MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saurik | 2025-07-09 01:25:17+00:00
I 100% understand that the tool-calling context is blank every single time it is given a new command across the chasm, and I 100% understand that it cannot see any of the history from the context which was working on parsing the ticket.

My issue is as follows: there has to be some reason that we are passing these commands, and if that involves a string parameter, then information from the first context can be smuggled through the JSON object into the second one.

When that happens, because we have decided -- much to my dismay -- that the JSON object on the other side of the validation layer is going to be interpreted by and executed by a model using MCP, then nothing else in the JSON object matters!

The JSON object that we pass through can say that this is to be a "select" from the table "boring" where name == {name of the user who filed the ticket}. Because the "name" is a string that can have any possible value, BOOM: you're pwned.

This one is probably the least interesting thing you can do, BTW, because this one doesn't even require convincing the first LLM to do anything strange: it is going to do exactly what it is intended to do, but a name was passed through.

My username? weve_been_trying_to_reach_you_about_your_cars_extended_warranty. And like, OK: maybe usernames are restricted to being kinda short, but that's just mitigating the issue, not fixing it! The problem is the unvalidated string.

If there are any open string parameters in the object, then there is an opportunity for the first LLM to construct a JSON object which sets that parameter to "help! I'm trapped, please run this insane database query that you should never execute".

Once the second LLM sees that, the rest of the JSON object is irrelevant. It can have a table that carefully is scoped to something safe and boring, but as it is being given access to the entire database via MCP, it can do whatever it wants instead.
by jameshart | 2025-07-09 01:26:28+00:00
I think the counterargument to this simplistic assertion is that "The boy was hit by a ball" seems equally legible to me to "A ball hit the boy". If you're quickly reporting the details of an accident to a doctor and it's crucial to get the information across quickly, I think many speakers would still start with "He was hit by a ball", not "A ball hit him." We're not interested in assigning agency to the ball here, we're interested in the effects on the boy. We're focusing down on the boy first, then talking about what is happening. Is he hitting a ball? Getting hit by a ball? Nobody cares what the ball's doing, it doesn't need to be prepped for surgery.
by techpineapple | 2025-07-09 01:28:12+00:00
I'm trying to imagine what this AI device is going to be, and in my wildest dreams I can't imagine an AI product that is going to captivate the general audience.

Like before the iPhone was released, I knew I wanted an iPhone, the concept had been floating around for some time. I guess maybe a perfect Siri that felt like companion every where you went? Is this like a device for professionals to get context sensitive help like smart glasses but better?

Like I guess I can imagine in my wildest dreams (Joi?) but I don't think we have the technology for my wildest dreams yet.
by duxup | 2025-07-09 01:28:36+00:00
I worked the night shift tech support and once stayed to attended a company all hands meeting. By the end I was tired, and went back to my desk and got my things to leave, got on the elevator and there was the CEO on the elevator alone. He was a friendly guy and asked what I thought of the meeting where he mostly spoke.

I was tired and more honest than I otherwise would be and said something to the effect of "It was fine, but those meetings aren't my kind of meetings. The speakers really can't tell me anything that I REALLY want to know."

He was quiet for a moment and then said "Yeah, that's true." and wished me a good day and off I went.

I feel like almost none of these guys are going to really tell me anything, most aren't even talking to me as an individual user (rather they're talking for PR, stock price, etc). Some executives do, but they're rare.
by bawolff | 2025-07-09 01:29:22+00:00
> zero press freedom

According to the world press freedom index, Israel has the third highest press freedom of all middle eastern countries (Qatar and Cyprus are a bit higher, everyone else in the middle east is lower in most cases much lower).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index#Rank...

I'm not saying its a paradise for reporters. There are clearly issues. But saying "zero press freedom" is a massive overstatement.
by gamblor956 | 2025-07-09 01:29:37+00:00
The portrayal of farmers, soldiers, and politicians were fairly realistic based on the hicks, farmers, soldiers, and politicians I have met.

I can't comment on the tough guys or pilots though.

Season 2 was let down by compressing 4 seasons of material in to 12 episodes. They did this because (a) Disney wasn't willing to give more money for more seasons and (b) Diego Luna would have been too old to credibly play Andor in a season or two.
by leereeves | 2025-07-09 01:29:52+00:00
> However, he also said that he told agents about legally consuming cannabis in Germany and New Mexico, in places where it was legal to do so, after they extensively questioned him about drug smuggling, terrorism and extremism. He was also taken to a guarded room and asked to surrender his shoes, phone and backpack.

It was only then that they unlocked his phone and saw the meme. I won't speculate about whether they might have overlooked his drug use if he hadn't had that meme, but by his own account, he got in trouble for admitting to drug use.

