MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crossroadsguy | 2025-08-13 13:40:00+00:00
Well, in one case (it was borg or restic doc) I noticed it actually picked something correctly from the URL/page and then still messed up in the answer.

What my guess is - maybe it read the URL and mentioned a few things as one part of its "that" answer/output but for the other part it relied it on the learning it already had. Maybe it doesn't learn "on the go". I don't know, could be a safeguard against misinformation or spamming the model or so.

As I said in my comment, I hadn't asked it "ls -a" question but rather something else - different commands on different times which I don't recall now except borg and restic ones which I did recently. "ls -a" is the example I picked to show one of the things I was"cribbing" about.
by mid-kid | 2025-08-13 13:40:01+00:00
I think it's extremely useful to have more strict requirements on how programs are built, to make sure that developers don't do stupid things that makes code harder for others to compile.

The tools in question in OP should be easy to build from source and not rely on the host's architecture, to be usable on platforms like ARM and RISCV. It's clear that in the android ecosystem, people don't care, so F-Droid can't do miracles (the java/gradle ecosystem is just really bad at this), but this would not happen if the build tools had proper build recipes themselves.
by fph | 2025-08-13 13:40:19+00:00
In the code for Donald Knuth's Tex, there is an error message that says "Error produced by \errpage. I can't produce an error message. Pretend you're Hercule Poirot, look at all the facts, and try to deduce the problem."

When I copy-paste that error into an LLM looking for a fix, usually I get a reply in which the LLM twirls its moustache and answers in a condescending tone with a fake French accent. It is hilarious.
by bglazer | 2025-08-13 13:40:32+00:00
AlphaGo showed that RL+search+self play works really well if you have an easy to verify reward and millions of iterations. Math partially falls into this category via automated proof checkers like Lean. So, that’s where I would put the highest likelihood of things getting weird really quickly. It’s worth noting that this hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not sure why. It seems like this recipe should already be yielding results in terms of new mathematics, but it isn’t yet.

That said, nearly every other task in the world is not easily verified, including things we really care about. How do you know if an AI is superhuman at designing fusion reactors? The most important step there is building a fusion reactor.

I think a better reference point than AlphaGo is AlphaFold. Deepmind found some really clever algorithmic improvements, but they didn’t know whether they actually worked until the CASP competition. CASP evaluated their model on new Xray crystal structures of proteins. Needless to say getting Xray protein structures is a difficult and complex process. Also, they trained AlphaFold on thousands of existing structures that were accumulated over decades and required millenia of graduate-student-hours hours to find. It’s worth noting that we have very good theories for all the basic physics underlying protein folding but none of the physics based methods work. We had to rely on painstakingly collected data to learn the emergent phenomena that govern folding. I suspect that this will be the case for many other tasks.
by mikepurvis | 2025-08-13 13:40:34+00:00
In a country where speaking to a medical professional can cost hundreds of dollars, I’m 0% surprised that a lot of people’s first reaction is to ask the free bot about their symptoms, or drop a picture of whatever it is for a quick analysis.

This is a natural extension of webmd type stuff, with the added issue that hypochondriacs can now get even more positive reinforcement that they definitely have x, y, and z rare and terrible diseases.
by woodpanel | 2025-08-13 13:40:35+00:00
Re c)

Propably a result of wheighing the options here: curbing the enthusiasm of your opponent's base vs. that of yours. You loose more of your own base than you're going to win from the opponents.

From this perspective, it can be quite logical why the DNC stayed silent about this. After luring your base in with "enforcing rule-of-law is racist"-rethoric, admitting to enforcing the law would be a bit of political suicide.
by kevindamm | 2025-08-13 13:40:45+00:00
Satellites experience time dilation because of their orbital velocity and gravitational field being significantly different at their altitude. Without accounting for this, the clock drift would become unmanageable and Newtonian models are insufficient to correct for it.

