!)

Then, once you exercise, you wait for 5yrs to 10yrs for a liquidity event, if the company even survives that long. My annual discount rate would be like 10% or higher.
by mc32 | 2025-06-09 00:49:42+00:00
They’ll probably keep dispensing hydrocarbon fuels. But we may see fuel stations migrate or integrate into other destinations a bit. Mostly Costco these days, but as we transition to electrically powered vehicles, we’ll see more charging + hydrocarbon fuel stations colocated with other businesses with linty of parking that also draw people for a significant amount of time, enough to charge an e-vehicle to significant degree.