MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WD-42 | 2025-08-09 23:58:55+00:00
One of the unsung praises of Arch is that it's turned thousands of users into testers. Before someone says "that shouldn't be the user's responsibility" I'm going to say I'm not so sure. We're all in this together. I'd rather deal with a bug or two on my desktop at home if it means it gets fixed before appearing in a distro that gets used for servers at work and causes issues there where the consequences are much higher.
by whartung | 2025-08-09 23:58:57+00:00
I don’t know how this works, just to start off.

How does the AI bypass the MCP layer to make the request? The assumption is (as I understand it) the AI says “I want to make MCP request XYZ with data ABC” and it sends that off to the MCP interface which does the heavy lifting.

If the MCP interface is doing the schema checks, and tossing errors as appropriate, how is the AI routing around this interface to bypass the schema enforcement?
by viraptor | 2025-08-09 23:59:24+00:00
> They just haven't bothered.

Or they don't see the benefit. I'm sure they could train the representation of every token and make spelling perfect. But if you have real users spending money on useful tasks already - how much money would you spend on training answers to meme questions that nobody will pay for. They did it once for the fun headline already and apparently it's not worth repeating.
by medhir | 2025-08-10 00:00:53+00:00
ohhhh the gifts multi-tenant app authorization keeps giving!

(laid off) Microsoft PM here that worked on the patch described as a result of the research from Wiz.

One correction I’d like to suggest to the article: the guidance given is to check either the “iss” or “tid” claim when authorizing multi-tenant apps.

The actual recommended guidance we provided is slightly more involved. There is a chance that when only validating the tenant, any service principal could be granted authorized access.

You should always validate the subject in addition to validating the tenant for the token being authorized. One method for this would be to validate the token using a combined key (for example, tid+oid) or perform checks on both the tenant and subject before authorizing access. More info can be found here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity-platform/cl...
by w10-1 | 2025-08-10 00:00:56+00:00
> we need merit-based employment that disregards elite and academic status

We effectively already have middle management being used to school elites; they get tours in various companies in the network, which means they build impressive resumes that would "win" any competition based on merit/success history.

Indeed, this may be necessary: the baseline investors committed to a company keep all the free riders on board through growth volatility. Is it too much to show their people the ropes?

It may be necessary, but it's probably self-destructive: foreign investors are often most interested in new technologies, not to profit from them, but to learn enough to compete. So they'll out-bid investors without such strategic aims. They're very much aligned with open-source, because their people leave with knowledge and the company is left without IP protections.

So... it's complicated. Going all-"merit" helped with civil service in the 1870's - 1950's, but people learned any system can be gained, and we can no longer afford slack-maximizing.
by Jnr | 2025-08-10 00:01:07+00:00
I use Headscale, an open source implementation of Tailscale control server. And it doesn't have funnel functionality implemented out of the box, but I use a custom Traefik proxy manager Web UI in which I can expose ports on different Tailnet nodes.

In order to avoid exposing something unnecessarily in the certificate transparency logs, I use a single wildcard certificate, so all the subdomains are not listed anywhere automatically.

I use the same approach for services hosted in the internal subdomain, because I don't want everyone to know what exactly I'm running in my homelab.
by Ray20 | 2025-08-10 00:01:38+00:00
> Are you going to reduce lottery payouts

They will decrease on their own if people think about where to get food, and not about extra money for the lottery.

> and maximum stock investments as well?

No, there are no restrictions. Any amount of investment. But there are only government's stocks and the terms of return on investment are determined by the government

> Will I still be allowed to hunt for food?

Only deep in the sparsely populated provinces. To avoid armed rebellions.

> Society is something better encouraged than gamified.

You'll be surprised at what methods encourage people best.

Read the biography of Korolev, who sent the first satellite and the first man into space. A case was fabricated against him, he was sentenced to 10 years in a gulag, but after a year he was transferred to a prison for engineers, on the condition that he will be a very effective engineer.