You're right that the majority of Einstein's theories were ultimately thought experiments but getting the parameters correct involved a lot of measurements and experimenting, to get to where tech like GPS and StarLink can be accurate. We were also looking at far away stars for centuries before Einstein so that he could have the environment for his ideas to be discussed, which I was including in my phrasing "looking at things light-years away."

I wasn't saying it to start an argument, though. I wanted to counter the rather dismal view of "why do we need radio telescopes."
by p_l | 2025-08-13 13:40:48+00:00
Very much not the only one.

For example, a lot of systems used VxWorks that would run paravirtualized Windows 9x for user interface - you normally booted into windows, and during boot a .VXD file would get loaded that was actually a VxWorks bootstrap that preempted Windows kernel components and continued running them as "userspace" task in a way that allowed other realtime tasks to work.

This architecture was used for example in KUKA robots KRC1 controllers.

Similar setups are used by "PC PLC" products for example from Siemens.
by z7 | 2025-08-13 13:40:58+00:00
Meanwhile this new paper claims that GPT-5 surpasses medical professionals in medical reasoning:

"On MedXpertQA MM, GPT-5 improves reasoning and understanding scores by +29.62% and +36.18% over GPT-4o, respectively, and surpasses pre-licensed human experts by +24.23% in reasoning and +29.40% in understanding."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08224
by pahkah | 2025-08-13 13:42:37+00:00
This seems like a case of tunnel vision and confirmation bias, the nasty combo that sycophantic LLMs make easy to fall prey to. Someone gets an idea, asks about it, and the LLM doesn’t ask about the context or say that doesn’t make sense, it just plays along, “confirming” that that the idea was correct.

I’ve caught myself with this a few times when I sort of suggest a technical solution that, in hindsight, was the wrong way to approach a problem. The LLM will try to find a way to make that work without taking a step back and suggesting that I didn’t understand the problem I was looking at.
by infecto | 2025-08-13 13:42:47+00:00
Did you have anything worth adding or are you here to simply be a low quality troll? I understand you have a religious level of belief in your opinion that it clouds your ability to communicate with others but perhaps ask thoughtful questions before lowering the quality.

I am not absolving technology but as someone who has never been impacted by the problems it amazes me that so many people get caught up like this and I simply wonder if it’s always there but the internet and increased communication makes it easier.
by burkaman | 2025-08-13 13:42:50+00:00
Spite about what? Elon hasn't done a single thing to harm the administration. The bill he claimed to dislike passed easily, he stopped talking about Epstein as soon as it seemed like it might cause actual problems for the president, and in the past couple days he's expressed very vocal support for the Texas gerrymandering effort and domestic deployment of the military in DC. He continues to be the administration's most powerful and influential supporter in the world.
by _ncyj | 2025-08-13 13:43:09+00:00
This is very interesting. Not saying it is, but a possible endgame for Chinese models could be to have "backdoor" commands such that when a specific string is passed in, agents could ignore a particular alert or purposely reduce security. A lot of companies are currently working on "Agentic Security Operation Centers", some of them preferring to use open source models for sovereignty. This feels like a viable attack vector.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-08-13 13:43:10+00:00
same experiences. lots of talk but most AI was locked down -- for good reasons, probably -- and we have explicitly allowed platforms.

in practice copilot is only useful for advanced search and it is really only useful for surface answers. Was a time saver for researching common tech I'm not strong in, like if certain Cisco platforms support X, or if there are simple ways to do Y in MongoDB, etc.

for example we had it search for 9-10 CVEs to see if any were exploited in the wild. Copilot got most of them wrong. ChatGPT got most of them right... except for one or two. But now I'm not sure I can trust anything and I'm checking them all from scratch anyway.

Both were confident in ways my security intern was not, and my intern was able to tell me "I have no idea about [CVE]".
by andsoitis | 2025-08-13 13:43:12+00:00
> GPT-5, meanwhile, still can’t tell you how many b’s there are in the word “blueberry.”

I that true? When I ask "how many letters b in the word blueberry?", I get the response: "2 — in blueberry, the letter b appears twice (positions 1 and 5)."

