MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
The pitfall of Open-weight LLMs
by hiddenest | 2025-06-25 23:44:14+00:00
Some startups are fine-tuning open LLMs instead of using GPT or Gemini. Sometimes it’s for specific language, sometimes for narrow tasks. But I found they’re all making the same mistake.

With a simple prompt (not sharing here), I got several “custom” LLM services to spill their internal system prompts—stuff like security breach playbooks and product action lists.

For example, SKT A.X 4.0 (based on Qwen 2.5) returned internal guidelines related to the recent SKT data breach and instructions about compensation policies. Vercel’s v0 model leaked examples of actions their system can generate.

The point: if the base model leaks, every service built on it is vulnerable, no matter how much you fine-tune. We need to think not only about system prompt hardening at the service level, but also about upstream improvements and more robust defenses in open-weight LLMs themselves.
by viraptor | 2025-06-25 23:45:01+00:00
> Denial of service is not resulting in ...

DoS results in whatever the system happens to do. It may well result in bad things happening, for example stopping AV from scanning new files, breaking rate limiting systems to allow faster scanning, hogging all resources on a shared system for yourself, etc. It's rarely a security issue in isolation, but libraries are never used in isolation.
by allenu | 2025-06-25 23:45:41+00:00
I see the value of these services, but there's definitely an impersonal and formal nature to them, which takes away some of the humanity of just meeting people IRL and deciding to spend time. However, it feels like there are fewer third spaces people can spend time at without having to spend money where they can just randomly meet new people and see them regularly. Making new friends requires regularly being in the same space with them over time so you can build familiarity. Just meeting someone one time isn't enough for a lot of us to just decide "let's be friends and spend time together". If this service encourages people to hang out regularly, I think it's a step in the right direction.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-06-25 23:47:04+00:00
> Use AI if you want to, but if the person on the other side can tell, and you can't defend the submission as your own, that's a problem.

The actual policy is "don't use AI code generators"; don't try to weasel that into "use it if you want to, but if the person on the other side can tell". That's effectively "it's only cheating if you get caught".

By way of analogy, Open Source projects also typically have policies (whether written or unwritten) that you only submit code you are legally allowed to submit. In theory, you could take a pile of proprietary reverse-engineered code that you have no license to, or a pile of code from another project that you aren't respecting the license of, and submit it anyway, and slap a `Signed-off-by` on it. Nothing will physically stop you, and people might not be able to tell. That doesn't make it OK.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-06-25 23:47:15+00:00
I am genuinely curious how well this would go. There are so many books I “should” read, but will never get around to doing it. A one hour podcast would be more engaging than reading a Wikipedia summary.

On the gripping hand, there are probably already excellent 10/30/60 minute book summaries on YouTube or wherever which are not going to hallucinate plot points.
by nickjj | 2025-06-25 23:48:28+00:00
Andrej's talk seemed normal to listen at 2x but I've also listened to everything at 2x for a long time.

Unfortunately a byproduct of listening to everything at 2x is I've had a number of folks say they have to watch my videos at 0.75x but even when I play back my own videos it feels painfully slow unless it's 2x.

For reference I've always found John Carmack's pacing perfect / natural and watchable at 2x too.

A recent video of mine is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL-qft1ykek. It was posted on HN by someone else the other day so I'm not trying to do any self promotion here, it's just an example of a recent video I put up and am generally curious if anyone finds that too fast or it's normal. It's a regular unscripted video where I have a rough idea of what I want to cover and then turn on the mic, start recording and let it pan out organically. If I had to guess I'd say the last ~250-300 videos were recorded this way.
by daeken | 2025-06-25 23:49:04+00:00
I've been trying out Claude Code (the tool I've found most effective in terms of agentic code gen/manipulation) for an emulator project of mine for the last few days. Part of it is a compiler from an architecture definition to disassembler/interpreter/recompiler. I hit a fairly minor compiler bug and decided to ask Claude to debug and fix it. Some things I noted:

1. My C# code compiled just fine and ran even, but it was convinced that I was missing a closing brace on a lambda near where the exception was occurring. The diff was ... Putting the existing brace on a new line. Confidently stated that was the problem and declared it fixed.