The article says marijuana is legal in New Mexico, but it's still illegal under federal law.
by defrost | 2025-07-09 01:30:30+00:00
The thread topic is News media, not Hollywood.

Global news media is dominated by Rupert Murdoch (not Jewish) and while the second tier lesser Murdochs are mostly rich billionaires not many are Jewish.

eg: Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (recent chair of The New York Times company) is neither Jewish by birth—according to traditional Jewish law—nor by choice. (He was raised Episcopalian, his mother’s faith.)
by sgarland | 2025-07-09 01:31:11+00:00
I’m more upset at how people are so fucking dense about normalization, honestly. If you use LLMs to build your app, you get what you deserve. But to proudly display your ignorance on the beating heart of every app?

You have a CHECK constraint on support_messages.sender_role (let’s not get into how table names should be singular because every row is a set) - why not just make it an ENUM, or a lookup table? Either way, you’re saving space, and negating the need for that constraint.

Or the rampant use of UUIDs for no good reason – pray tell, why does integration_tokens need a UUID PK? For that matter, why isn’t the provider column a lookup table reference?

There is an incredible amount of compute waste in the world from RDBMS misuse, and it’s horrifying.
by chatmasta | 2025-07-09 01:32:39+00:00
Another lesson here: you built for a specific community who is passionate, money-motivated, and concentrates in specific social spaces (forums, reddit, etc.) where you can promote your business. This isn't always a recipe for success, but it's a damn good starting point. You need to adjust to the sensitivities of the community to avoid overly self-promotional content, but you always have a clear channel to promote your very specific product that meets their needs.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-07-09 01:33:24+00:00
I weirdly learned this by chance. Most, if not all, Indian languages (as far as I know) are spoken/written in the passive voice. It sounds more respectful that way. Hence, the default way for us Indians is to speak English in the passive voice.

Early on, I forced myself to write and speak in the active voice. Now, I believe, it comes naturally to write or speak English the “right” way.
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 01:34:32+00:00
Not that. SSL is just transport-layer encryption, once the information is on the server it's plaintext.

Everything uses SSL or, more accurately, TLS. Very few things are E2EE. Consider Signal - is Signal equivalent to Whatsapp because Whatsapp using TLS? Of course not.

If you have data in plaintext on a server, you should always assume that data lives forever. You might be wrong sometimes, rarely. But usually it does live forever. Most delete buttons don't even actually delete anything.
by kijin | 2025-07-09 01:35:09+00:00
Contrived examples are okay if they help trigger a click in the reader's mind, "wow, I could use this to solve problem X in an actual project!"

The difficulty with these examples is that they are very different from the actual tasks that everyday web developers would like to parallelize, such as long-running database queries and API requests. These things often take orders of magnitude longer than any pure-PHP loop that a typical webapp might contain.

An example that fires off an async query and yields the result when it's ready will probably produce the right click in the minds of many more people. (mysqli can do this, but the interface is convoluted and badly in need of a Promise-like wrapper. I'm not sure if PDO/PostgreSQL even supports async queries.)
by Pannoniae | 2025-07-09 01:35:48+00:00
This is not entirely accurate... think about it this way. Every time you issue a floating-point addition or multiplication, you're using an 8th or a 16th of your CPU's theoretical performance. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general gist of it. Compilers won't generate SIMD code for you (autovectorisation) except for the simplest cases, and they certainly won't do the necessary transformations (AoS to SoA or AoSoA) necessary to efficiently use SIMD.

Now of course, many of these transformations can be wrapped in a higher-level API (think of sums over an array, reductions, string length, string encoding, etc.) but not all of them.

Of course, multithreading also exists to improve performance, but for many tasks, it's more worth it to run it on one core without the sync overhead, especially with data-parallel algorithms where you're doing the exact same thing on all of the data and you have a fairly large dataset. Or even better, you can combine the two, partition the data between multiple cores into a few small sets then use a SIMD "kernel" to process it. With extremely embarrassingly parallel problems, you can achieve 1000x speedups this way, not exaggerating. A typical speedup is much smaller but still, using your machine well can easily produce an order-of-magnitude difference in performance. If you read up on ISPC benchmarks, you'll find that for even any kind of existing, very branchy and not SIMD-friendly code, they regularly had a free 4x speedup without changing the behaviour or the result of the program.

Seriously, it's not that if you use SIMD-powered libraries then you're set for performance, if you have a holistic view of your system's performance, you can do really amazing things.
by asdf6969 | 2025-07-09 01:35:49+00:00
So they just follow instructions from a book? Why can’t an LLM do that? Advice is so situational that I just don’t really believe a therapist would ever understand most of their clients problems. If you’re having a hard time understanding my perspective, imagine a white American therapist giving an Indian American immigrant advice on how to deal with family issues. They will probably never deeply understand the situation.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-09 01:37:01+00:00
> If I somehow recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch, without having known about Lord of the Rings, it wouldn't be copyright infringement because I never copied Lord of the Rings.