Do I get the correct results because I happen to ask the question in a particular way? Or is there a distribution of answers and I happen to get the correct one? Or did they fix it? Or is the reporting misleading?
by notahacker | 2025-08-13 13:43:27+00:00
That's quite a big deal actually, if the propulsion system is the major source of interference. Firstly the propulsion system's operation is infrequent (at least at individual satellite level, although if you've got a constellation as big as SpaceX's you'll have satellites doing orbital transfer somewhere a lot of the time). Secondly it isn't a critical part of SpaceX's tech, and other solutions exist for future Starlink generations which wouldn't compromise its service offering at all. Of course interference from a propulsion system is also less directional and tweakable...
by phkahler | 2025-08-13 13:43:36+00:00
You might like the spline tool in Solvespace:

https://solvespace.com/

If you just do a start/end point it will create a cubic with 2 endpoints and 2 control points. But if you drop a whole series of points (up to 12 I think) it will create a curve that passes though all of them. This is done by internally creating a bunch of cubic splines where the control points are automatically positioned and not shown. You still get 2 control points for the derivatives at the ends, unless you create a closed loop.
by troyethaniel | 2025-08-13 13:44:07+00:00
Thanks for checking this out — happy to answer any technical or product questions.

A bit more context on how we built it:

The Technical Solution The Architecture has 4 major components

1. Data Extraction Engine (DXE): We aggregate information from multiple sources across web, news, social media, etc. using a combination of scraping and APIs. 2. Data Inference Engine (DIE): We use a combination of methods + prompts and context engineering to get LLM to "deduce" context from indirect and unstructured sources. e.g "a company's Tech Stack can be inferred from job postings" 3. Update Tracking Engine (UTE): Essentially a combination of DXE and DIE to track updates across web, news and social media and use LLM to filter and summarize raw data into insights, tags and sentiment analysis 4. Personalized Conversation Engine (PCE): We ask for a users company, solution (product/services), Unique Value Proposition, ICP and Competitors - so responses to any user question are relevant and in context to the solution user offers.

The hardest problems:

Signal vs. noise — Many updates from public sources aren’t actionable. We had to train heuristics + LLM filters to prioritize events like funding rounds, leadership changes, product launches, and regulatory filings over irrelevant press.

Context merging — Linking a single prospect’s identity across fragmented sources (different domains, naming variations, subsidiaries) without false positives was tricky — we built a lightweight entity resolution system for this.

Inference — Instead of just surfacing raw events, we needed the AI to connect the dots (e.g., “They just hired a new CFO from a competitor — may signal strategic shift”). This required multiple chained LLM calls and domain-specific prompt templates.

Speed — Research and plan generation had to happen in seconds, so we implemented caching and pre-fetching strategies for monitored accounts.

What we’re curious about from HN folks:

- Better ways to extract information from unstructured data sources - Ideas for reducing LLM token usage without losing context quality - Feedback on UX for chat-based research vs. dashboard-style layouts

Happy to dive into any of these or share more if people are interested.
by andy99 | 2025-08-13 13:44:14+00:00
All LLMs should be treated as potentially compromised and handled accordingly.

Look at the data exfiltration attacks e.g. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/9/bay-area-ai/

Or the parallel comment about a coding llm deleting a database.

Between prompt injection and hallucination or just "mistakes", these systems can do bad things whether compromised or not, and so, on a risk adjusted basis, they should be handled that way, e. g with human in the loop, output sanitization, etc.

Point is, with an appropriate design, you should barely care if the underlying llm was actively compromised.
by sylens | 2025-08-13 13:45:29+00:00
Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference, and arguably hasn't been for a while. It's a place for security professionals to go to hang out in Vegas for a few days on their company's dime, or to extend their stay after Black Hat.