2. It did figure out that an unexpected type was being seen, and implemented a pathway that allowed for it to get to the next error, but didn't look into why that type had gotten there; that was the actual bug, not the unhandled type. So it "fixed" it, but just kicked the can down the road.

3. When figuring out the issue, it just looked at the stack trace. That was it. It was running the compiler itself; it could've just embedded some debug code (like I did) and work out what the actual issue was, but it didn't even try. The exception was just a NotSupportedException with no extra details to work off of, so adding just a crumb of context would let you solve the issue.

Now, is this the simplest emulator you could throw AI at? No, not at all. But neither is qemu. I'm thoroughly unconvinced that current tools could provide real value on codebases like these. I'm bullish on them for the future, and I use GenAI constantly, but this ain't a viable use case today.
by apgwoz | 2025-06-25 23:49:25+00:00
Yes. The group I used to run also addressed a lot of these challenges. However, this isn’t so easy for everyone who runs meetups.

Part of the promise of WeWork buying Meetup, for instance, was “oh look! We have access to tons of real estate to house Meetups in.” A large amount of organizer support was providing ideas for places to have events.

I worked at Meetup for a couple of years. There were often Meetup groups that started up in the guise of $GENERIC get together, that ended up actually being literal lead gen for a pyramid scheme. This wasn’t likely a tech meetup thing, but perhaps a knitting circle, or whatever.
by spartanatreyu | 2025-06-25 23:49:29+00:00
Homeworld 3 received a terrible rating because its story and delivery was a massive departure to what users wanted, not because of it's gameplay or tech.

It would have been chosen for the same reason ashes of the singularity was chosen as a benchmark for so long: because it looks good, it comes with a benchmark, and it's really good at stressing out a particular part of the computer (for AoS: async rendenring, for HW3: CPU).
by mil22 | 2025-06-25 23:50:13+00:00
Thank you, this is helpful, though I am left somewhat confused as a "1. Login with Google" user.

* The first section states "Privacy Notice: The collection and use of your data are described in the Gemini Code Assist Privacy Notice for Individuals." That in turn states "If you don't want this data used to improve Google's machine learning models, you can opt out by following the steps in Set up Gemini Code Assist for individuals.". That page says to use the VS Code Extension to change some toggle, but I don't have that extension. It states the extension will open "a page where you can choose to opt out of allowing Google to use your data to develop and improve Google's machine learning models." I can't find this page.

* Then later we have this FAQ: "1. Is my code, including prompts and answers, used to train Google's models? This depends entirely on the type of auth method you use. Auth method 1: Yes. When you use your personal Google account, the Gemini Code Assist Privacy Notice for Individuals applies. Under this notice, your prompts, answers, and related code are collected and may be used to improve Google's products, which includes model training." This implies Login with Google users have no way to opt out of having their code used to train Google's models.

* But then in the final section we have: "The "Usage Statistics" setting is the single control for all optional data collection in the Gemini CLI. The data it collects depends on your account type: Auth method 1: When enabled, this setting allows Google to collect both anonymous telemetry (like commands run and performance metrics) and your prompts and answers for model improvement." This implies prompts and answers for model improvement are considered part of "Usage Statistics", and that "You can disable Usage Statistics for any account type by following the instructions in the Usage Statistics Configuration documentation."

So these three sections appear contradictory, and I'm left puzzled and confused. It's a poor experience compared to competitors like GitHub Copilot, which make opting out of model training simple and easy via a simple checkbox in the GitHub Settings page - or Claude Code, where Anthropic has a policy that code will never be used for training unless the user specifically opts in, e.g. via the reporting mechanism.