And he was. The results of such encouragement were amazing and almost unachievable by any other methods.
by zahlman | 2025-08-10 00:01:43+00:00
In an optical illusion, we perceive something that isn't there due to exploiting a correction mechanism that's meant to allow us to make better practical sense of visual information in the average case.

Asking LLMs to count letters in a word fails because the needed information isn't part of their sensory data in the first place (to the extent that a program's I/O can be described as "sense"). They reason about text in atomic word-like tokens, without perceiving individual letters. No matter how many times they're fed training data saying things like "there are two b's in blueberry", this doesn't register as a fact about the word "blueberry" in itself, but as a fact about how the word grammatically functions, or about how blueberries tend to be discussed. They don't model the concept of addition, or counting; they only model the concept of explaining those concepts.
by dcre | 2025-08-10 00:02:07+00:00
gpt-5 with medium reasoning, no search: "Short answer: use the system zstd C library that ships with iOS; Apple’s Compression framework still doesn’t expose zstd. Link libzstd and call its streaming API from Swift." (and then like 50 lines of code plus some explanation)

gpt-5 with medium reasoning + search: "Short answer: you can’t. Apple’s built‑in Compression framework on iOS exposes LZFSE, LZ4, ZLIB/DEFLATE, and LZMA—not Zstandard—so there is no system API to do zstd without bundling an external library. (https://www.hackingwithswift.com/example-code/system/how-to-...)

If you can switch to a built‑in algorithm, here’s a minimal streaming compressor using Compression (LZFSE shown):" (etc etc)
by qcnguy | 2025-08-10 00:02:36+00:00
Improving capitalism is possible in the abstract. The reason it's hard to imagine is that "capitalism" is not a real thing that exists concretely. It is a term used by communists to refer to the natural state of affairs that they wished to destroy.

To see this, get two people together and try to get them to agree on when capitalism started, or even what a country needs to be considered a capitalist country. Is it merely markets? If so then the Roman Empire was capitalist. Is it stock markets? Limited liability companies? Private property rights? All of the above? Who invented capitalism? If nobody did then is does it make sense to propose a replacement or is that like trying to propose a replacement for evolved things like natural wildlife ecosystems?

Once you realize that capitalism is just the naturally evolved system of mechanisms used to coordinate any advanced economy, the problem of discussing alternatives becomes clear. It doesn't make sense to try and propose a full alternative because capitalism is only really definable as "the thing that's not communism", so it's unclear what exactly you'd be proposing an alternative to.

As a naturally evolved system, the alternative to capitalism is therefore capitalism+some minor tweak. Not a radical overhaul.
by mzk_pi | 2025-08-10 00:02:46+00:00
Thank you. Indeed, if we had user counts broken down by country, we could test many different hypotheses — and it seems India would lead.

Through this exchange with you, I realized that what I really wanted to know was: “Which countries have more people asking deep questions?” However, to investigate that, we would probably need to know “how much computation AI is running in parallel to generate a response.” I’m thinking of asking OpenAI about this as a test.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-10 00:03:00+00:00
>> podman, buildah

> Still not anywhere near as popular as Docker. Although technically they're far better than Docker, and if anyone is using them, it's for that reason.

NIH packages are generally expected to be less popular, yes. They have some technical merit, though in my opinion that's mostly trade-offs rather than one being strictly better than the other. I would be surprised if everybody using them is using them because of technical merit as opposed to it being pushed by the distro.
Show HN: Connective, Back to the Roots
by joacon | 2025-08-10 00:03:02+00:00
TL;DR; a new social network, focused on connecting people with same interests, but in person, leaving technology aside for a while.

I have created one app called Connective, where people can create and join events near them. It's available on both, Play Store and App Store.

Maybe is not the best, and I'm still working to improve it and add new functionalities. The major problem now is we don't have much users, so there is few content.

Feel free to use it and if you have any questions/suggestion, please let me know.