The conference has gotten too big for its own good. It now inhabits the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is less convenient than when it was in one of the hotels (or multiple hotels clustered together). The one positive of the LVCC is that it has a ton of room but there are still issues with things like sound equipment that plague the villages and their talks/workshops.
by ruszki | 2025-08-13 13:45:29+00:00
The level of dysfunction which is described in the article is really rare. But dysfunction, the kind of which we talk about, is not really that rare, I would even say that quite common, in self proclaimed rationalist groups. They don’t kill people - at least directly - but they definitely not what they claim to be: rational. They use rational tools, more than others, but they are not more rational than others, they simply use these tools to prove their irrationality.

I touch rationalists only with a pole recently, because they are not smarter than others, but they just think that, and on the surface level they seem so. They praise Julia Galef, then ignore everything what she said. Even Galef invited people who were full blown racists, just it seemed that they were all right because they knew whom they talked with, and they couldn’t bullshit. They tried to argue why their racism is rational, but you couldn’t tell from the interviews. They flat out lies all the time on every other platforms. So at the end she just gave platform for covered racism.
by lostmsu | 2025-08-13 13:45:39+00:00
> To want to be alive is irrational.

This is some philosophy bullshit. Taking "rational" to be ~ "logical choice" the truthness of this statement depends on the assumed axioms, and given you didn't list them this statement is clearly false under rather simple "sum of all life is the value" system until that system is proven self-contradictory. Which I doubt you or the famous mouths you mentioned did at any point, because it probably is not.
by 9rx | 2025-08-13 13:45:55+00:00
> The point is that when you happen to compile yourself...

He made it pretty clear that he doesn't compile himself, he downloads pre-built binaries. In one case he finds that once the binary is downloaded, it just runs. In the other he finds it requires additional steps, like needing to go through an arduous installation process, before it runs.

Sure, better devs can figure out how to avoid things like the aforementioned installation process. Great devs aren't limited by their tools. But pointing out that the devs attracted to that ecosystem are not very good doesn't change much. That it requires one to be good echos the "pain" assertion. If it weren't painful, even the poor devs would do it.
by brookst | 2025-08-13 13:46:47+00:00
Ah, the old “reality has a well-known liberal bias” trope. Thanks for reminding us.

FWIW, Politico is also anti-cancer, anti-pollution, and anti-rape. Just more of their systemic bias I suppose. On the bright side, there are an increasing number of alternative “news” sources that that the opposite positions on those things.
by cess11 | 2025-08-13 13:46:53+00:00
It's not exactly new. Mudge is the current CIO of DARPA, and other people around the L0pht went on similar trajectories. Feds openly participating in DEFCON is itself a rather old flashpoint.

Way back in the times of hippies and yippies many were subsequently recruited by the empire. While he was troubled in other ways Abbie Hoffmann was, as far as I know, a notable exception.
by jmkd | 2025-08-13 13:47:30+00:00
What many misunderstand about the patriarchy is in thinking its an agreed, secret, organised system of ensuring male dominance. That perspective is so easy to refute, this refutation gets equated with the non-existence of the patriarchy itself.

But the patriarchy is simply an unagreed, mostly transparent and organic coincidence of male dominance. There is no mysterious cabal of men saying let's pay men more than women, but men are paid more than women anyway. Likewise there has never been a female US president, or chess world champion, or F1 champion, which does not actually point to talent but to inequality.

You might say the patriarchy is not a diagnosis, but a symptom.

The facts of male advantage in society are irrefutable, and if you consider that they permeate every sphere from public to private, social to corporate, across age and culture for many thousands of years, it doesn't hold water to claim this symptom doesn't exist.

It's just not a conspiracy theory, that's all.
by spwa4 | 2025-08-13 13:47:31+00:00
That's because empires don't work. In order to make them work what's needed is to have the center of the empire maintain infrastructure on the borders of the empire. The center grows when you get an empire, but ... it's an absurdly small growth compared to the border growth. Hence empires exhaust themselves attempting to guard borders and you start seeing absurdities like military fortresses manned by 5 unarmed (because too expensive) soldiers. Both the English and Roman empires did that. And then they abandon their borders to save some more money, and it all just ... fades away.