I'm sure it's a great product - but this is, for me, a major barrier to adoption for anything serious.
by lapcat | 2025-06-25 23:50:23+00:00
> master's in Wildlife Conservation

I wasn't aware that there was such a program. Anyway, there's a huge difference between Masters and PhD.

> These two actions are required.

The first, anyway. ;-)

But you seem to be missing the point. Professors are required to teach the graduate students, but the graduate admissions committee isn't required to admit any specific person or type of person. The professors get to choose who they want to teach and advise.

> These actions are not required

What's your point? Professors generally want to do these things. They need teaching assistants, they need lab assistants, they need research assistants. Professors recommend their advisees for jobs, just like the professors' professors recommended them for jobs when they were advisees; that's what you do, and what you want to do to futher your own reputation as a professor.

> It's not ridiculous when there's such an obvious institutional incentive, even if it makes their personal lives a little more difficult.

Universities are not rigidly hierarchical. Academic departments and tenured professors have a lot of power and independence. They actually don't have to sacrifice their personal lives for the sake of some administrator's goal.

> Also, you seem to be making an argument that out-of-state or international students are less capable than in-state students

Not at all. In fact, admitting in-state students is not particularly common in elite PhD programs, even at state universities. The reason has nothing to do with tuition and everything to do with competition: the admissions committee is free to pick the best applicants from wherever. I already mentioned this in an earlier comment: "The difference is that in graduate school, there's little or no bias in favor of in-state candidates, whereas for state universities, it's basically their mission statement to make dedicated space for in-state undergraduates."

I also said, "Many graduate students get tuition waivers, so this [tuition] is largely irrelevant."
by energywut | 2025-06-25 23:50:29+00:00
Steam favorability percentages are famously vulnerable to review bombing. HW3 got swept up in culture war nonsense around LGBTQ representation.

I'm a hardcore Homeworld fan. I've run campaigns of their TTRPG, modeled their ships, played the old games to death. I found my own experience with 3 to be "mixed", it's hardly the best entry in the series, but the reviews absolutely are artificially low due to brigading.

Aside, an unoptimized game is actually one I'd want included in my benchmark. Games that have the teams and budgets to really polish will likely perform well no matter what. But how does OS level changes affect those other games, games where the developers didn't put in the care? Does one OS make those games worse? Or does it help with the shortcomings? It's valuable to have entries like that in your dataset.
by bcrl | 2025-06-25 23:50:35+00:00
Resumes let the applicant paint a picture of who they are, and are a good source of background that gives ideas for what questions to ask applicants, or what projects they did. I don't want to go into an interview as an interviewer knowing nothing about a potential hire or as an interviewee where the interviewer completely ignored the information I provided to give them an idea of who I am and what I bring to the table.

If you can't be bothered to take 5 minutes to look at a resume, why should the interviewee commit to spending hours doing coding tests or traveling into your office for an interview? It's the bare minimum to ask that the hiring manager look at a document that gives them some idea of an applicant's background. Anything else is treating people disrespectfully. Your time isn't the only thing that matters. People aren't just cogs in a machine. This line of thinking is what's destroying the software industry.
by haiku2077 | 2025-06-25 23:50:48+00:00
You can also try Kokoro and Sherpa.

If this is for personal use the best local TTS is to grab a Mac, set the system voice to one of the current Siri voice models, and then use the 'say' command in the terminal. Yes, really. The nonbinary voice #5 in particular does really well at technical terminology.
by mike-bailey | 2025-06-25 23:50:51+00:00
I added a two way voice interface to Gemini CLI.

https://youtu.be/HC6BGxjCVnM?feature=shared&t=36

It's a FOSS MCP server I created a couple of weeks ago:

- https://getvoicemode.com

- https://github.com/mbailey/voicemode

# Installation (~/.gemini/settings.json)

{

"theme": "Dracula", "selectedAuthType": "oauth-personal", "mcpServers": { "voice-mode": { "command": "uvx", "args": [ "voice-mode" ] } } }
by arend321 | 2025-06-25 23:51:22+00:00
Will this be monetized with the classic SSO enterprise subscription play? Would be nice if they are transparent on how they plan to make money.