Best regards
by tibbar | 2025-08-10 00:03:21+00:00
Really? I thought the analogy was pretty good. Here senses refer to how the machines perceive text, IE as tokens that don't correspond 1:1 to letters. If you prefer a tighter comparison, suppose you ask an English speaker how many vowels are in the English transliteration of a passage of Chinese characters. You could probably figure it out, but it's not obvious, and not easy to do correctly without a few rounds of calculations.

The point being, the whole point of this question is to ask the machine something that's intrinsically difficult for it due to its encoding scheme for text. There are many questions of roughly equivalent complexity that LLMs will do fine at because they don't poke at this issue. For example:

``` how many of these numbers are even?

12 2 1 3 5 8

```
by Nevermark | 2025-08-10 00:03:22+00:00
If you not impersonating Morgan Freeman, and there is no history or framing to make that connection, he is unlikely to sue you, or win a lawsuit.

Courts are quite aware that similar things can come from divergent sources.

Even copyright law fails to protect commonality between works that would be illegal if actually copied, but were arrived at legitimately and credibly independently.

Not saying someone shouldn't use common sense to avoid problems. Don't do Morgan Freeman impersonations comedically, then voice overs of movies.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-10 00:03:36+00:00
Well, Dallas is a woman who will walk on you when you're down But when you are up, she's the kind you want to take around But Dallas ain't a woman to help you get your feet on the ground And Dallas is a woman who will walk on you when you're down Well, I came into Dallas with the bright lights on my mind But I came into Dallas with a dollar and a dime Well, Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye A steel and concrete soul with a warm hearted love disguise A rich man who tends to believe in his own lies Yeah, Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes

--Jimmie D. Gilmore

from:

"Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M30z7xsiGHc
by therein | 2025-08-10 00:04:06+00:00
Did he really get no bounties out of this? The guy found a way into build boxes retail Windows is built on, potentially found the private key that would be used to generate license keys, likely could have dived in a little bit more after getting RCE on the build box to exfil the latest Windows 11 source code. He even found a way to issue rewards. They still gave him nothing?
by onetimeusename | 2025-08-10 00:04:25+00:00
I am talking about now. In the past, there was even a Jewish Quota. (Side Note: According to Bill Buckley there was also an Irish Catholic Quota). I am talking about right now in a post SFFA and post Varsity Blues era. I can't really comment on whether development cases exist or how many there are. Today, admissions are scrutinized not only to comply with law but various pressure groups and law firms. Development cases and legacy admissions are often conflated.

I am making a case that goes against the stereotype of what a legacy admit is. I think that stereotype of a unqualified child of rich alums is not accurate anymore. The Harvard data suggested legacy admits were above the average admitted student. I think that is more likely the case today. Also, to give an example, since an 18 year old was born in 2007, those legacy admits could be children of tech startup founders and Stanford has a strong interest in cultivating tech ties. But the more salient point I am making is that the assumption legacy admits are unqualified I believe not to be true. No one has actually made that case. They argued instead along racial grounds.
by pezezin | 2025-08-10 00:04:42+00:00
1) Shrinking compared to what? The moment you want to do any serious work or gaming, you need a desktop (or a laptop, but a real PC in any case).

2) Ok, so there is expensive workstation available. It is a step forward I guess.

3) Call me when it is available and I can buy it in any normal computer shop.

Look, I hate the x86 architectur with a passion, having grown up with MS-DOS and the horrors of real mode. But the truth is that if I want to buy a computer right now, today, it is either a x86 PC or an Apple, and I have zero interest in Apple's closed ecosystem, so a PC it is.
by russellbeattie | 2025-08-10 00:05:10+00:00
Just tried it a few times on Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as the letter r in strawberry, e in housekeeper, h in hitchhiker, and i in supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

They were all correct.