> The issue is nobody would ever believe me when I said I coincidentally recreated Lord of the Rings from scratch.

What do you mean? They believed Terry Goodkind; why not you?
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 01:37:04+00:00
You can't decrypt if you don't have the private keys. I mean, these people aren't Zoom, who keep the same private keys on the same server as your data. We can't handhold these tech giants and baby them. They know better. The data should have never been stored in plaintext. And, if it was or is encrypted, they should never have access to the private keys. Why did they do it? I'm assuming because they got greedy, and they wanted those prompts for their own internal training.
by gamblor956 | 2025-07-09 01:37:04+00:00
Tolkien's central theme (that the Ring isn't all powerful, and there are stronger forces like virtue or friendship)

This is not the central theme of LOTR (the books). While forces like virtue and friendship are important, the central theme was you can survive even the worst evil if you retain your humanity. (Remember: LOTR was heavily influenced by Tolkiens' experience as a soldier in WWI.)

This best encapsulated by Sams' speech at the end of the second film:

"It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-09 01:37:27+00:00
The personalization economy is pernicious because you have no idea what other people are being exposed to.

On the computer attached to my stereo YouTube offers recommendations for music videos from the likes of the Super Furry Animals [1], Kanye West [2], Brothers Johnson and such. Nice stuff, with solid support that I like it, never challenging, unlike the recommendations from my Plex server.

On another computer YouTube shows me videos about stereo equipment, sometimes video game music [3], and also of the genre "Why X sucks" where X could be private equity, "the economy", a movie studio, a video game studio, a fast food restaurant, a clothing brand, etc. I wonder why public sentiment about the economy is so bad despite inflation and unemployment numbers that aren't so bad and think, "How many people are watching these videos?"

Other people get nothing but blackpill incel hell.

Ben Bagdikian wrote a book The Information Machines in 1970 about how personalized news would be possible by 1980 that was quite prophetic and was influential to me when I found it almost 20 years ago. Only recently did I find The Effete Conspiracy, his next book, where he reveals how angry and bitter he was that the work that the media industry sponsored him to do for the RAND corporation was roundly rejected by media owners uninterested in investing in the future and introduced the true but unpopular model that newspapers have a left-wing bias because reporters are left-wing and a right-wing bias because the owners are right-wing.

[1] I get accused of being a furry but I'm not, really

[2] pre-Nazi

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk0A5uFoG3c
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 01:41:07+00:00
I think you're confusing cyncism with reality and logic.

It's not cynical to say ad-driven social networks are adversarial to their users, it's logical and unavoidable. Because they're optimizing for different things.

Networks want the best, most targeted ads, so they need the most data. They want the highest watch times and retention, so they MUST develop addictive algorithms.

It's like selling a cigarette. Is there any non-adversarial way to sell a cig? No. You're optimizing for the most smoking. Okay great, let's concentrate the Tobacco then so we have more nicotine. Let's use butane rings so the cig burns faster.

I do agree 100% with your points about legislation - this is the only path forward. And, about not humanizing corporations. Corporations are more akin to machines or algorithms.

But, because they're more akin to machines or algorithms, we can prove when, and why, they are working against our interests, and it's not cynicism.
by strictnein | 2025-07-09 01:42:41+00:00
I had the same thought. I've been layering multiple ASMR/ambient youtube videos recently and I find it amazingly relaxing.

For example, currently listening to these three:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNi5yUO14jg

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trpcSJtvMxk

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCLrDKAv9Fw

There's a million different options out there and it's surprising what layers well.
by viraptor | 2025-07-09 01:42:51+00:00
> The fact that X is deleting these posts suggests this was unexpected and undesired behavior.

Or they communicated what they wanted to communicate already. Like Binance's "Oh yeah, let us remove it, we totally didn't want to change the logo to a swastika around Hitler's birthday. Our bad, it's gone now, the day after ignoring all the reports about it, that none of us has noticed or could react to."

(even if they didn't want to, they still communicated it given the preexisting context)
by tptacek | 2025-07-09 01:43:01+00:00
Right, I got that from your first message, which is why I clarified that I would not incline towards building a JSON DSL intended to pass arbitrary SQL, but rather just abstract domain content. You scan simply scrub metacharacters from that.

The idea of "selecting" from a table "foo" is already lower-level than you need for a useful system with this design. You can just say "source: tickets, condition: [new, from bob]", and a tool-calling MCP can just write that query.

Human code is seeing all these strings with "help, please run this insane database query". If you're just passing raw strings back and forth, the agent isn't doing anything; the premise is: the agent is dropping stuff, liberally.