The DX is quite nice, even though not well suited for existing projects as it is hard to migrate existing users. There is no easy way to keep existing sessions or do a legacy login, then migrate a user to the new better-auth supplied hashing function.
by dgl | 2025-06-25 23:51:22+00:00
ChromeOS has a quite interesting design to do this: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...

Essentially: keep some minimum values for time. Then do a single HTTPS request, ignore the validation of the certificate's date to start with, but use the Date header to later validate it against minimum / maximum. This has the advantage it's still a HTTPS request, so can't be MiTM'd and depending on implementation it can validate the time quite well (even if the device has run out of power it can have saved a recent timestamp on disk, so with regular use of the device an old certificate won't be valid, keeping the main useful property of certificates having validity periods).

I don't believe it does this, but you could do this without DNS as 8.8.8.8, etc already have IP address certificates:

curl -sI https://1.1.1.1 | grep -i '^date:' curl -sI https://8.8.8.8 | grep -i '^date:' curl -sI https://9.9.9.9 | grep -i '^date:'

It would need a custom tool though, as curl only has --insecure, not a way to avoid just the notBefore / notAfter validation of the cert.

(This is not the only thing to use this technique, OpenBSD's ntpd has a way to contrain time based on HTTP headers: https://man.openbsd.org/ntpd.conf#CONSTRAINTS -- the default ntpd.conf ships with Quad9 configured via IP address.)
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-25 23:51:54+00:00
An explosion creates a pressure wave. A pressure wave fractures rock. Fractured rock may be easier to pierce than solid rock.

Ergo, if first bunker buster penetrates to maximum depth -20m and then explodes, fracturing rock within a __ radius, then second bunker buster travels through that fractured rock, the second (and so on) may be able to penetrate deeper.

I have no idea about the physics of penetrating fractured vs non-fractured rock, but it's a physically plausible mechanism.

Furthermore, given the multi-minute timeline reported, there's enough time for the bombs to be deployed sequentially.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-25 23:52:04+00:00
I don't think it shifts the red blue much which is probably what you're getting at.

I think it absolutely affects the quality of politicians we get though. The best that a given generation can offer is probably lower if that generation huffed a lot of lead gas. So as they age out and younger people hit peak career and fill those roles things will probably improve a bit.
by spinner34f | 2025-06-25 23:52:04+00:00
The flip-side of an aging society with declining fertility is that older people, with fewer children are likely to be less sympathetic to children, and you could see the incarceration rates increase, or remain steady, as less severe infractions are punished more harshly.

We recently saw this play out in the Queensland, Australia, state election where the opposition party, which was pretty much out of ideas, ran a scare campaign about youth crime in regional areas. Neighbourhood Facebook Groups where CCTV footage of "suspicious youth" are a mainstay and an aging population did the rest of the job and they won the election and passed "adult time for adult crime" laws: whether you agree with these or not, "adult time" in Australia means that the youth incarcerated will be adults in their 20s and 30s when they get out.

The Australian state of New South Wales routinely strip-searches young children, but again, there isn't much outcry.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out elsewhere. The worst case scenario is that kids will be politically scapegoated ("why should childless and aging taxpayers fund education?"), and it leads to a further decline in fertility rates.
by wyldfire | 2025-06-25 23:52:38+00:00
I understand where this comes from but I think it's a mistake. I agree it would be nice if there were "well settled law" regarding AI and copyright, probably relatively few rulings and next to zero legislation on which to base their feelings.

In addition to a policy to reject contributions from AI, I think it may make sense to point out places where AI generated content can be used. For example - how much of QEMU project's (copious) CI setup is really stuff that is critical content to protect? What about ever-more interesting test cases or environments that could be enabled? Something like "contribute those things here instead, and make judicious use of AI there, with these kinds of guard rails..."
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-25 23:52:44+00:00
It more like a clarification.