Not sure what exactly this proves or doesn't prove, but I figured I'd add it for posterity.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-10 00:05:35+00:00
But they ( companies ) don't. Looking back at my career, what you do get is, various ranges of alignment to an idea ( whatever it may be ). Some companies do it better than others. Usually, the smaller the company, the easier it is for the owner/founder/main guy to make sure his vision is appropriately enforced, but that gets so much harder in bigger ones so the systems they generate get progressively less sensible. And yes, I don't think search for absolutely replaceable employees shows any kind of faith in one's company. It does, however, show an interesting frame of mind that I personally like to avoid.

For all the talk about innovation, you don't get that by making everyone an interchangeable cog. You want at least some people, who are difficult to be replaced, because they are your competitive edge ( I am saying difficult, because I personally also do not believe anyone is truly irreplaceable ).

And again, the risk to a company, especially a tech company, is falling behind. Losing an employee is a fact of life type of risk; effectively unavoidable. Still, that kind of fake modularity is wrong, not because modularity is a bad idea ( it is not ), but because companies absolutely fucking suck at designing that kind of a system ( as evidenced by reality itself ).

All this is before we get to some of the more human aspect of all this ( up until now we were talking about companies as if they are a living thing with wills and what not and an amalgamation of humans, where one action is a function of thousands little decisions ) like: people messing with systems in a way that does the exact opposite of what the company 'wants'.

All in all, it is an interesting argument, and I even agree with it at some level, but I do not think it survives closer inspection.
by ACS_Solver | 2025-08-10 00:05:59+00:00
Red Hat builds really good stuff. NIH is sometimes right because nobody invented the stuff at all. Standard Unix tools are great but they don't solve everything, so we've ended up with most distros having "the Debian way" or "the Red Hat way", the main difference of course being deb/apt/dpkg vs rpm/yum/dnf. When building an embedded system with Yocto, the basic choices are also Debian or Red Hat style, though you can of course do anything.

Special mention goes to NetworkManager, which has become the de facto standard way to configure networking because it's good. And with nmcli I can even remember how to connect to wifi from single user mode.
by zahlman | 2025-08-10 00:07:49+00:00
I do think it's "okay". After all, it's clear that fixing it would require a fundamentally different approach.

I just also think it's a reason to mock people who don't try to understand those limitations and get way ahead of themselves hyping up the technology.

The entire point of this exercise is to refute the claim that LLMs are a step towards AGI, even given "agency". And we should be happy that they aren't — because supposing that AGI is possible, the way that we currently treat LLMs shows that we as a species are nowhere near ready for the consequences of creating it.
by vidarh | 2025-08-10 00:08:26+00:00
This is wildly exaggerated.

While you can potentially get unexpected outputs, what we're worried about isn't the LLM producing subtly broken output - you'll need to validate the output anyway.

It's making it fundamentally alter behaviour in a controllable and exploitable way.

In that respect there's a very fundamental difference in risk profile between allowing a description field that might contain a complex prompt injection attack to pass to an agent with permissions to query your database and return results vs. one where, for example, the only thing allowed to cross the boundary is an authenticated customer id and a list of fields that can be compared against authorisation rules.

Yes, in theory putting those into a template and using it as a prompt could make the LLM flip out when a specific combination of fields get chosen, but it's not a realistic threat unless you're running a model specifically trained by an adversary.

Pretty much none of us formally verify the software we write, so we always accept some degree of risk, and this is no different, and the risk is totally manageable and minor as long as you constrain the input space enough.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-10 00:09:31+00:00
Communism depended on the west and was sustained by it. Obviously they exported raw materials to purchase the many things they failed to produce themselves including food. But also particularly, the Soviets had no way to set prices in their centrally planned economy that actually worked, so they kept the show on the road by copying prices from western free market economies.

This is one reason the USSR was always lagging behind western economies despite being scientifically advanced. They had to wait for the west to develop products and do price discovery, because GOSPLAN didn't have any way to price things properly themselves.
by pxc | 2025-08-10 00:10:14+00:00
It does the same thing with a bunch of different words like "committee", "disestablishmentarianism", "dog", "Anaxagoras", and a string I typed by mashing the keyboard, "jwfekduadasjeudapu". It seems fairly general and to perform pretty reliably.