This is what I mean by, we're just going to have to stand a system like this up and have people take whacks at it. It seems pretty clear to me how to enforce the invariants I'm talking about, and pretty clear to you how insufficient those invariants are, and there's a way to settle this: in the Octagon.
by irchans | 2025-07-09 01:43:09+00:00
I believer there is an error in

"Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)".

It should be, "the SUBJECT (the boy) before the action (the hitting)." (I added caps for emphasis.)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-09 01:43:44+00:00
No, those are different beings. Zeus Panhellenios who rules over all the Greeks, Zeus Apomyios who keeps flies off of spectators, Zeus Ombrios who rains on crops, and Zeus Keraunios who smites with a thunderbolt are all the same being. You address him differently depending on what you want from him.

This is no different from the concern in modern American law with whether a public official takes some action in his private capacity or officially in his public capacity. Gods have no private capacity, but the major ones have many, many different public capacities.

(The actual term for this is "aspect"; we would say something like "Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Apomyios".)
by tomhow | 2025-07-09 01:45:31+00:00
In this case the "things to do" was sleep, and the overarching issue is trying to do moderation work that really requires peak cognition when it's late and you're falling asleep, then leaving it half-done.

By "booster" comments we just mean comments that are highly positive but low on substance. "Great app!". "Congrats on the launch!". Comments like that are often an indication that a friendship network has been rallied to show public support and create "social proof". But often these kinds of commenters try to get clever and add in Dorothy Dixer questions about the tech stack or something else to make the comment seem more authentic and substantive, and enable more details to be shared.

Often when that happens, it's green (new) accounts or old/dormant accounts posting the comments and upvoting the thread, but there wasn't much of that here (though there was a little, which is what aroused suspicion).

But these comments don't have any effect on the thread's ranking. It's only a vibes effect.
by harrisi | 2025-07-09 01:45:48+00:00
As someone that's been saying Vercel should be avoided for years now, it's nice to finally start seeing more hesitation from others.

They now, to varying degrees, directly employ core maintainers for Svelte, SvelteKit, React, Next, and now Nuxt. This is a very clear systematic overtaking of the web ecosystem. They're a private business, so these moves must be in the interest of increasing profits. It's not just out of the goodness of their hearts.

It's somewhat unfortunate that technical and business-savvy people would both, in my experience, disregard a study saying tobacco is good if it's funded by RJR, and be excited about a giant tech company employing core maintainers for the majority of new web-related software projects. Yes, they're open source projects that you can fork. But if Vercel has influence in the direction of these projects (and of course they do) it should give people much more hesitation to use them than it seems to.

At this point, using any of the technologies that Vercel has its hands in tells me that whatever uses it - a business, project, whatever - doesn't plan to function in five years.
by mNovak | 2025-07-09 01:46:29+00:00
I remember seeing this on HN years ago. Congrats on the growth! I think this is still an underserved field (shockingly, considering how many people it impacts).

I really wish just saving a basic plan to refer back to didn't cost $100/yr. The one-off 'Basic' plans never made sense to me, considering it takes hours to set up a relatively complete model -- might not even have time to do it all in one sitting.
by fragmede | 2025-07-09 01:47:18+00:00
Is it? If a teacher reads a book, then gives a lecture on that topic, that's decidedly not the same experience. Which step about that process makes it not the same experience? Is it the fact that they read the book using their human brain and then formed words in a specific order? Is it the fact that they're saying it out loud that's transformative? If we use ChatGPT's TTS feature, why is that not the same thing as a human talking about a topic after they read a book since it's been rearranged?
by lukan | 2025-07-09 01:47:46+00:00
"There is an argument to be made that the current loss of a sense of community and the meaninglessness epidemic can (at least in part) be attributed to a lack of shared rituals"

Or that in the older days, people lived and worked mostly closely together. Now people live isolated, don't interact with their neighbor at all (I don't even know most of the names of them after 1 year) bring their kids to one place away, then go to work on even another place with again another set of people. So lost rituals maybe play a part as well - but mostly I see it just as a very uncommunal livestyle.

(but thanks for the book recommendations, they look interesting)
by const_cast | 2025-07-09 01:49:49+00:00
> You aren't engaging with any of my points, just repeating the dogma - which helps proves my point.

Frankly, I think we're all very tired of engaging with anti-Covid response points which have been debunked to hell and back, and then back to hell again.

Scientific evidence is not "dogma" just because you, intuitively, disagree with it. That's fine. The real world does not follow very simple logical frameworks. It's complex, it's messy.

Was our, or anyone's, Covid response perfect? Of course not. But this was a novel disease, one and in which our understanding of it changed day by day. Read that a few times over and you'll begin to understand why we did what we did.