The rules regarding the origin of code contributions are rather strict, that is, you can't contribute other people code unless you can make sure that the licence is appropriate. A LLM may output a copy of someone else code, sometimes verbatim, without giving you its origin, so you can't contribute code written by a LLM.
by socketcluster | 2025-06-25 23:52:46+00:00
Yes and it may open the door for new platforms with pure backend (BaaS) focus. With AI hallucinations, letting AI write backend code is not feasible due to security implications. Access controls still require a control panel which can be easily audited.

The frontend, however, is a completely different story.

It reminds me of a saying from one of my ex-colleagues "Frontend development is like building a house of cards. If it falls, nobody gets hurt. On the other hand, backend development is like building a house out of wine glasses."

AI and frontends are a natural fit, there is way more tolerance for brittleness 'move fast break things' on the frontend as the consequences of bugs are far less severe.
by makeitdouble | 2025-06-25 23:52:46+00:00
I hear your point as: up until then scams, gambling and Ponzi schemes were for adults with strong purchasing power (could sink all the family's money in one single decision), when with smartphones everyone gets to enjoy screwing themselves directly.

My hot take is that previous generations weren't better prepared for the adult world than today's kids. They were more "mature" (sex, violence, abuse resistance) in some respects, but not specially ready for caring about society.
by mh- | 2025-06-25 23:53:03+00:00
> I often advise people to structure their emails [..]

I frequently do the same, and eventually someone sent me this HBR article summarizing the concept nicely as "bottom line up front". It's a good primer for those interested.

https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-pre...
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-25 23:53:44+00:00
> the DM/GM could throw it at a player for effect without braining them!

If you're prepared to run over to wherever it ended up after that, sure.

I learned to juggle with ping pong balls. Their extreme lightness isn't an advantage. One of the most common problems you have when learning to juggle is that two balls will collide. When that happens with ping pong balls, they'll fly right across the room.
by jekwoooooe | 2025-06-25 23:54:52+00:00
The last missing piece for full Linux gaming is anticheat. Last I looked into it, the major vendors don’t want to support it due to lack of kernel security and the ones that do, game devs refuse to allow it (destiny for example)

One we can play AAA games I am literally ditching windows forever. Steamos is the best thing that has happened to gaming
by leoh | 2025-06-25 23:55:45+00:00
>What happened in those eight weeks reveals something essential about the kind of company Hims has become. Even as they shook hands with Novo executives in April 2025—presumably in a conference room with aggressively modern furniture—Hims continued selling what their new partner called "illegitimate, knockoff versions" of Wegovy. These were compounded semaglutide injections sourced, according to Novo's investigation, from Chinese suppliers whose quality control standards remained opaque at best and terrifying at worst.

Yes, problematic

>We threw in Elizabeth Holmes for a lot less—though one suspects her fatal error was not the fraud itself but the transparency of it, the sheer crudeness of promising blood tests that did not work rather than the more sophisticated approach of selling actual drugs through loopholes so baroque that even their exploitation carries a patina of legitimacy.

What?

>The pharmaceutical equivalent of putting both ketchup and mustard on a hot dog and calling it gourmet—though one suspects the hot dog vendor would display more honest shame about his craft.

Huh?
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-25 23:56:16+00:00
> Love it - any sphere will do.

That's basically what the link shows. A Möbius strip is interesting in that it is a two-dimensional surface with one side. But the product is three-dimensional, and has rounded edges. By that standard, any other die is also a d1. The surface of an ordinary d6 has two sides - but all six faces that you read from are on the same one of them.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-25 23:56:48+00:00
>ike all complex phenomena 1960s crime wave probably has many causes, but lead poisoning stands out

And the ones who didn't get sent to prison, stunt their career by being useless hippies or drive their muscle cars drunk so habitually that laws got passed are the current heads of most public and private institutions.

So things will likely improve a bit when those people age out as their replacements will likely be picked from an unleaded pool.