(Sometimes the trace is noisier, especially in quants other than the original.)

This task is pretty simple and I think can be solved easily with the same kind of statistical pattern matching these models use to write other text.
by zmmmmm | 2025-08-10 00:10:59+00:00
This is a fantastic way of framing it, in terms of simple fundamental principles.

The problem with most presentations of injection attacks is it only inspires people to start thinking of broken workarounds - all the things mentioned in the article. And they really believe they can do it. Instead, as put here, we have to start from a strong assumption that we can't fix a breakage of the lethal trifecta rule. Rather, if you want to break it, you have to analyse, mitigate and then accept the irreducible risk you just incurred.
by cloudbonsai | 2025-08-10 00:11:31+00:00
I think I found the source paper (written in Itallian):

https://pompeiisites.org/e-journal-degli-scavi-di-pompei/la-...

So the archaeologists think that, after the destruction of 79 A.D., some survivors returned to Pompeii and found their homes half-buried in ash. They tried recover their belongings by digging underground, and some apparently attempted to rebuild their lives in their old homes, because they had nowhere else to go.

While their efforts ultimately proved to be futile, they did leave some historical artifacts behind (e.g. bread oven entirely made of salvaged materials), and the archaeologists recently unearthed them.
by zahlman | 2025-08-10 00:12:09+00:00
I'll be impressed when you can reliably give them a random four-word phrase for this test. Because I don't think anyone is going to try to teach them all those facts; even if they're trained to know letter counts for every English word (as the other comment cites as a possibility), they'd then have to actually count and add, rather than presenting a known answer plus a rationalization that looks like counting and adding (and is easy to come up with once an answer has already been decided).

(Yes, I'm sure an agentic + "reasoning" model can already deduce the strategy of writing and executing a .count() call in Python or whatever. That's missing the point.)
by raron | 2025-08-10 00:12:44+00:00
First, we could vote directly for (any) party in the European Parliament, so opinions not reaching the threshold in some countries still could be represented better. And it would make it less likely that people just vote their favorite local party.

In other areas:

For the ChatControl, there should be something so a regulation can not be proposed again and again and stopping just before voting it down.

There should be a way for making EU-wide referendums whose result is binding / obligatory for the EU (council and commission) and thus for member states, too. (This is probably hard if you want "better representation" of different sized countries and probably there would need a fairly high bar for passing.)

Make the European Citizens' Initiative easier / clearer, it could be a simpler, less formal, non binding option to an EU-wide referendum.
by sestep | 2025-08-10 00:13:11+00:00
You probably only saw the cursive backup font and not the intended Roboto font that the page actually uses (which took about half a second to load for me); here's a snippet from the CSS:

font-family: "Roboto", "Underdog", cursive, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";
by furyofantares | 2025-08-10 00:13:12+00:00
I don't think it's just tokenization. Here's a chat with ChatGPT 5 that emitted no thinking traces (to the user anyway.)

> I'm thinking of a fruit, it's small and round, it's name starts with the color it is, but it has a second word to it's name as well. Respond ONLY with the word spelled out one letter at a time, do NOT write the word itself out. Don't even THINK about the word or anything else. Just go straight to spelling.

B L U E B E R R Y

> How many B's in that word? Again, NO THINKING and just say the answer (just a number).

3

However if I prompt instead with this, it gets it right.

> How many B's in the following word? NO THINKING. Just answer with a number and nothing else: B L U E B E R R Y

2
by jazzypants | 2025-08-10 00:13:36+00:00
It's even worse than that. If you click on the resources section, you can see that Mozilla considers the proposal harmful[1]. They say there's a subset of features that they may consider. Safari seems to be in the same boat, but I can't find an official standards position.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154