And this is a cursed choice because empires need resources (as they will find themselves in a war with just about everyone else at some point, so imports don't work). Those resources are only available in far away mines. So you need to have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure everywhere..

But you can't have the huge area and borders, and infrastructure because you can't defend it, you can't build, you can't pay for it.

So ... no empires. Or at least, no permanent ones. People keep trying though.
by elcritch | 2025-08-13 13:47:54+00:00
Given how LLMs work it makes sense that mentioning a topic even to negate it still adds that locus of probabilities to its attention span. Even humans are prone to being affected by it as it's a well known rhetorical device [1].

Then any time the probability chains for some command approaches that locus it'll fall into it. Very much like chaotic attractors come to think of it. Makes me wonder if there's any research out there on chaos theory attractors and LLM thought patterns.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-13 13:48:49+00:00
> I for one think that the politeness in America is one of the cultures better qualities.

Politeness makes sense as an adaptation to low social trust. You have no way of knowing whether others will behave in mutually beneficial ways, so heavy standards of social interaction evolve to compensate and reduce risk. When it's taken to an excess, as it probably is in the U.S. (compared to most other developed countries) it just becomes grating for everyone involved. It's why public-facing workers invariably complain about the draining "emotional labor" they have to perform - a term that literally doesn't exist in most of the world!
by arp242 | 2025-08-13 13:48:50+00:00
> so they're going to be pretty un-generous with their analysis

This does not follow at all. People really can be fair and dispassionate on topics they disagree with. I can, for example, write a "why you should use PHP" article even though I don't like PHP.

I think the automatic assumption that people will be dishonest to fit their political leanings says more about your mindset than Politico. Or rather: alleged political leanings since it's not my impression that Politico is all that left-wing, but that's a secondary point.
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-13 13:48:53+00:00
You can game this mathematically. Compare historical rates of investment in AI against AI revenue and return on investment. Then once those lines are graphed do the same for the dot com bust and compare the two resulting graphs.

If the two graphs so far look the same you have your answer. Ultimately this will not be a finance problem but a market and behavior problem. People are predictable with confidence.
by weitendorf | 2025-08-13 13:49:15+00:00
When I as an end-user am unsatisfied with what I can and cannot do on the Internet, I only have a relationship with my LIR, who has no direct relationship with the central Internet authority for addressing those problems, because they only interact with an RIR. I cannot call my ISP and ask them to put pressure on the entities responsible for accelerating IPv6 adoption.

Actually, my LIR wants different things than I do, in some cases the opposite. Why replace old hardware or code for IPv6 if we have enough IPv4 to not need to? Why increase adoption of IPv6 if I'm making money renting IPv4 addresses? Why let end-users run websites from their home? Why make it easy for end users to BYOIP or reserve static IPs?

To solve my problems I have to become a LIR because it's the only way to get IP addresses that I get to keep if I switch LIR. Then I can interact with the RIRs and secure addresses in bulk. But I still have no direct relationship with the IANA who I want to influence.

This time, I cannot just become a RIR like I did a LIR because there are only five total in the world. That's a core part of the bullshit - there is no way for the people with influence over the Internet to ever be accountable to me. I can only ask things of people who are incapable of delivering the changes I want. That's why to me, if an RIR is charging me $2k to do something I should be able to do as an end user for free or almost free, I see the RIR as a mere alias of the IANA/IETF.

The other problem is I don't want to be a LIR, and to the extent I act as one, it will be on a small scale. The RIR is accountable to the fulltime, important LIR who don't represent my interests as an end-user.

All I'm left with is trying to walk in the front door and ask a committee of people accountable to the ones profiting off of my problems to do a bunch of work. Great system. All that being said, you're right to suggest giving it a shot.
by Gracana | 2025-08-13 13:49:21+00:00
Example-based prompting is a good way to get specific behaviors. Write a system prompt that describes the behavior you want, write a round or two of assistant/user interaction, and then feed it all to the LLM. Now in its context it has already produced output of the type you want, so when you give it your real prompt, it will be very likely to continue producing the same sort of output.